To live in Britain is to live in eternal existential anxiety. The tiny island nation lives on the knife-edge of global warming-driven sea level rise (which would submerge much of what is now dry land) and global cooling, which, while not on the books in the immediate future, has in the past repeatedly scoured hominin life from the region. It’s not surprising that many authors have offered visions of an ephemeral United Kingdom that is no longer united…
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951)
A horticultural mishap put Bill Masen in hospital with his eyes temporarily bandaged. Consequently, he is denied the wondrous meteor shower that lights up Earth’s sky, as well as the total blindness that strikes every person unlucky enough to have sought out a view of the meteors. Once the reality sinks in—that the vast majority of the human population is now incurably blind—he does the only responsible thing a decent middle-class Englishman could do in his place: he abandons the useless blind to certain death.
In very short order, the United Kingdom is transformed from a single realm to a mass graveyard in which, here and there, small autonomous communities of the lucky prevail…for the moment.
Calamity for humanity was opportunity for the triffids (carnivorous ambulatory plants recently introduced to the UK). The helpless blind were their first victims. Now, with the masses dead and triffid numbers soaring, the only substantial meals remaining are the sighted enclaves. Places like Masen’s own farm.
***
The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff (1959)
Eighteen-year-old Aquila remains behind with his family in Britain when the cavalry in which he serves is called back to the Continent by the demands of 5th-century Roman politics. Roman Britain must fend for itself. Aquila will fend for his family.
As above, so below: Roman Britain collapses under barbarian invasion in surprisingly short order and Aquila’s family estate is at the forefront of this collapse. Overwhelmed by a Saxon attack, his father slain, his sister carried off, a wounded Aquila is tied to a tree and left to die. He survives, but soon realizes that restoration, a return to normalcy, is impossible. All he can do is adapt to a new, post-Roman Britain.
***
Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence (1985)
Aware that Soviet nuclear attack is imminent, a handful of functionaries retreat to the Bunker, a fortified base that can withstand the immediate effects of war and its aftermath. Aside from providing the hope that administrators will someday emerge from the Bunker to govern the whole of the nation once more, the British government can do little for its people save for giving them a heads-up that most of them are about to perish.
Generations pass. Only the countryside nearest the bunker at the focus of the novel falls under what rudimentary government that Bunker can provide. Other pockets of survivors will have to fend for themselves. Perhaps they have bunkers of their own!
At first, the Bunker and its supplies of modern equipment give it the advantage over its rustic subjects. Supplies are finite, however. One day the last machine will break and the final tin of beans will be eaten. On that day, will the denizens of the Bunker be able to adapt as their mutated cousins have? Or will they join the rest of the pre-war world in extinction?
***
The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod (1995)
Rescued by US/UN intervention from the perils of the United Republic’s radical democracy, Britain is home to a patchwork of micro-states under the umbrella of the restored Hanoverian monarchy. Within sensible limits, each micro-state is free to govern itself as it sees fit, with heavily armed, remotely piloted war robots providing gentle rebukes should anyone overstep the US/UN guidelines.
Although the peace process can be trying from the perspective of the common person in the street, the system provides something the US/UN treasures: stability. However, stability is a chimera. An unseen enemy has been waiting patiently to bring the US/UN regime down. Now, thanks to a mercenary, a fundamentalist teen, and a scientist, the revolution has come.
***
New Model Army by Adam Roberts (2010)
Pantegral is a new model army, the Uber of mercenary forces. Eschewing expensive gear like artillery, devolving functions like logistics from complex bureaucracies down onto individual soldiers, equipped with modern, high-speed networking1, Pantegral is a lean, cost-effective organization with which conventional armies are hard pressed to deal.
Faced with a United Kingdom curiously unwilling to let Scotland go its own way, Scotland turns to Pantegral for salvation. British Forces-deserter-turned-Pantegral foot soldier Tony Brock finds himself facing his former employers. More importantly, the British Army finds itself facing a New Model Army: an unstoppable, decentralized swarm of armed soldiers spreading chaos through England’s vulnerable cities.
***
Obviously, this is a populous subgenre such that for every example I can adduce, you can collectively think of dozens. Comments are below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]What happens to Pantegral if someone takes out the network? Do they control the satellites, the cables, the wi-fi, and the servers?
Glad to see someone else likes “The Lantern Bearers.” Read that when I was in 7th Grade or so, along with a number of Rosemary Sutcliff books for kids.
_Mandrake_ by Susan Cooper. I only remember the premise, which is that rising local xenophobia means that you’ll be mobbed if you’re too far from home. There’s no explanation given for why this is going on.
Pantegral = Pantagruel? It seems a little to on the nose.
@3: I think that’s a false cognate. Pantegral looks more like Pan + Integral, i.e. “unifying everything”.
The Lantern Bearers has a special place in my heart because it was in the giant box of schoolbooks we had in Brazil, a box that arrived after I (needlessly [1]) went several months without any books in English. Technically, it was my older brother’s text but I read it many times.
1: The University of Florianópolis had a library, of course, and part of the collection was in English. It took us a while to twig to that.
The Lantern Bearers is a good one. Sutcliffe wrote a sequel (Sword at Sunset), with Aquila’s son as the main character.
Chaos in the British Isles also occurs in John Christopher’s Empty World (1977). A pandemic wipes out 99%+ of the human population. Only a few kids survive, including our protagonist, an English boy living in Kent.
I read it at my local library shortly after it was released and was terrified. A few years ago, I saw that the exact same copy was still at my library! So I read it again for funsies.
Ooh boy. The racism & sexism fairies had not been idle in the past 40 years.
The Pantegral network (in the field at least) is an ad-hoc network, nodes communicate with each other directly and route messages between themselves to cover a wider area. About all you can do is try to jam the RF, there’s no reliance on external equipment.
@3: Pantegral has a short speech at the end of the book, part of which is “My name is Rebelais. I, Pantegral. I, giant.” (No, that’s not a typo) so not a coincidence.
Day of the Triffids sounds very ableist.
@6, Sword at Sunset is an Arthurian story. Which character is Aquila’s son?
8 Only because it is.
In Bold as Love, by Gwyneth Jones, Britain is falling into chaos. People are being killed. The government has lost all credibility, and nobody seems to have a clue what to do. So they turn to the rock stars? Well, nothing else has worked.
I thought about including Bold as Love (which I managed to read through without spotting it was a retelling of Arthur) but I decided a book whose protagonist hates democracy didn’t need the boost.
Any future works of fiction about Britain in collapse are going to have to reckon with the ghastly realization that we’re totally capable of creating our own kind of hellish chaos entirely spontaneously, without any assistance (aside from a sprinkling of oligarch press barons and idiocrats schooled on the playing fields of Eton).
Just as COVID19 has rendered implausible any zombie pandemic fic that doesn’t account for zombie denialists, Z-virus infection parties, and anti-vaxxers, so too has Brexit made it clear that you don’t need a nuclear war to create a plausible post-catastrophe future Great Britain when we’ve been gifted with the Daily Mail’s editorial desk.
Really, why did I even bother putting Nyarlathotep in 10 Downing Street when the combination of Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings brought about so much crawling chaos without even one human sacrifice?
(At risk of blowing my own trumpet, my New Management books—2020’s Dead Lies Dreaming and next January’s Quantum of Nightmares—are set in a UK where the Lovecraftian horrors won a general election and are re-shaping the government in their own image. The result is turning out to be surprisingly upbeat and optimistic compared with actually-experienced Brexit …)
The Chronicles of St Mary’s refer to some kind of violent uprising that changed the UK sometime in modern times, recounting a battle at the Battersea Barricades.
Leery as I am of seeing the modern British monarchy described as ‘Hanoverian’ – that description hasn’t been apt since the personal union between the United Kingdom & Hanover ended with the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1837 (Hanover having nothing to do with queens regnant, a custom that may well have doomed it to be swallowed up by Prussia during the latter’s metamorphosis into the German Empire) – how could I not immediately ‘Fave’ a thread that paid tribute to the late, great Rosemary Sutcliff CBE? (Still one of my Favourite writers lo these many years after she became my very first Favourite).
Will Self The Book of Dave.
I ‘ve never known anyone else who read Rosemary Sutcliffe, and now I see others who treasure her also. I especially like Aquila lighting the watchtower beacon one last time after the troops depart, a light against the darkness.
8. princessroxana:
I can’t recall – it’s been years since I read it.
Aquila makes a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo along the lines of someone saying “And Aquila died.” (offstage)
The Rampart trilogy, starting with The Trials of Koli, by M.R. Carey – where man-eating forests, war drones and scary androids have put the UK back into a state of small village life. Loved it!
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban would be a worthy addition to this list.
I believe that Aquila’s son was the minor character called Flavian. Not identified with any of the knights of legend.
As you know, fellow Sutcliff fans, The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset were part of a very loosely related sequence of books all of which are set in Britain at a moment of crisis, starting with the Roman occupation and ending with the Norman invasion
@14 It’s been a decade or more since I read The Star Fraction, but it is quite clear that there was an interregnum between the rule of the Windsor (Saxe-Coburg) family and the restoration of the Hanover dynasty. I don’t remember if there it was a reason given that the Windsors had lost the Mandate of Heaven.
I never heard of Mandrake! It reminds me a lot of The Changes trilogy by Peter Dickinson. Great Britain is entirely isolated by perennial bad weather while its citizens develop a sudden, violent antipathy to any sort of machinery, causing society to regress back to a quasi-medieval state. Not bad, if of its time.
There was a novel I read years ago in which Britain (and presumably the rest of the world) is hit with a sudden geological event which causes poisonous gas to roll out of the ground. If you have a gas mask or can improvise one with cloth and vinegar you can survive but most of Britain doesn’t get the word in time. Chaos ensues, and the novel ends with members of of the Royal Family (who were of course ensconced in a bunker) personally flying themselves into the countryside on RAF helicopters to help their people.
Anybody got a guess as to the name of this novel?
I read Mandrake recently having loved her Dark is Rising series for decades. It still stands up as an atmospheric piece of post-war dystopian British sf (see also: John Christopher, John Wyndham, Fred Hoyle), with the central theme of growing xenophobia having unsettling parallels to post-Brexit Britain today. Far-fetched in comparison but wonderfully written.
Keith Roberts’s Molly Zero was set in a balkanized England, which broke up in response to lethal class warfare and was artificially kept that way by its Secret Masters.
Anybody got a guess as to the name of this novel?
“Omega” by Stewart Farrar. Triggered by some sort of power generators that work in antipodeal pairs.
@3: The focus group noped “Legion” :-) also trademark issues………
There’s always Ray Bradbury’s Henry the Ninth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbYCjmsi7mE
@8, 9: The summary is inaccurate. SPOILERS AHOY.
The group Masen joins right after the Night of the Green Flashes wants to save as many people as it can without endangering its metaphorical lifeboat for everybody inside. It makes a point of rescuing as many people who were already blind as possible, because they already know how to get along: they can teach the newly blinded what to do. The much smaller group Masen joins later is 50 percent composed of people who were blinded that night, not counting children born later. Masen always treats them with respect, takes the time to find things they can use on his scavenging trips even if they aren’t vital to the function of their farm, and speaks of the–blind–owners of the property as such right to the end of their time there. A group that tries to take over their land is…less respectful. But the heroes aren’t ableist, unless I’m missing something.
Day of the Triffids is, however, thunderingly sexist. The original group only saves already blind women of childbearing age (“girls”), and a few newly blinded men who are family members of sighted women. They want as many women as possible because their plan is for the men to work and the women to “have babies.” To which I replied, on first reading the book, “Uh huh. The women will have babies AND work, just as they’ve always done; y’all just won’t call it work.” They also demand that all women who are capable of doing so “have babies” in order to stay with the group.
There’s a throwaway line in <i>The Door Into Summer</i> which announces that Great Britain is now a province of Canada in the far future of the year 2000.
I was disappointed when it didn’t happen.
James Lovegrove?
–Provender Gleed
–Untied Kingdom
The Ur-text of this genre might very well be After London; or, Wild England (1885) by Richard Jeffries. The cause of the catastrophe is unclear, but life has changed forever. Well worth a read and it’s out of copyright
The bit in _The Lantern Bearers_ when Aquila realizes that Ness is facing the same impossible choice that Flavia faced can still make me cry 35 years after I first read it. In fact, even though it is ostensibly a children’s/YA novel, Aquila and Ness’s relationship arc has much more of an impact when read as an adult.
Then, there’s Owain’s grief at the death of Dog in _Dawn Wind_ and the end of _Song for a Dark Queen_. I love Sutcliff, but she really knew how to make her characters suffer.
@12 (cstross): ISTM there was plenty of human sacrifice; wasn’t there initially a plan to go to herd immunity by letting as many people as possible get infected?
Richard Cowper’s White Bird of Kinship books take place mostly in an England that IIRC is somewhat subdivided by rising sea levels — perhaps not as wildly chaotic as most of the above, but definitely after a retreat to quasi-medievalism. Meanwhile, his The Twilight of Briareus shows a breakdown apparently started by a nearby supernova, which first interferes with human fertility (leading to assorted panicked tyranny), then turns down the temperature enough that all of England is covered in heavy snow for several months of the year.
It’s a bit of a reach, but John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting is set mostly in an alternate Britain during the Wars of the Roses (which were pretty chaotic); Byzantium, having covered most of the continent, is abetting much of the chaos with an eye to adding Britain to complete its restoration of the Roman Empire.
Aquila’s son Flavian isn’t exactly a “minor” character in either The Lantern Bearers or Sword at Sunset. He’s not the protagonist, but he’s important to Aquila and to Artos. I recently re-read both (and in fact, all the Dolphin books, from The Eagle of the Ninth through The Shield Ring) and they hold up pretty well, especially The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind.
here is a recent book that is well worth reading: 84K by Claire North. Wonderful stream-of-consciousness style prose, a UK in the grip of peak capitalism. Splendid really.
Malevil (set in France and thus irrelevant to this, although it seems likely whatever the big flash was killed almost everyone in the UK as well) has the men regularly convene to discuss how best to manage their very limited supply of women. They do this very very seriously and as far as I recall, the women ignore the very serious judgments that result and do whatever they feel like doing with the person they feel like doing it with. But at least the men get to feel like they are contributing to the decision-making process.
There are definitely five interesting SF books with very narrow views of gender roles, if I could think of a way to phrase it so as not to provoke a firestorm of angry comments. E.g. The Tripods, where girls get be motivationally fridged and not much else.
@38: @35 is my post @29 run through some kind of translator. The link goes to an online casino.
Ian Tregillis’ Milkweed trilogy, starting with Bitter Seeds, is a little hard on Britain and, incidentally, the rest of the planet. It’s an alternate history in which one of the Nazis’ more exotic experiments pays off and gives them an overwhelming advantage–among other things, the rescue at Dunkirk doesn’t happen and the British radar stations are rapidly located and destroyed. The only thing saving Britain are its native magicians, who make increasingly sanguinary bargains with eldritch beings to defend the Channel. Rather too late, they discover what it was that said beings wanted with all that blood.
I’m very glad that you included the MacLeod & the Roberts. Neither author gets enough love. The Wyndham is problematic, as usual.
Gwyneth Jones is one of my favorite writers and, while the Bold as Love series is far from my favorite Gwyneth, I did enjoy it. Never a good hippie because I dislike nature, I was nevertheless heavily involved in the counterculture in the 1960s, which may have enhanced my appreciation of these books.
I would add Fugue for a Darkening Island by the great Christopher Priest. Also, I think Bryan Talbot’s gorgeous The Adventures of Luther Arkwright graphic novel basically qualifies.
I concur with @25’s suggestion of Molly Zero. Another potential Keith Roberts is The Furies. We don’t know if the wasp attacks are global, but if I’m remembering it correctly, the action is entirely set in England.
The Changes trilogy by Peter Dickenson has Britain wracked by technology rejecting riots.
In the 1980s the great political journalist Neal Ascherson used to call the UK establishment ‘the Hanoverian regime’ and I borrowed the usage. It’s related to the idea, notably mooted in the 1960s by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn in New Left Review, that the UK state (and ruling class) is in some important respects ‘pre-modern’.
It has nothing to do with the actual once and future kings (or queens). Probably just as well: you can speculate on a future Republic, but speculating on a rival dynasty taking the throne would be very much Not the Done Thing, old chap.
Most of the Jerry Cornelius stories (Moorcock et. al) have Britain falling apart in some way as part of their background. Usually it seems to be generalised entropy and apathy rather than any more coherent force, but there’s lots of variety since continuity is an early victim of the effect…
There is hardly a work of British science fiction that doesn’t present the country in chaos, from the Furies and The Chalk Giants by Keith Roberts to A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest to the Corley sequence by Richard Cowper to Kairos by Gwyneth Jones to most of Ballard to The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again by M. John Harrison and on and on. It’s what we do best, destroying the country.
@6: English* chaos is also featured in Christopher’s _The Prince in Waiting_, where the country has broken into feudal city-states.
*English, because IIRC the sequel reveals that Wales has remained united under a king and has a significantly more tolerant culture.
War in the Air was mention in a previous essay but it would have worked too: the invention of cheap aircraft leads to global warlordism and the general collapse of civilization. The hero marries his sweetheart, though, so it’s not all bad.
45. Just finished re-reading ‘The Condition of Muzak’! And yeah; in one reality, Britian has fragmented into a lot of smaller states, all engaged in ferocious skirmishes with one another. Jerry ends up King of London. Which is nice. One thing I didn’t notice until now (even though I read the book every ten years or so) is that there are two Jerrys in attendance at the New Years’ party at Ladbroke grove – a Pierrot & a Harlequin. Catherine gets woken up in both timelines, although the circumstances are slightly different in each case.
Where do you start with this one, apart from with virtually everything written in the seventies? (I’m looking at you Christopher Priest. … Ballard, are you chewing?)
I have a soft spot for the overwrought, over-educated and over-here cry of outrage, though, so here are three bewildering out-of-genre dystopias: (HERE BE SPOILERS.)
.
.
.
L.P. Hartley – Facial Justice (1960). In the name of fairness, anyone too attractive is “encouraged” by a mysterious Dictator to have one of a limited range of standard issue faces transplanted onto them. People live underground and wear sackcloth. At one point they take a coach trip and dance orgiastically around Ely cathedral, for which there are Consequences.
Angus Wilson – The Old Men At The Zoo (1961). Various functionaries at a London zoo squabble and scheme over the proper way forward for the establishment, which is in no way a massively overworked metaphor for postwar Britain. The zoo ends up as a concentration camp, and the UK is nuked and taken over by some kind of European superstate. A propos of nothing at all.
R C Sherriff – The Hopkins Manuscript (1939). Everything’s actually going deceptively well for the UK at the start of this one. The only slight problem is, the moon has left its orbit and is due to hit the earth in 3,2,1… well, okay – a few months. Various non-Plebeian types including our chicken-fancying narrator are informed and sternly injuncted to tell no one, so of course the news doesn’t get out until the government’s good and ready. The moon conveniently lands right in the Atlantic, causing less damage than the reader might expect, what with it being the moon. Plucky, decent types begin to rebuild, and soon chickens are back on the menu. It’s at this point that things go wrong.
Are these good books? No, they are not good books. They’re three of the worst books I’ve ever finished. But as fascinating literary relics, they’re right up there.
H. G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come fits this category well.
@26 – yep, that’s the book! Thanks.
@12 I am reminded of this wonderful summary of the modern British media, from the Lessons from the Crisis substack: most of them attended a press conference about a mass death plan and didn’t really notice.
It’s hard not to laugh.
@7 I suspect GCHQ would have something to say about “The Pantegral network (in the field at least) is an ad-hoc network… all you can do is try to jam the RF”
It may be a fairly obvious nominee, but I suppose someone ought to mention The Second Sleep.
Nevil Shute’s In the Wet has Britain falling into catastrophe while the rest of the Commonwealth is doing pretty well- inflationary spirals, mostly. Jo Walton discussed it here.
https://www.tor.com/2009/10/22/the-future-of-the-commonwealth-nevil-shutes-lemgin-the-wetlemg/
@@@@@ 36. Tehanu:
Aquila’s son Flavian isn’t exactly a “minor” character in either The Lantern Bearers or Sword at Sunset. He’s not the protagonist, but he’s important to Aquila and to Artos. I recently re-read both (and in fact, all the Dolphin books, from The Eagle of the Ninth through The Shield Ring) and they hold up pretty well, especially The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind.
At the end Artos decided that three generations of one family, dying in that long fight, was too many. He sent Minno to carry a message, so he’d not be killed in the final battle. Flavian gave Minnow the family ring before he left.
@22. David Owen-Cruise: A perfectly fair suggestion (though I’m fairly confident that if there’s a dynasty with less of a claim to the Mandate of Heaven than the heirs of George the First, they were probably only Prom Kings to start with – the Elector of Hanover was transformed into the “King of Great Britain, of Ireland and of France” precisely because Parliament did NOT want a sovereign who could and had leaned as heavily on the Divine Right of Kings as the House of Stuart).
@44. It’s only treason if you don’t end up non the Honours list!
On a more quibbling note, I still think ‘Victorian Establishment’ makes more sense (Especially since the last monarch of Great Britain born outside the British Isles was George the Second – and he died in AD 1760!).
Admittedly ‘Hanoverian Establishment’ benefits from Jacobite chic (or if you prefer, Jacobite cheek) but since I’m a Crown & Parliament man, just imagine me wearing a red coat and a scowl whenever somebody starts sporting the white cockade!
Mention of Christopher reminds me of an ancient SFBC selection, Pendulum, in which England falls into an anarchy of motorcycle gangs, then is ~reorganized by a collection of religious fanatics.
If I recall correctly, the set-up of The Furies was that a double nuclear test destabilised the planet causing mass disasters world-wide. The eponymous Furies came out of hiding and took advantage of the destruction. The other one I’m thinking is The Chalk Giants, also by Keith Roberts.
I take it TV doesn’t count – The Last Train had plotholes you could drive a train through (sideways, as my partner put it), then there were both versions of Survivors – the original 1975 series and the 2008 remakes (very apposite with current events), and the children’s TV serial that dramatised Peter Dickinson’s The Changes Trilogy.
From more recent times there’s Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan, in which the entire world has been left practically in the middle-ages by a computer virus which destroyed basically everything connected to the internet. In the UK the military have effectively taken over, and are forcing people to join their ‘land army’ and work in the fields in order to feed the country. Most of the book is set in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol, which is less than a stones throw away from where I live, and I can vouch for the verisimilitude. I’m glad I read it near the end of 2019, because I think it would have hit home a little too much once the pandemic hit.
At the more weird end of the spectrum is Shades of Grey* by Jasper Fforde about a community which seems to be based in Wales after what are only referred to “the Terrible Events”. In the ‘Chromatacia’, as it’s known, social hierarchy is based on what colours a person can perceive (colour blindness seems to have become endemic), but the society is clearly regressing into a cargo-cult. Personally I think it’s his best book, adding some darkness to temper his usual whimsy.
* Definitely an unspecified number of shades of grey. I like to think a few people mistakenly picked up Fforde’s book instead of 50 Shades and got a very different read than they were expecting ;)
It’s been a while since I read it, so I may be misremembering, but I think there’s some element of fracturing or backsliding in Britain in Paul Cornell’s “Something More”.
I really rather enjoyed L P Hartley’s “The Go-between” (non-genre), and hadn’t realised he’d written anything in this vein, although based on the comment above, perhaps I’ll give it a miss.
@57, ‘I’m a Crown & Parliament man, just imagine me wearing a red coat and a scowl whenever somebody starts sporting the white cockade!’
Good for you, ED! The Hanoverians may have been thick and unattractive but the ‘romantic’ Stuarts were megalomaniac incompetents!
I’m surprised nobody mentioned the Greg Mandel/Event Horizon series by Peter Hamilton. Set in a UK after the People’s Socialist Party caused a breakdown in the running of the country by imposing a Marxist-Moist dictatorship while global warming ravages food production.
Presumably sea level rise is why it was a Moist dictatorship.
Rupert Thompson’s Divided Kingdom is a favourite of mine. The government divides the UK population into 4 groups related to personality types in an attempt to reform society, dividing the land into quarters and relocating people there.
How about the Northland trilogy from Stephen Baxter.
It starts (in “Stone Spring”) with the end of the latest ice age and the work of a tribe to prevent the rising sea from submerging their living grounds, the land bridge with the European continent. It develops very soundly (as usual with Baxter) and sometimes not very pleasantly as well (again as usual with Baxter… and frequently with life) all the way to climate change in the end with “Iron Winter”.
There are some fantastic books in the article and comments – I’m taking notes, here! I studied the Wyndham and the Macleod for my MA in Science Fiction Studies, and I definitely need to add the others to my TBR.
I hope you’ll allow me to mention the Battle Ground Series – a post-Brexit dystopia set in the UK after Scottish independence, civil unrest, and the introduction of Martial Law.
Two young women. A dis-united Kingdom. Opposing sides in a British civil war.
Yes, I’m blowing my own trumpet, but if @@@@@cstross can do it … :-)
Iain Banks – Song of Stone. Basically set against a backdrop of a Balkanised Britain where militias roam the countryside in tanks & jeeps. Unfortunately, it is by far my least favourite Banks book (the first person narrator is very unlikeable) so I’ve only read it once and can’t remember much else.
I was about 10 when Children of the Dust came out. My school teacher read it to us.
Freaked us Cold War kids right out.
Good pick!
@59: I wish there had been more episodes of the Survivors reboot, hard as it was to watch sometimes.
In particular, I wanted somebody to explicate that when that MP sneered about “digging ditches” as makework for the unimportant, she was being deeply, deeply stupid. Had she never heard of the Fens?
Ok, am I way off base saying “War of the Worlds” would qualify? It may have been about the whole world, but the original was set in Britain?
A cstross (# 12) Your career has been arrested by the Poe’s law police. (Now a public-private partnership between Scotland Yard and Blackwater.)
phuzz #60 – Haven’t read that one of Fforde’s but the Thursday Next series with its megalomaniac Goliath Corporation is interesting (and hilarious.)
@@@@@ 57, ED:
@@@@@44. It’s only treason if you don’t end up non the Honours list!
On a more quibbling note, I still think ‘Victorian Establishment’ makes more sense (Especially since the last monarch of Great Britain born outside the British Isles was George the Second – and he died in AD 1760!).
Admittedly ‘Hanoverian Establishment’ benefits from Jacobite chic (or if you prefer, Jacobite cheek) but since I’m a Crown & Parliament man, just imagine me wearing a red coat and a scowl whenever somebody starts sporting the white cockade!
The House of Hanover ended with the death of Victoria in 1901.
Her son Edward the Caresser was the first of the short-lived House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.
Come the War to End War, German names and titles became unpopular.
In 1917, under George V, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha became the House of Windsor.
Surely the obvious Keith Roberts book is ‘Pavane’? An alternative history in which scientific research has been banned by a Catholic theocracy, Britain hasn’t advanced beyond the Steam Age, even in the 20th century, and semaphore stations and traction engines are the main means of long-distance communication and transport. That theocracy thinks the country is stable and secure, but rebellion is stirring …
Children of Men by P.D. James. Definitely social breakdown in Britain.
Also qualifies as annoying sf by a non-sf writer. That is, the sterility is never explains, and ends at a time and in a way optimized for the story, but with (as I recall) no explanation. People probably have examples just as bad by sf writers, but I don’t think they’re as typical these days.
@72: I was just thinking about War of the Worlds too. Although similar attacks in other countries are mentioned in the book, the action takes place entirely in southern England and shows the ordered late-Victorian society rapidly collapsing into chaos – something that would have been both alarming and thrilling to his audience, used to thinking of Great Britain as an invincible, unchallengeable power. Wells famously wrote the book to draw parallels with the British Empire and the way it treated the native populations in some of its colonial conquests. The breakdown in societal norms s something that the Spielberg/Tom Cruise film adaptation does well, especially in the scenes in the basement of the ruined house where the decision to “kill or be killed” becomes not about the invaders but about your fellow refugee. That’s hardly news to anyone living in a war zone, but to the comfortable middle classes of 1890s Britain or their American counterparts a century later, it conveys the message, “It could happen here, to you” and implicitly asks the question “What would you do?”
@77: It’s one of the rare books whose film version is actually better. There is a single event of Biblical dimensions: every womb has been closed. And from that flows everything else.
I was going to mention Children of Men as well. There is also Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard, about the very same event — the end of fertility — focused on the last aging survivors, interspaced with the gradual fading of society.
Also, The Purple Cloud, which I read in, oh, 1960?, but was late-19th century, about the first expedition to the North Pol setting off the title poison cloud that wiped all life from the planet, save the sole survivor of the team. Since he’s British, it counts.
Then there’s No Blade of Grass, where the only possible rival to the hero is conveniently killed off in the final firefight (Pirrie). Handy, that.
My wife just finished, and I am currently reading P.D. James’s “Children of Men.” It is set in a fictional future 2021, and was remarkably prescient about many recent social changes (eg: comfort and pleasure replacing personal freedom) for being written in the early 1990s.