Eco-Apocalypse novels

There are signs that the state of the environment (and particularly climate change) is prompting a contemporary literature of ‘end-ism’ (see below the novels published over the past 20 years).  The fictional treatment of environmental problems has been around for longer than that, of course, and often these treatments take an apocalyptic turn.  I thought I’d create a list of them here in case anyone else is interested in this genre.  I’ll do it by decade – and if anyone knows of any that aren’t recorded here, do please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

1940s

George R. Stewart, Earth Abides (1949).  Isherwood Williams returns from a camping trip in the hills to find that a virus has killed just about everyone.  The transition from the Old Times is nicely observed (how long would you stop at a red traffic light until you kicked the habit?) and ‘Ish’ travels America observing changes with a dispassionate eye.  ’Dispassionate’ just about sums up this never less than interesting book, in fact.  Odd, too, that the little community Ish sets up is able to live off the scraps of the old civilisation for over 20 years.  And then?  Ish has to decide which is more important: a library full of books, or a bow-and-arrow.  Stewart’s recipe for post-catastrophe survival seems to be: little imagination and lots of courage, as civilisation slips away.

1950s

John Christopher, The Death of Grass (1956), republished as a Penguin Modern Classic (which it is).  This is the story of a worldwide virus that kills all species of grass.  This premise is not the most interesting aspect of the story; more striking is the charting of the descent into ‘barbarism’ brought about by environmental collapse.  Cosmopolitanism is the casualty ….

1960s

J.G.Ballard, The Wind From Nowhere (1962).  A super-hurricane blasts round the world, reaching hundreds of miles an hour.  Whole communities are buried, London is unrecognisable and people turn against each other in a desperate battle for survival.  Ballard apparently suppressed this novel as ‘juvenilia’ – but get it if you can.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962).  Classic depiction of a globally-warmed world (though not caused by carbon overload).  Ballard’s drowned world is weird and terrifying.  Strangest moment?  Maybe when they peer underneath the boat and recognise the Planetarium.

Brian Aldiss, Earthworks (1965).  A Ballardian account of a garbage-ridden overpopulated world.  A central figure is the Farmer (food is at a premium) who runs ‘the village’ where food is grown by forced labour.  Knowle Noland, our hero, escapes from the village and joins the Travellers who live a version of the old life in and out of decaying towns.  Noland is captured by the Farmer but is released by him to work on the giant atomic ships that transport soil from Africa around the world.  Africa is the new political centre of the world, and the book’s denouement takes place as a vital conference gets under way.  A brilliant, haunting novel – definitely dystopian, but Noland is a survivor.

J.G. Ballard, The Drought (1965).  A protective skin over the oceans caused by radioactive dumping has stopped it raining anywhere but in the middle of the sea.  On land, everything begins to die and civilisation itself begins to crack.   People and places mutate.  Pure Ballard.

1970s

Robert C. O’Brien, Z for Zachariah (1975).  Ostensibly a book for 14-18s, but riveting for anybody.  This is the story of  a girl who thinks she is the only survivor of a nuclear war.  Then she sees smoke from a fire over the hill, and her life changes irrevocably.  Ann Burden – the girl – is courageous, resourceful, and tender.  She will be on your mind long after you’ve finished the book.

1980s

1990s

David Ely, A Journal of the Flood Year (1992).  No real eco-catastrophe premise here, but the central character is The Wall, built out from the eastern US seaboard in the Atlantic to make the country bigger and keep the sea out.  Typical dystopian theme: a man and a woman’s fight to resist technobureaucracy and conformity. But The Wall is the real star.

Maggie Gee, The Ice People (1998).  Gee imagines a globally warmed world which is returning to aridity and cold. Men and women are segregated.  This is the story of one man’s attempt to find his son, and to take him South, to where the sun shines.

2000s

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006). The one that just about everyone’s read.  America has burned, and a father and son trek across the country to the coast.  They only have a pistol to defend themselves against other would-be survivors.  Redemptive or just harrowing?

Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army (2007). Much of Britain is underwater and the country has been taken over by the Authority.  This is the story of a woman who escapes the garrison town in which she lives, to try to reach a commune of women in the Lake District, in Carhullan, where she believes she will find sanctuary.

Jim Crace, The Pesthouse (2007).  America’s been devastated by an illness that has wiped out vast tracts of the population, and sent the country back into a pre-mechanical age.   Like many of these novels this one involves a journey, with the protagonists finding solace in each other while assailed by all the tribulations in which life has once again become ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’.  Probably shouldn’t be on this list as the premise is not strictly an eco-catastrophe.  But the writing is taut and appropriately dated – mirroring the state into which society has fallen.  There is redemption amid the destruction.

Saci Lloyd, The Carbon Diaries 2015 (2008).  A climate change book for teenagers.  Brilliant idea: it’s 2015 and everyone’s been issued with a carbon card as the UK is the first country in the world to introduce carbon rationing.  But the climate change backdrop occasionally disappears from sight as this novel for teenagers turns into a … novel for teenagers.   The heroine, Laura Brown, catalogues her relationships with Mum, Dad and boyfriends in her diary, as well as her attempts to get a band together.  So far, so normal.  But the scenes toward the end as the Thames Barrier fails drag the narrative back to where it should be.  For me, a missed opportunity – but then I’m not 15 any more. 

Toby Litt, Journey into Space (2009).  Some catastrophe has befallen the Earth, but we never know what sort.  A gaggle of humans has set off into space to find another habitable planet.  We join the trip when those who set out on it are long since dead.  There are some brief but interesting reflections on nature loss, memory, nostalgia.  This reads to me like a missed opportunity.

James Howard Kunstler,  A World Made by Hand (2009). Kunstler imagines life in a small town in Vermont in the aftermath of peak oil and a decade into what the author refers to as ‘the long emergency’.

Stephen Baxter, Flood (2009).  The water rises inexorably, everywhere – and with the book reaching 556 pp maybe you can imagine where it gets to.  Characterisation isn’t the strong point of this novel by this science fiction star, but there are some vivid accounts of the effects of worldwide flooding, and the occasional glances back to a ‘normal’ world are poignant.  The best post-apocalypse books are good on the changes in society and people that environmental change wreaks.  On this count, Flood fails – how on earth they are still on the internet when the floods are 100s of metres deep is beyond me.

Liz Jensen, The Rapture (2009).   Climate change with a twist (and more in the background than the foreground).  At the heart of the story is 16 year-old Bethany Krall, apparently capable of predicting natural disasters.  Or is she somehow causing them?   And what of the wheelchair-bound psychiatrist assigned to dealing with her?  And her physicist lover?   Do we care?   By the end, not enough – although the climatic denouement is carried off with just about enough panache to overcome the faintly ridiculous circumstances with which Jensen surrounds it.

Matthew Glass, Ultimatum (2009).   I’m writing this just as the Copenhagen climate change talks of December 2009 look close to collapse.  China and the USA are at loggerheads.  But if real life looks bad, then the stand-off in Ultimatum reaches eye-popping proportions.  This climate change novel is full of descriptions of drab high-level political meetings, and it struggles to get off the ground until the stakes get really high towards the end.  If what happens in Glass’s imagination is what has to happen in the real world to get a meaningful climate agreement, then we’d have to wonder if the game is worth the candle.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (2009).  I was so looking forward to reading this one – probably too much. Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) is a brilliant fictional treatment of the effects of genetic manipulation, and of a disrupted relationship between humans and the non-human natural world.  So as a semi-sequel, I had high hopes of The Year of the Flood.  An unspecified natural disaster has altered life on Earth, and a group called God’s Gardeners preach the virtues of a more natural life in the face of social and environmental instability.  Sounds good?  The characters here are thinly developed, though, and Atwood’s capacity for linguistic invention overwhelms the story.  There are lots of luminous parts here, but they don’t quite amount to a whole.

Robert Edric, Salvage (2010).  Climate change serves as a backdrop for a study in corruption.  Civil Servant Quinn has been sent to some unspecified part of the north of England to audit the progress on preparations for the creation of a new town.  He encounters a nasty cast of characters all on the make and all trying to cover up various irregularities – especially the toxic residue from the culling of large numbers of farm animals, necessitated by the changing climate and the collapse of farming.  It’s a grim place in a grim time.  Climate change novel fans aren’t likely to put this at the top of their list though: the climate isn’t integral to the story – though the ending is satisfyingly weather-ridden.

Ian McEwan, Solar (2010).  Earlier this year McEwan expressed surprise at the lack of climate change novels being written.  He has obviously not been paying attention, as the list above testifies.  I’m not sure this adds to the canon though.  It reads more like a rather tired mid-life crisis novel, as the protagonist struggles to deal with a failing career and a younger wife (his fifth) who doesn’t love him any more – if she ever did.  Climate change is incidental to this story, a mere backdrop which could have been any other backdrop.  We learn nothing about the causes of climate change, nor what to do about it. There is no comment on the styles of life or political and economic systems that contribute to climate change, and nothing about the arguments that rage around the fairness or unfairness of international negotiations.  There is even very little about the arguments over the science of climate change – a surprise, perhaps, given that McEwan’s protagonist is a Nobel prize-winning scientist.  In all, definitely not an eco-apocalypse novel and probably not even a climate change novel.

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Mike Smith (Professor of Geology at Cymru University) has written a climate change ‘blovel’, and you can read it online here: 

Glass House: Climate Change in the Third Millennium

July 2009 note – Thanks to Ian Christie for the following annotated list, which I’m looking forward to reading (or re-reading, in the case of the first one):

The Day of the Triffids is an anti-industrial, anti-progress novel and a warning about genetic manipulation and invasive species, and (like many 50s and 60s sci-fi books) a metaphor for pervasive fears about nuclear doom.

Olaf Stapledon’s epic history of the future Last and First Men (1930) takes human history out about a billion years from now, and the projections for the millennium ahead are full of hints of eco-disaster and technological hubris.

There’s also George Turner’s The Sea and Summer (1988), an unbelievably depressing novel about Australia in the grip of global warming, with mass squalor, violence and resource scarcity.

Kim Stanley Robinson has also done a global warming trilogy, set in the USA, which begins with Forty Days of Rain – not bad, but not gripping enough to make me want to carry on with the rest.

There is also a terribly over-long sci-fi blockbuster called White Devils (by Paul McCauley) that has its moments, despite some plodding characterisation and longwindedness. It is set in the 2030s, when global warming plus ‘gene hacking’ (rogue gene-splicing by criminal scientists and amateur genetic engineers) have caused global havoc. It’s set mainly in the Congo, which has become a calamitously damaged genetic manipulation laboratory run by a supposedly sustainable TNC on behalf of the UN. Someone is doing Dr-Moreau-style experiments for evil ends, and it all goes from bad to worse.

Many thanks for this contribution from Paul Moloney – some very interesting-looking recommendations:

George R Stewart, Earth Abides (1940s) – see review above

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1950s)

Brian Aldiss, Earthworks (1960s) – see review above

Gregory Benford, Timescape (1982?)

Frank Herbert, The White Plague (1985)

… and a more general source: Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd edition, 1990s).  Out-of-print, unfortunately, but full of interesting references.  As Paul says, ‘there are probably more of these kinds of novels kicking about than most of us might suppose’.

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