The Post-Apocalyptic Future

Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy , Staff Picks , Fiction

For readers of post-apocalyptic fiction, or for those of you who just can’t wait for the world as we know it to end, here are two recent novels of note. 

With A Meeting at Corvallis, S. M. Stirling brings to a close a trilogy (cited in a previous posting) set in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, following a catastrophe that renders useless all technology, power generation, and gunpowder.  From chaos and brutality, feudal societies emerge with medieval capabilities and equivalencies. 

But liberty versus tyranny is the familiar dynamic.  The Clan MacKenzie, the Bearkillers, and the city-state of Corvallis form an alliance of communities that withstands dominion by the Portland Protectorate, a fascist-feudal nation led by the ruthless Lord Protector.  (A former university educator, the Lord Protector is the worst sort of villain.) 

He is determined to conquer the surrounding communities in a final, all-out attack.  Mike Havel, the ex-Marine and leader of the Bearkillers, stands directly in his path.  Stirling concludes his rousing, violent, over-lengthy sequence in a manner that is satisfactorily integral and symbolic.

The Book of Dave, Will Self's satirical tour de force, is something else altogether. Dave, a London cabdriver, is divorced by his wife in 2002.  She leaves him for another man and takes Dave’s son.  Desperate, sick with rage, and half-mad, Dave pens a wildly misogynistic screed that's both a doctrinal code and a mystical vision of the city.  It's all tied in with "The Knowledge," the encyclopedic understanding of London's streets impressed in the memories of cabdrivers.  Intending the book for his son, Dave prints it on metal plates and buries them in his ex-wife’s garden in Hampstead.

A thousand years later, seawater covers most of London, now an archipelago called Ingland. On the island of Ham, the wretched inbred citizens live according to the Book of Dave, which was exhumed 500 years earlier and now serves as the moral code for an insanely dystopian society.  Almost everything Dave wrote is misinterpreted by an all-powerful clergy; except maybe his rage and hatred of women.  Dave’s story, and that of Ham, unfold in alternating sections.  With the characters of Ham speaking "Mokni," a bastard form of the cockney dialect, these chapters can be pretty tough going for a reader.

The Book of Dave is savage satire, brilliant in conception and scope, and filled with myriad hidden allusions and mysteries that the reader delights in discovering.  This is the kind of novel that either seizes your imagination or sends you away screaming in search of another book.

The future is now in a post-apocalyptic novel!  Enjoy the New Year!