alt Hacker NewsIt seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction.
In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon."
In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic.
This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list.
In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts.
Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.
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Quaint? We are the closest we've ever been to nuclear annihilation, according to the experts: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/
>It seems quaint now,
Miller's situation is a little more nuanced - he was crew on an Allied Bomber that levelled the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy during World War I, falsely believing it was occupied by German troops. His subsequent PTSD was a driving force behind his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism, and he uniquely imbues the novel with the structure and lexicography of a closed order. His fear was not so much war - atomic or otherwise - as it was the loss of knowledge and tolerance as a consequence of the cyclical and barbaric nature of human society.
Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction.
As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors.
Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.
When I was in high school (late 70s) we lived on Hood Canal in Washington state less than 10 miles from the Bangor Nuclear submarine base. My dad would often joke that it was probably the best location to live when WWIII starts because we'd just be instantly annihilated instead of having to suffer through some kind of post-nuclear hellscape.
It shouldn't be astonishing. The bombs dropped in Japan did create nuclear shadows of human beings when their bodies were annihilated. When Bradbury wrote it (1950), that was very, very fresh.
It’s been a very long time, but I read Alas, Babylon in middle school.
I remember aspects of their modern existence also being problematic (IIRC a house in florida with lots of windows doesn’t fare well without AC)
On topic of fear of nuclear war:
After reading Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, I'm surprised we as a species are still around.
Reading Philip K. Dick's short stories in publication order is also quite something in that respect. It was so pervasive in his early stories.
Beautifully articulated, but I have to disagree with you on nuclear power. We're close to the point where renewables and battery tech are a solution to all our power needs. Remaining obstacles being primarily political / geopolitical.
Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.
We also don't fully appreciate how much this shaped the American Baby Boomer psyche. My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school.
> "It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction."
Quite the reverse. That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war and that's not a normal state of affairs. The 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by war after war between major powers, culminating in the First World War ("the war to end all wars" remember?) and then Second World War in the first half of the 20th century. It was very surprising to everyone that another global war hadn't materialized by the 1980s.
Fear not, military rearmament spending worldwide has shot upwards as nations prepare for the inevitable wars to see who will be the new global top dog. We are all about to re-learn some old lessons, albeit at a heavy cost.