Constructive Post-Holocaust Stories
Jan. 28th, 2006 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollThat's a lousy term but what I mean is the sort of story that is set after some great calamity where the point isn't to rack up as high a body count as possible fighting over dog-food tins, to show how nomadic barbarism is the true state of manly men or to demonstrate how awful _those people_ are without society keeping a boot on their necks [1]. Instead, the idea is to recover from the disaster, to preserve what is worth preserving and to create that which was lacking the first time round to enable the disaster to occur [2].
What made me think about this was that the University of Nebraska recently reprinted the Pelbar Cycle (Paul O. Williams) as part of their Beyond Armagedon series, and the Pelbar Cycle is all about E Pluribus Unuming: the stage starts off with two different flavours of nomadic barbarians (One set descended from feral Minnesotans and the other from Boy Scouts gone dingo) and a few thousand matriarchal town dwellers (ranging from stuffy to actively malign) and ends up by book five
Yeah, a spoiler warning should go here: SPOILER WARNING
with the life styles of the three groups radically transformed, their knowledge of the world vastly exanded and a new nation stretching roughly from the Rockies to the Appalachians and from what was Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Not bad for under 20 years work.
It's an odd series. The author is an English professor but the language is very simple. Many characters seem to suffer from an excess of reasonableness and even many of the arch-conservatives come around, once they are presented with evidence, sweet logic and the total collapse of their old lifestyles, in large part because of their own actions. There's also a weird thing with the religions, many of which are derived from Christianity. When the texts from the original faith are found, people revert to that, rather than seeing it as something that led to the ONE TRVE FAITH. I guess some of that is the characters' willingness to see similarities rather than differences. For them, the important thing isn't how much things have diverged but how they all come from the same roots.
I am not entirely clear why this particular series now but I am not unhappy that I had to read books one through five.
In any case, there's a section in the report where I had to compare the books in hand to other books like them and now that it's too late to matter, I am curious what titles other people would have picked to compare this series to. The basic ideas are: post-nuclear war (a very thorough one, where a thousand years later the population still seems to be measured in perhaps tens of thousands), a lot of time has passed, the survivors are beginning to construct a new continental civilization.
1: Say, what is it about Canadian politicians and references to cannibalism in connection with Africa? First Mel and now le Roi Arthur.
2: In a lot of cases, the disaster is a nuclear war so that which was lacking was a hesitation to trade massive waves of nuclear warheads back and forth.
What made me think about this was that the University of Nebraska recently reprinted the Pelbar Cycle (Paul O. Williams) as part of their Beyond Armagedon series, and the Pelbar Cycle is all about E Pluribus Unuming: the stage starts off with two different flavours of nomadic barbarians (One set descended from feral Minnesotans and the other from Boy Scouts gone dingo) and a few thousand matriarchal town dwellers (ranging from stuffy to actively malign) and ends up by book five
Yeah, a spoiler warning should go here: SPOILER WARNING
with the life styles of the three groups radically transformed, their knowledge of the world vastly exanded and a new nation stretching roughly from the Rockies to the Appalachians and from what was Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Not bad for under 20 years work.
It's an odd series. The author is an English professor but the language is very simple. Many characters seem to suffer from an excess of reasonableness and even many of the arch-conservatives come around, once they are presented with evidence, sweet logic and the total collapse of their old lifestyles, in large part because of their own actions. There's also a weird thing with the religions, many of which are derived from Christianity. When the texts from the original faith are found, people revert to that, rather than seeing it as something that led to the ONE TRVE FAITH. I guess some of that is the characters' willingness to see similarities rather than differences. For them, the important thing isn't how much things have diverged but how they all come from the same roots.
I am not entirely clear why this particular series now but I am not unhappy that I had to read books one through five.
In any case, there's a section in the report where I had to compare the books in hand to other books like them and now that it's too late to matter, I am curious what titles other people would have picked to compare this series to. The basic ideas are: post-nuclear war (a very thorough one, where a thousand years later the population still seems to be measured in perhaps tens of thousands), a lot of time has passed, the survivors are beginning to construct a new continental civilization.
1: Say, what is it about Canadian politicians and references to cannibalism in connection with Africa? First Mel and now le Roi Arthur.
2: In a lot of cases, the disaster is a nuclear war so that which was lacking was a hesitation to trade massive waves of nuclear warheads back and forth.
