Beached Statue

 Ever since Planet of the Apes, a disaster-wrecked Statue of Liberty has been used frequently in movies and on their posters to symbolise ruined America.

  

 

 

  

It's a cliche that started in literature, and actually goes back to 1887: the oldest occurrence I've read is in J. A. Mitchell's novella The Last American, which featured illustrations like these...

 

 ..and which, along with Planet of the Apes, led to numerous book, pulp magazine and comic covers featuring Liberty in various states of disrepair and repurposing.

Now that a horrific deluge of utterly unoriginal post-apocalyptic self-published fiction has been unleashed by Amazon, it seems only fitting that these books without new ideas should also feature covers to match.

It's mildly unfair to include Warday here, in that it was first published in the 1980s by a respectable firm, but Streiber abandoned his career as a writer of obvious fiction in order to become a wildly disreputable purveyor of alien-abduction bullshit and plagiarist, so fuck him.

Slowly Spinning to a Stop

US edition: Random House

Science fiction tends to have as its characters the most important people in the world: they’re the scientists who make the big discovery, the heroes who save the universe, the time travellers who change history, the survivors of apocalypse who build a new world from the ruins. This is reasonable enough: if a good working definition of science fiction is that it changes something about the world or the universe, and then logically pursues the consequences, then it makes sense to have as your heroes and villains the people who are central to that change.

But there’s another kind of science fiction which can be extremely powerful, and it’s something not many writers have explored. It takes a more domestic view, one where the world has been changed, and where the story is that of completely ordinary people living their lives in that world, trying to make a go of it. A particularly powerful example from a couple of years ago is I Have Waited, and You Have Come by Martine McDonagh. Another is about to be published: The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker.

“We did not sense at first the extra time, bulging from the smooth edge of each day like a tumor blooming beneath the skin.”

UK edition: Simon & Schuster

Miracles’s central conceit is an unlikely one—the Earth’s rotation suddenly starts to slow, dramatically increasing the length of day and night. (Walker was inspired by the fact that the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake slowed the Earth’s rotation by a fraction of a second.) Days lengthen by minutes, then hours, then double and triple in length.

“By the end of November, our days had stretched to forty hours.”

Society begins to mutate and fail, ecosystems begin to crash, and the cyclic patterns the human brain is used to, and relies on, are disrupted further and further. This would make for an elegant disaster novel on its own. But Walker has something else in mind. The Age of Miracles is in many ways a classic coming-of-age novel, about a teenaged girl trying not to lose her friends, to deal with crushes, to cope with her parents and her changing body. It’s just that she has to do all of this in a world that is slowly, inexorably changing and falling apart.

Teenagers are famously bad at clearly imagining their futures, and frequently take the sort of risks only people who feel immortal would take. Even in the face of global cataclysm, how much would that change? If you have trouble thinking of what to do when you grow up, how much does it matter if you’re not sure if you—or anyone else—will actually make it to a few more birthdays? Elegaic and bleak, Walker’s novel (her first) is finely written and very compelling.

A heartening quantity of excellent science fiction has been written recently by writers who are not normally seen as SF writers, such as Colson Whitehead, Ben Marcus, Julie Myerson and Cormac McCarthy. That almost all of these works have been apocalyptic in nature is both intriguing and, to a troubled devourer of end-of-the-world stories like myself (see here  and, indeed, all of these posts). Even if most of the readers of these books refuse to see them as science fiction, not wanting to find themselves in that particular literary ghetto, it’s heartening to see writers like Walker crossing genre boundaries with such aplomb, and expanding the world for their readers—even if they take them into some very dark places.


This also leads to cover designs that try their damnedest not to look like covers for SF books: see the two examples here. I have no problem with that--many SF covers are awful, after all--but it would be nice to think that the motive was aesthetic rather than literary gtenre snobbery.

[For more information on the physics of what might happen if the Earth were to stop rotating, see here.]

Birds & Apocalypses

In honour of Russell Hoban, who has just passed away, a great author of both adult and children's books, and the man responsible for one of the greatest novels of all time, the post-nuclear-holocaust Riddley Walker, I thought I'd take a look at another avant-garde take on the apocalypse, Adam Novy's The Avian Gospels.

I first came across this via a rave review in Publishers Weekly. It sounded fascinating, and that was before I actually saw the book. Published by Short Flight/Long Drive Books, it's a thing of beauty, taking its cue from the book's title and theme with a very biblical look--most specifically, the little Gideon's you find in hotel rooms.

Designed by Elizabeth Ellen and Aaron Burch, the woman behind SF/LD and the man behind the parent Hobart Pulp, this design splits the book into 2 volumes--a fat 'old testament' and a thin 'new', with gilded page edges, ribbon bookmarks and page reference numbers.

After buying these, I found that everyone who orders them from the publisher gets a free ebook edition too, which is probably a good idea. But if ever you needed a reason to avoid ebooks, it's when the physical alternative is this beautifully considered and produced.

SF/LD seem to specialise in these genre/format-warping exercises: Karl Taro Greenfeld's story collection is disguised as a series of travel guides, while Michelle Orange's travel book is in the format of a passport. This sort of madness is only to be encouraged.

The Dead School

Forthcoming from NYRB, The Letter Killers Club, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (about whose amazing Memories of the Future I wrote here):

I don't know who took the photo on the cover, but I recognise what it's a photo of: a school in Pripyat, a city abandoned when the area was contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986. See these other photos of the same schoolroom:







Visit those three flickr albums above for more amazing and creepy photos from the abandoned city. As you might imagine from my obsession with nuclear disaster, I can't stop thinking about these pictures.

Eye

What did cover designers do with London-set books before the London Eye was built? Before that, it seems London didn't have a skyline identifiable to book-buyers. Now the Eye itself is becoming shorthand for central London.

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

The Baxter and Scarrow books, by the way, are recent additions to the end-of-the-world library. The former posits sea levels that keep rising and rising and rising, while the latter is a very good end-of-peak-oil novel somewhat hobbled by an unnecessary and somewhat daft vast-international-conspiracy subplot

This is completely unconnected, but interesting... the design of a commercial book cover, condensed into just under 2 minutes, by Lauren Panepinto.

Cooking in the Wastelands

Most celebrity cookbooks these days feature the author/chef looking faaaabulous in the kitchen, or else on some sunny or in some lush glade. And then there's this one, which looks more like an image from Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

It looks very much as though the reader/photographer is about to be the main dish in a post-holocaust cannibal feast.

Vonnegut Addendum

I should have posted this with the other Cat's Cradle covers in the last post: it's certainly my favourite take on Vonnegut's best apocalyptic novel. Done for the Essential Penguin line in 1999, it was photographed by Mike Venebles. He froze the cover text, and then took the shots through the ice.

 

Venebles did a similar thing for the cover of The Water Clock, a crime novel. As he says, the "random almost pre-historic appearance" of the distortion from the ice is very pleasing to the eye.

Angry Rabbits

A different sort of apocalypse this time: Australian writer Russell Braddon's The Year of the Angry Rabbit, first published in 1964. This is the first comic take on the end of the world I've covered here: usually I prefer my armageddons done with deadly seriousness, John Christopher-style. But Angry Rabbit has a certain embarrassed place in my heart. Here are the hardcover and softcover jackets.




Australia has long had a feral rabbit problem, the apparently inoffensive creatures devouring vast quantities of crops and driving a number of native animals to near-extinction through competitive population pressure. A fairly horrible virus, Myxomatosis, was introduced here in 1950 in an attempt to wipe the rabbits out, but they have, for the most part, developed an immunity to it.

Angry Rabbit features scientists developing a new disease, Supermyx, to defeat the cunning rabbit hordes. The problem is that it doesn't do anything to the rabbits, but turns out to be instantly lethal to humans. Naturally enough, the Australian Prime Minister decided to use this accidental biological super-weapon to hold the world to ransom, leading to Australia's unlikely conquest of the globe. As you might expect, though, things do not go according to plan, the virus gets away, and worldwide carnage ensues. It's daft as a brush, but quite a lot of dated fun.

The story about the book does not end there, however.



In 1972, the book was unwisely filmed as Night of the Lepus. The setting was inevitably moved to the USA, and instead of a rampaging super-virus killing humans, the plot now involved a rampaging super-virus turning rabbits into bloodthirsty predators who then set about killing humans.



The central problem with this film, aside from the laughable acting, pathetic script-writing and woeful directing, is that rabbits are, in fact, incredibly cute, and not in the least bit scary. The poster artists did a valiant job...


..but these frames from the film all are too revealing.

Chilling!

The movie's trailer will leave you in no doubt as to the scale of the folly of this enterprise.