By Professor Eric S Rabkin PhD, Martin H. Greenberg, Dr. Joseph D. Olander Ph.D.
The essays chosen by means of the editors to explore those apocalyptic visions are: “The Remaking of 0: starting on the End,” by way of Gary okay. Wolfe; “The Lone Survivor,” by way of Robert Plank; “Ambiguous Apocalypse: Transcendental models of the End,” by means of Robert Galbreath; “World’s finish: The Imagination of Catastrophe,” by way of W. Warren Wagar; “Man-Made Catastrophes,” via Brian Stableford; and “The uprising of Nature,” through W. Warren Wagar. Wolfe sees in those postholocaust narratives a relevant attraction—“the mythic energy inherent within the very belief of a remade world.” This strength derives from 3 assets: the emergence of a brand new order from the ashes of the outdated method, and hence a type of denial of dying; the reinforcement of 1 set of values rather than one other; and as anything continuously replaces no matter what used to be destroyed, a promise that not anything can annihilate humanity.
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But the post-catastrophe tale brings this confrontation with Nature closer to home; in these stories chaos may lie just beyond the limits of the village, or outside the family circle, orespecially with "last man on earth" storiesaround the next corner. In M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901), the struggle is even internalized; the question is not merely whether Adam Jeffson, apparently the last man on earth, can master the immense environment he inherits, but whether what he calls the "White" forces of his own mind can master the destructive and chaotic "Black" forces that cause him to deliberately burn great cities and almost to kill the only surviving woman.
3:2224) One way or another, we have always wanted to know too much, have made our Father-Gods jealous, have risked changing the world and thereby, inevitably, changed it. Ending our world, we simultaneously create a new one, one sometimes fearful and one sometimes hopeful, but one that always depends for its emergence upon the destruction of the world that preceded it. No matter how indirectly, we always call destruction an act we regret and yet somehow cherish as our own. If Page viii paradise is lost by us, we who have scared the gods have it in us to create a paradise anew.
Marxism, or anything that resembles it, does not generally fare well in these novels (Malevil in particular, which features a Marxist as one of the secondary characters, repeatedly demonstrates the failures of this character's schemes in reorganizing the new society). But novels in which the antagonists threatening the community represent a strong moral viewpoint usually do not associate such characters with the wilderness; such characters, instead, prepare us for the decisive moral battle discussed below.