The light on the horizon: Imagining the death of American cities

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 175-196

  Abbott, Carl ^a  

^a PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Antiurbanism; Cities in fiction; Nuclear war; Science fiction; Urban catastrophe

Indexed keywords

CULTURE AND SOCIAL PHENOMENA; LITERATURE REVIEW; POST-WAR; URBAN AREA;

NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES;

EID: 31444443309     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: 15526771     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0096144205281831     Document Type: Review

References (106)

1. For example, Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960);
2. and Herman Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable (New York: Horizon Press, 1962);
3. compared to Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982).
4. I. E. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763-3749 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
5. H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988);
6. Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocaust: Atomic War in Fiction (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987), with an updated ed. at http://www.wsu.edu/ brians/nuclear;
7. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light (New York: Pantheon, 1985);
8. and David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999).
9. Also see Martha Bartter, The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1988);
10. and Mick Broderick, Nuclear Movies: A Critical Analysis and Filmography of International Feature Length Films Dealing with Experimentation, Aliens, Terrorism Holocaust and Other Disaster Scenarios, 1914-1989 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1991).
11. W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982);
12. and David Ketterer, New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974).
13. The novels, films, and stories that I have selected mostly fall into three categories. Some are important as early responses to the possibility of nuclear war (e.g., books by Wylie, Merril, and Clarkson). Others have been very widely read or viewed (e.g., books by Frank and King, and movies like "Testament" and "The Day After"). A third category is well-wrought stories and novels that have been particularly influential within the science fiction genre (e.g., by Bradbury, Dick, Miller, and Ellison).
14. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964);
15. Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964);
16. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955);
17. and Elizabeth Cummins Cogell. "The Middle Landscape Myth in Science Fiction," Science Fiction Studies 15 (July 1978): 134-42.
18. Clarke, Voices, 42, 88;
19. Franklin, War Stars, 24, 46-47;
20. and Wagar, Terminal Visions, 121.
21. Homer Lea, Valor of Ignorance, with Special Maps (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1909). The most interesting feature is the detailed maps showing exactly where Lea thinks the Japanese might land, establish strong points, and make other military moves. Lea's book was an argument for a larger and stronger standing army and navy to support the new imperial and international roles of the United States.
22. Jean Heffer, United States and the Pacific: History of a Frontier (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 184-89.
23. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), inventories many examples of yellow peril literature. It is interesting that American fears of future wars in the 1920s continued to center on the low-tech threat of Asian hordes. Europeans at the same time were developing fearsome scenarios of aerial bombardment with poison gas - surely a response to the horrors of the Western front in the Great War. Eighty-two years after Dooner's book, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick managed to invert the whole yellow peril myth (and Battle of Dorking genre) in one of the all-time best alternative reality novels. In The Man in the High Castle (1962), he imagined a world after German and Japanese victory. World War II finally ended in 1947, its results inevitable after the British defeat at Cairo and the German capture of the Middle East. Now, in 1962, Germans control the eastern United States and Japan directs a puppet government for the Pacific Coast, with the Rocky Mountains states as a small, independent enclave. We see no ruined cities. The Germans apparently inflicted significant conventional damage on the Atlantic coast, but they have been energetically rebuilding New York and Baltimore and reconstructing the economy in a sort of Speer Plan for the defeated people, and ambitious young Americans are flocking to New York. San Francisco apparently fell without becoming a battlefield. It remains undamaged, while the culturally sensitive Japanese try to mitigate the worst impacts of German racism. They cherish the peacefulness that they have brought to the Pacific Coast ("completely different from back there"). They treasure artifacts from prewar America like Colt revolvers and see a Mickey Mouse watch as "most authentic of dying old U.S. culture, a rare retained artifact carrying flavor of bygone halcyon day."
24. Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light, is the best source on the full range of American reactions to the early atomic age.
25. Also see Franklin, War Stars, 157;
26. and Clarke, Voices, 167.
27. John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1946).
28. Brians, Nuclear Holocaust, makes this point very well. Hersey's stylistic choices are analyzed in David Seed, "The Dawn of the Atomic Age," in Imagining Apocalypse: Studies in Cultural Crisis, ed. David Seed (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), 88-102.
29. With the actual experiences of atomic war so horrifying, some writers deliberately distanced their stories from its realities. Science fiction writer C. L. Moore chose ironic detachment. Her 1946 story for Astounding, "The Vintage Season," imagines time travelers from the future visiting New York to watch its atomic destruction as a tourist attraction. E. B. White's story "The Morning of the Day They Did It" (New Yorker, February 25, 1950) used a sometimes playful tone to group pollution, television, and the arms race as threats that trigger the destruction of civilization by alienated technocrats on the moon.
30. Wylie supposed that Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York were obliterated by H-bombs and that twenty-five smaller cities were hit with fission bombs. The book is dedicated to the Federal Civil Defense Administration and serves as a plea for strong civil defense preparations. Philip Wylie, Tomorrow (New York: Rinehart. 1954).
31. Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, Warday, and the Journey Onwards (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984).
32. Also see Seed, American Science Fiction, 14-25.
33. Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail-safe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962);
34. and Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, Seven Days in May (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). The movie versions had the misfortune to appear in 1964, the year after Dr. Strangelove.
35. Kidman's character is based in part on Jessica Stern, author of The Ultimate Terrorists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
36. Madison Smartt Bell, Waiting for the End of the World (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985), is a more sophisticated variant that uses the atomic terrorism plot to explore the sociology and psychology of alienation.
37. Wagar, Terminal Visions, 11;
38. and Ketterer, New Worlds for Old.
39. My discussion deliberately excludes two types of postapocalypse stories in which cities scarcely figure, even offstage. One is the Adam and Eve story in which a handful of survivors (maybe even just two!) have to decide whether to perpetuate the human race. This is the premise of the movies Five (1951), a very early film about life after the bomb; The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959);
40. and The Last Woman on Earth (1960).
41. In End of August at the Ozone Hotel, a 1966 film from Czechoslovakia, bands of women search for the last fertile male. Soldiers in 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983) battle through the streets of the postholocaust city to seize the last fertile woman. The Adam and Eve plot has been especially attractive to science fiction short-story writers, who like the challenge of devising one more twist on the two-person plot.
42. The second story type is the "Mad Max" quest, in which one or a handful of survivors have to make their way through postnuclear dangers of nasty people and mutant beasts to find shelter, water, and other basics for survival. Examples of films include Damnation Alley (1974), The Ravagers (1979), Stryker (1983), World Gone Wild (1988), and Badlands 2005 (1988) - and of course, the original Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior (1981). The Mad Max quest is especially popular for low-budget films, since many minutes can be filled with motorcycle chases and long camera shots across desolate landscapes not too far from home base in Los Angeles. Some fictions combine both premises. In Panic in the Year Zero (1962), Ray Milland is a dad who helps his family through chaos after the bombing of Los Angeles. He changes from a typical suburbanite to a fierce survivalist and fights off such dangers as juvenile delinquents in a hot rod. Hell Comes to Frogtown (1987) sends one of the few remaining potent men to impregnate women in the wilderness, but he encounters dangerous mutants on the way. See Franklin, War Stars, 175-77.
43. For introductions to films about nuclear war and its aftermath, see Broderick, Nuclear Movies;
44. Jack G. Shaheen, ed., Nuclear War Films (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978);
45. and Wyn Wachhorst, "The Days after: Films on Nuclear Aftermath," in Phoenix from the Ashes: The Literature of the Remade World, ed. Carl B. Yoke (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987), 177-92.
46. The ravages of half-mad mobs of refugees from bombed cities are a subtheme in Tomorrow and another argument for better civil defense preparations. When writers bring survivors back to the city soon after the bomb, the depictions are vastly unrealistic. For example, the film The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959) uses the Adam and Eve plot to focus on three survivors of nuclear war who encounter each other in a New York where the dead and decaying bodies of 8 million people seem to have evaporated without a trace. Vivian Sobchack, "Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film," East-West Film Journal 1 (December 1988): 4-19, sees the unpeopled city as a major trope that expresses and repudiates the modern. We should also note the economics of production. It is cheaper to close off a few city streets on Sunday morning and set up a big fan to blow scraps of paper down the empty concrete canyons than to pay for elaborate sets and special effects depicting a ruined city.
47. Judith Merrill, Shadow on the Hearth (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950);
48. Franklin, War Stars, 178;
49. and Seed, American Science Fiction, 57-60.
50. Originally published separately, the story was included as one of the loosely linked stories that make up The Martian Chronicles;
51. Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains," in Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950). The title comes from a poem by Sara Teasdale, written under the shadow of World War I.
52. Helen Clarkson, The Last Day: A Novel of the Day after Tomorrow (New York: Dodd, Mean, 1959). Helen Clarkson was a pseudonym for Helen McCloy, a successful writer of mystery and suspense fiction from the 1930s to the 1970s.
53. Wagar, Terminal Visions, 186;
54. and Seed, American Science Fiction, 63-65.
55. Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (1959; reprint, New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1999), 144.
56. Pat Frank was the pseudonym of journalist Harry Hart, a successful journalist on foreign relations and military affairs who had written several previous novels. Alas, Babylon, appearing when Americans were worrying about a missile gap with the Soviet Union, was one of the best selling of the nuclear war novels. See C. W. Sullivan III, "Alas Babylon and On the Beach: Antiphons of the Apocalypse," in Yoke, Phoenix, 37-44.
57. Frank, Alas, Babylon, 162.
58. Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), is an excellent introduction to this strand of American culture.
59. Also see Edward James, "Rewriting the Christian Apocalypse as a Science-Fiction Event,' in Seed, Imagining Apocalypse, 45-61.
60. The Day After is discussed in Charles E. Gannon, "Silo Psychosis: Diagnosing America's Nuclear Anxiety through Narrative Imagery," in Seed, Imagining Apocalypse, 104-7.
61. Sobchack, "Cities on the Edge of Time."
62. For a supplementary point of view, Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), argues that movies depicting the destruction of Los Angeles by mutant insects, Martians, and other such invaders were a means for expressing fear of racial difference.
63. "The Scarlet Plague" was originally published in the London Magazine in 1912. It can be accessed at http://sunsite3.berkeley.edeu/ London/writings/scarlet.
64. Stephen Vincent Benet's story "By the Waters of Babylon" from 1935 is a similar tale of a primitive United States long years after the great disaster. See Paul Carter, The Creation of Tomorrow (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 231-32, 241.
65. Thomas Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (New York: Free Press, 1988), 83,
66. points out that out of the first thirty novels cited by David Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1986), seven are directly concerned with nuclear war and eight transpose the disaster to other forms via aliens, plagues, and the like.
67. In the first category are Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles;
68. Bernard Wolfe, Limbo;
69. Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow;
70. Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination;
71. Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint;
72. Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon;
73. and Walter Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz. In the second category are George Orwell, 1984;
74. George Stewart, Earth Abides;
75. Robert Heinlein, The Puppet Masters;
76. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids;
77. Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End;
78. Clifford Simak, Ring around the Sun;
79. Edgar Pangborn, Mirror for Observers;
80. and John Christopher, The Death of Grass.
81. Willy Ley, The Conquest of Space (New York: Viking Press, 1949).
82. Brace quoted in Charles Glaab, The American City: A Documentary History (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1963), 329;
83. see also Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: F. O. Schulte and Co., 1890);
84. and Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust (New York: Random House, 1939).
85. For more general fears of disorder, see Frederick C. Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885-1918 (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1964).
86. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Lucifer's Hammer (New York: Putnam, 1977);
87. and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, False Dawn (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978).
88. Stephen King, The Stand (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 122-23, 368.
89. A Canticle for Leibowitz consists of three novellas set roughly 600, 1200, and 1800 years after the first nuclear war. The rise of the Texarkanan Empire is found in the middle novella, "Fiat Lux." In 1939, Stanley Weinbaum's novella "Dawn of Flame" posited a similar sort of postcollapse United States in which competing city-states battle to control the Mississippi Valley. There is a neo-New Orleans, the Ozarky, and Salui (St. Louis), and a big battle at Starved Rock on the Illinois River.
90. See Edgar L. Chapman, "Weinbaum's Fire from the Ashes: The Post-Disaster Civilization of The Black Flame," in Yoke, Phoenix, 85-96.
91. Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 14.
92. Brackett was a successful screenwriter as well as novelist, working on such movies as The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, and The Empire Strikes Back. Also see Diana Parkin-Speer, "Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow: A Quest for the Future America," Extrapolation, 26 (Summer 1985): 190-200;
93. and Donna M. DeBlasio, "Future Imperfect: Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow," in Yoke, Phoenix, 97-103.
94. "The New Adam and Eve" was written in 1843 and included in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), http:// www.eldritchpress.org/nh/newae.html.
95. The novel was republished as Daybreak - 2250 A.D. and also paired with No Night without Stars as Andre Norton, Darkness and Dawn (New York: Baen Books, 2003). Page references are to this latter edition. Alice Mary Norton, writing as Andre Norton, produced 75-80 science fiction and fantasy novels for both children and adults from the 1940s to the 1990s. She also wrote a several World War II adventure books with teenaged heroes. Starman's Son was written for the juvenile/teenage market, as is clear from the vocabulary, which sticks close to the word choices with the fewest syllables.
96. Norton, Daybreak, 6-7.
97. Ibid., 38.
98. Ibid., 132.
99. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Wild Shore (New York: Berkley, 1984).
100. Clarke, Voices, 170-73.
101. Tim Powers, who has written more supernatural terror fiction than science fiction, depicted a somewhat similar southern California in Dinner at Deviant's Palace (New York: Ace, 1985). A century or so after atomic holocaust, Los Angeles is a small farm market center, Irvine is the headquarters of a powerful exploitative cult that leads many followers to their death, and Venice Beach is the home of perverted vice businesses that involve the prostitution of mutants.
102. The story was originally published in 1969. Page citations are to Terry Dowling, ed., The Essential Ellison (Omaha, Neb.: Nemo Press, 1987), 927, 938.
103. In the decade or so after 1945, a number of city planners advocated the planned decentralization of urban areas as a civil defense measure, in effect making suburbanization patriotic.
104. Susan Sontag, "The Imagination of Disaster," Commentary (October 1965): 42-48.
105. Martha Bartter, "Nuclear Holocaust as Urban Renewal," Science Fiction Studies 13 (July 1986): 148-58.
106. There is also a practical consideration. American postdisaster fiction can focus on the small town and countryside because North America is so big. Even a narrow peninsula such as Florida has room for new beginnings, not to mention the Great Plains and the western mountains. In contrast, Charles Gannon argues in "Silo Psychosis" (107-9), nuclear war scenarios in physically constructed Britain tend to linger on the details of the devastated city because there is no practical place of refuge. Indeed, some classic British versions of the big catastrophe, such as John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, seem to focus on making do and muddling through. Indeed, some classic British versions of the big catastrophe, such as John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, seem to focus on making do and muddling through.