Apocalyptic fiction – Graham Clements

The Glad Shout by Alice Robinson

Graham Clements — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 01:34:00 +0000

The Glad Shout is a novel that will shake many reader’s expectations of their future prospects. It portrays a potential future for many of us, especially those who live near the coast. The novel is set in 2045 after a massive storm has flooded Melbourne, destroying much of the housing and infrastructure, including power.

The story is about one family: Isobel, her three-year-old daughter Margaret, and Shane, her husband. It is told almost exclusively from Isobel’s point of view. The family has just made their way out of the floodwaters to higher ground in a sports stadium. It could be the MCG, but that is never made clear. It is supposed to be an evacuation centre but has limited supplies, limited staff, and virtually no communication with the outside world.

The family sets up a tent in the muddy stadium field. They then wait to find out the extent of the damage to Melbourne and where they might eventually be relocated to. There is a lot of tension in the camp. As the novel is set in Australia, it fortunately lacks the American gun and gang culture. No one tries to take control with guns, as would happen in many similar American novels. For the most part, the survivors still behave like they are part of a continuing society that has order to it.

In between the story of Isobel and her family’s attempts to survive, the novel explores her backstory. Isobel and her older brother, Josh, were brought up by their mother, Luna, a real estate agent. To Isobel, Luna seemed more concerned about having a house that looked like it belonged in a magazine photoshoot than being a caring mother. Isobel frequently escaped to stay with her bohemian grandmother, who also lived in Melbourne. She and Josh also often holidayed at their grandfather’s small farm.

Through the backstory, we learn that Isobel had an emotionally unfulfilling childhood. She longed for a mother who took more interest in her and her brother. We also see the creeping effect of climate change and how it changes the character’s lives over the years.

One of the novel’s themes is the plight of internal climate change refugees. As climate change destroys the environment and the economy, more and more people are displaced.

The novel is much more than a disaster story. It is about how a woman needs to take control for her family to survive while exploring her fears, desires, concerns for her child, and sense of abandonment, as well as her questioning whether she could have done more to prepare for the disaster and climate change.

The story is written in first person and present tense, giving it a real urgency. It is well-written, immersing the reader in the main character’s life.

This is a fantastic novel that should scare climate change complacency out of many of its readers. It should have them asking if it is possible to prepare for coming climate change disasters. It asks these questions while exploring a woman’s life and the effects of her family on it.

Review of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds.

Graham Clements — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 03:49:00 +0000

I read War of the Worlds after seeing it on a list of subversive novels. It attempts to get its readers to question the British invasion of countries and the way it treated their indigenous populations. Wells wrote it in part as a response to how the British slaughtered Aborigines in Tasmania. The War of the Worlds is an allegory of the conquest of a primitive society by technologically sophisticated colonists who do not respect indigenous cultures.

The novel is narrated by an unnamed character who is a philosopher and amateur astronomer. He is one of the first to notice that something is happening on Mars, and then the first alien spacecraft lands not far from his house in an English common. He goes to investigate. At first, the spacecraft, which just looks like a huge cylinder, gives nothing away of what it might contain or its purpose. People gather to gawk at it and contemplate what it might be. It then opens, and the war for humanity’s survival gradually begins.

The novel contains many extended war and action scenes, with small sections of contemplation of what the Martians are up to and why. Humanity attempts to fight back but, like the inhabitants of many countries the English invaded, is totally outgunned by Martian technology. The narrator spends much of his time fighting despair as he sees human resistance to the Martians fail. He is on the run for much of the story.

The POV character changes for a few chapters to the narrator’s brother, who, along with thousands of Londoners, is trying to find somewhere safe to flee. Only then do some slightly useful female characters appear. Their main role in the novel is basically to be placed somewhere safe and out of the way or to scream. They are not deemed likely of doing anything productive to defeat the Martians. One memorable line, “He was as lacking in restraint as a silly woman”, emphasises the role Wells thinks women would play in such a war. His writing though, is a product of its time, 1895.

The novel also takes a swipe at religion, where people hopelessly pray to be saved rather than try to do something productive to save themselves. The narrator gets trapped with a curate (a vicar or priest) for a few days. His religious rants do none of them any benefit.

The novel is written in the style of someone telling you what they experienced after the event. Wells curiously breaks the fourth wall every now and then by referring directly to the “reader”. If you were not aware of the outcome of the novel, this would tell you that the narrator survived.

Overall, with its anti-imperialism sentiment, the novel appears subversive for its time—when Royal Britannia wanted to rule the world no matter the cost. I very much enjoyed reading the novel and it deserves to be the renowned classic of science fiction and literature it is. I will be reading more of Wells’ novels.

Quick review of When the Floods Came.

Graham Clements — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 02:11:00 +0000

When the Floods Came is a well-written and imaginative take on an apocalyptic future. The novel is set in England, where a virus has wiped out most of the population. A few people live in isolated pockets using technology that is slowly running down. The main focus is a family who live by themselves in an otherwise abandoned apartment block. The story is told from the viewpoint of 22-year-old Roza. Due to the effects of the virus, people her age and under are rare.

The story centres around Roza waiting for her fiance (whom she has never met in real life; all their interactions have been on the web) to arrive on his push bike – no cars or pods are still running. While she waits, a mysterious stranger turns up. His arrival brings a sense of mystery and intrigue. Does he want to help and fit in, or does he have some hidden agenda?

The story is more character than plot-based. It is about how a family cut off from physical interaction with other survivors copes with a stranger and the outside world he introduces them to.

Review of Brother in the Land

Graham Clements — Fri, 22 May 2015 08:23:00 +0000

Brother in The Land begins with teenager Danny taking a break from working in his father’s corner store for a long bike ride into the English countryside. It starts to rain, so he takes shelter in a World War II pillbox. As he waits for the rain to stop, he sees the flashes of nuclear missiles exploding.

Aware that the rain might contain radiation, he waits for it to stop and then rides back to his fictional hometown of Skipley. It is badly damaged, and hundreds are dead. The rest of the novel tells the story of Danny’s attempt to survive.

Brother in the Land is a young adult novel told exclusively from Danny’s point of view. Danny seems slightly emotionally detached from what is going on around him. He mourns little for family and friends who died, which leaves the reader wondering if he had had any friends. But perhaps he is just in shock and too busy getting on with surviving to mourn.

The novel does a realistic job of describing the aftermath of a nuclear attack: the breakdown in authority, the wait for help while people do whatever it takes to survive, people dying of radiation sickness, crops failing, and deformed babies being born.

The novel was written and set in the 1980s, when nuclear war was a big fear. But it reads like it could have been written in the 1950s. One reason for this is the near-total absence of females in leadership roles. The novel has only one substantial female character, the tough but pretty Kim. She is used to show that Danny still has teenage hormones.

The novel has a real boy’s own adventure feel. Obviously, its author, Robert Swindells, had a military background, with Danny’s devotion to duty being one of the novel’s big themes. Duties included helping his family and joining a militia to fight those who sought to enslave the survivors.

The prose is straightforward, with little creative flair. The sentences are short, and there is a lot of foreshadowing. Brother in the Land won the “Other” award, but I could find no reference to that award on the web.

Originally, the novel ended with little hope for Danny’s survival, but Swindells added a new chapter that gives some hope. This seems unnecessary and goes against the novel’s overall bleakness. It also seems unrealistic.

Except for the additional chapter, Brother in the Land appears to be a relatively realistic portrayal of a teenager trying to survive after a nuclear war. As it progresses, it becomes a passable action novel, with Danny forced to fight to survive. But his lack of emotion left me thinking the author was too scared to explore the inner thoughts of his main character. It is a novel for teenage boys who don’t want to read any girly emotions.

Review of Holly Childs’ No Limit.

Graham Clements — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 06:10:00 +0000

No Limit is a book about hip young things doing hip things and wanting the world to know about their hipness via social media.

The novella is set in Auckland, New Zealand, in December 2012, which is important because the world was supposed to end then due to the Mayan calendar running out. To add to the apocalyptic feel of the novella, a volcano is erupting. Its ash causes the cancellation of Ash’s plane to Australia. With no idea how long she will have to wait, Ash decides to look up a cousin in Auckland. She spends much of the novella searching for him, meeting a few strange people along the way.

The novel is full of references to pop culture. For example, Tom, everyone’s first Myspace friend, makes an appearance. Many words are spent describing the clothes the characters wear—labels everywhere.

The characters all seem to suffer from attention deficit disorder. Their thoughts flick from observations of the world around them to desires, to how they are going to get to where they want to be, and then to wanting to be somewhere else immediately after they get there. Their lives seem jaded by too many unlived and unanalysed experiences.

All along the way, they want to record everything they do and say, but the internet keeps dropping out. Perhaps the end of the world is really happening. The novella emphasises a youth culture that can’t see the point in doing anything if they can’t take pictures of it and then share them on social media.

This is Holly Childs’ first published longer work of fiction. She is a writer and artist who, according to her bio, creates work around digital semiotics, transformations of language, obscurities, fashion, aberration and corruption.

She uses many short sentences in No Limit as if to emphasise the characters’ quickly passing thoughts. The novella is also very humorous.

This novella is for those who enjoy watching the slightly deluded lurch from one unfulfilled fantasy to another.

The Ten Best Apocalyptic Novels I Have Read.

Graham Clements — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 06:16:00 +0000

I finished reading Justin Cronin’s apocalyptic vampire novel The Passage a week ago. It is a brilliant novel in both the way it is written and the story. Cronin introduces dozens of characters, each with individual fears and problems that make them easy to empathise with. The Passage is one of the best adventure epics I have read. I thought it was close to the best apocalyptic fiction I have read. To try and decide if it is the best, I went through my bookshelves and found dozens of apocalyptic novels to compare it to.

I define apocalyptic fiction as any story set during the collapse of a civilisation and/or the stories of the survivors in the years after that collapse. Some novels on my shelves had civilisation slowly in decline, not so much a collapse, so I did not include them. This meant my all-time favourite science fiction novel, The Sea and Summer, by George Turner, missed out.

After much consideration, here is a list of the top ten apocalyptic novels I have read:

The Passage, Justin Cronin
The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
The Genesis of Shannara trilogy, Terry Brooks
Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Warday and the Journey Onward, Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka
Graffiti, Peter Van Greenaway
Earth Abides, George R Stewart.

Five of the novels are written by “literary” writers: Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy and Steve Amsterdam. I am a bit of a fan of Margaret Atwood. Justin Cronin claimed to be a non-genre writer before he wrote The Passage. Steve Amsterdam Is the only Australian on the list.

The books made the list for different reasons. The Road for its bleak atmosphere, the boy and man only have the next day’s struggle to look forward to. It’s keep moving or die.

The Genesis of Shannara is written for young adults, and its theme could leave them thinking that they better be prepared to live in a world destroyed by their parents. Brooks might not be the greatest writer, but he can tell an engrossing tale that kept me wondering if the main characters would survive for three books.

I loved the way Things We Didn’t See Coming is divided into eight or so self-contained short stories. Steve Amsterdam does a brilliant job of imagining the life of a person born just before the year 2000, coping with future dramatic environmental shifts. The novel sure lives up to its name because its stories constantly surprised me.

Warday is written like a diary and gives an account of what happens when EMP pulses from a limited nuclear attack send the US back into the Stone Age. It shows in grim detail the decline of the US.

Graffiti has a great concept; the history of the world after a nuclear war is written on the walls of a hotel. So much for ebooks being the future.

Margaret Atwood’s novels are so well written. Her words are seamlessly put together; there are no attempts at cleverness that throw me out of some other writers’ writing. She writes how she imagines characters would behave when civilisation is collapsing or collapsed, not how she would hope they would act. The Year of the Flood is a prequel to Oryx and Crake.

And Earth Abides was probably the first apocalyptic novel I read. It shows attempts to re-establish civilisation that are stalling.

Cause of the Apocalypse

What did these writers imagine destroyed civilisation?

The Passage– genetically engineered vampires
The Year of the Flood– a virus
The Road– nuclear war
Oryx and Crake– a virus
The Genesis of Shannara– pollution, genetically engineered mutants, and demons
Things We Didn’t See Coming– climate change
The Handmaid’s Tale– pollution and biological warfare
Warday– nuclear war
Graffiti– nuclear war
Earth Abides– a virus.

I will probably read Stephen King’s The Stand one day. King’s Under The Dome just failed to make the list. I also must read the classics War of the Worlds and Day of the Triffids. And I am still yet to delve into apocalyptic zombie novels.

What’s your favourite apocalyptic novel?