Triffids, Daleks and Cold War Paranoia

C HR ISTOPHER H E ATHCOTE Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation F ort Apache is set in the aftermath of the US Civil War. he American west should be at peace, but it is treacherously unstable because the Indian nations are restless. John Ford’s 1948 ilm follows the friction between two men against this background. here is the skilled and well-liked Indian ighter, Captain Kirby York (John Wayne), who has been passed over for command. His rival, Lieutenant-Colonel Owen hursday (Henry Fonda), is a prickly West Point poodle assigned an outpost he considers uncouth and beneath him. he ilm culminates in Fonda ignoring Wayne’s expert counsel and leading a large cavalry unit into what will be a massacre by the Indians—afterwards, the same bloody victors will merge with Crazy Horse’s force and storm into battle at Little Bighorn. he premise of Fort Apache seems pregnant with signiicance, because there are such intriguing parallels between Ford’s ilm and political tensions of its day. War is over, but peace is tenuous; the fort is isolated in an alien landscape, and surrounded by a hostile force; the enemy is foreign, with a diferent language, culture and religious outlook; a diferent war for survival is imminent. he story may be set in 1876, but European audiences were sitting up and paying attention when the ilm was distributed there in early 1949, ten months into the Berlin airlift. Some viewers felt the characteristics underpinning the story too evident for coincidence. Was the ictional fort, boxed in by hostile forces, a metaphor for Berlin, currently sitting behind the Iron Curtain? Was the Indian menace intended to symbolise a Soviet threat? Might there be a double meaning to that term, “the West”? he German cultural historian Andreas Huyssen suggests that European audiences were attuned to perceive themes in popular culture that were missed by Americans themselves. How signiicant is it that Fort Apache concludes with a defeat? John Wayne’s character may survive safely at the fort, but this popular ilm’s ending is hardly a stereotypical triumph. he cavalry is annihilated. Seen in this perspective, 80 the ilm seems to express a fear that civilisation is facing a crisis. he creative imagination is slippery. It behaves in odd ways. his is especially so with strong artists, because they will employ metaphor and subtle association. Much as a ilm like Fort Apache obliquely refracts pressing issues from current afairs, so too can certain novels be anchored in their political moment. Some motifs will be reapplied with the times. H.G. Wells crafted a disturbing ictional story, he War of the Worlds, in 1896-97 in response to fears of Prussian invasion. Decades later Orson Welles recycled the tale as a radio drama, tapping public anxieties over Nazi Germany. he War of the Worlds was updated as a Hollywood movie in 1952, this time encapsulating Cold War paranoia; and there was a feature ilm directed by Steven Spielberg in 2005 when the United States was in the grip of its “war on terror” (one scene evokes the 9/11 attack by having a jet airliner crash into the home where characters are sheltering). Symbolism is not far away. his compulsion to respond to political tensions is particularly evident in a surge in catastrophe iction over the 1950s. he setting in these British and American stories is not the historic Wild West. It is an aspect of the everyday world, usually in the near future. And civilisation is poised to fall. E xuding a charming folksiness, Ray Bradbury’s he Martian Chronicles (1950) is a meandering saga of interplanetary settlement. he novel, which begins in the year 1999, is customarily seen as connecting aspirations for space travel with pioneering myths of the Old West. Put against the author’s contemporaneous fiction, however, the book seems more a lament on the waning of small-town America with post-war progress; and, if the political questions that troubled Bradbury are brought in, his novel appears emphatically of its moment. he Martian Chronicles was shaped as tempers lared across Western Europe. A receptive public was growing for noisy critics of the Marshall Plan Quadrant November 2014 Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation and economic relations with the United States. European communities were alarmed by the spread of American mass culture, the French media having coined the pejorative term “coca-colonisation” to describe how American business seemingly imposed US values upon other nations. These tensions weave through Bradbury’s Martian stories. Far from struggling with physical danger, the difficulties faced by his colonists are psychological. hey are unable to rise above ingrained patterns of thought and behaviour: Mars is reshaped to resemble a nostalgic ideal. Shingled ranches are built on alien plains. Redwood, aspen and maple are planted along canals. A simulated Mid-West town, replete with honky-tonk saloons, is erected as planetary capital. Whether they are farming people, engineers or technologists, the colonists toil to implant a Norman Rockwell-like rusticity upon this alien world. Bradbury’s settlers repeat the worst aspects of that post-war collision of expansionist America with foreign societies (the indigenous inhabitants are closer to urbane Viennese than to native Americans). Martian civilisation, so ancient and rich, is smothered as the new arrivals impose their own culture. “Anything that’s strange is no good to the average American,” an anthropologist cries when astronauts litter and vandalise. Nothing native is studied, preserved or adapted. he alien is extinguished and swept away—an attitude conveyed in “the silver locusts”, a native phrase for the Earth spaceships which despoil their planet. he few Martians who do survive mirror lawed human desires. On the third expedition from Earth, for example, the astronaut lands his rocket in a Martian townscape that fulils deep cravings. here are tidy red-brick homes, leafy apple trees, a neat church with pointy steeple, geraniums in lower, even a brass band playing music. he townspeople are all from the astronaut’s childhood, including youthful versions of his “Mom” and “Dad”. Only after a turkey dinner at the family table, when the astronaut lies upstairs beside his slumbering kid brother in their old brass bed, does his mind challenge these experiences: “Suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and father at all,” he thinks, “but two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all the time.” Next morning the band leads a funeral service for the deceased Earth crew. Bradbury’s interplanetary settlers cannot adapt, a point intensiied as the threat of global war looms on Earth. Most colonists lee to their home planet. When Earth is annihilated in a nuclear cataclysm, the exiles left on Mars symbolically burn tokens of Earth culture—share certiicates, government paperwork—recognising they must adopt a diferent, more appropriate life. To survive in an alien place, the Americans need to change. T hese subtleties seem a world away from Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel he Puppet Masters, a runaway commercial success which set the template for American catastrophe iction. It speeds along like an action comic without pictures. Set in 2007, several years after an atomic war, the gung-ho story portrays an Earth invaded by slug-like aliens which attach themselves to human hosts: the population of the United States is being turned into slaves by a hidden enemy. A greater contrast with the homely moralising prose of he Martian Chronicles is hard to envisage than this irst-person narrative of a beefy government agent ighting ghastly invaders: “Puppet masters—the free men are coming to kill you!” the inal bellicose sentences run, “Death and Destruction!” Heinlein’s tale of aliens going undetected among everyday Americans purposely tapped the paranoia of the moment. he nation was reeling from spying allegations against the State Department oicial Alger Hiss, a media furore over the Hollywood Ten, and the sensational trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg over stolen secrets. he author recast Cold War patriotism as science iction: “I wondered why the titans had not attacked Russia irst,” the hero relects. “On second thought, I wondered if they had. On third thought, I wondered what diference it would make.” Tellingly, the enslaved humans experience an artiicial feeling of bliss when their willpower is removed by the communist-like parasites. Heinlein was soon defensive about his novel’s value. “It has a tired plot and was hastily written,” he admitted at the University of Chicago in 1957. “Its literary merit is negligible … If it has any permanent merit it must lie in its theme, which is a thinly-disguised allegory, a diatribe against totalitarianism.” Heinlein felt so strongly about communist expansion that he later sponsored paid advertisements in science iction magazines supporting US action in South-East Asia. his outlook seems consistent with Heinlein’s subsequent production of military-style space adventures where wholesome young astronaut-soldiers defend human freedom. J ohn Wyndham wrote with a distinctly English voice. It is recognisable in his diction, his choice of phrasing, as well as the moral outlook his narrators verbalise, their sense of what constitutes decency. But the novelist’s Englishness is also implicit in his Quadrant November 2014 81 Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation menacing imagery, the way he takes a romantic con- in the second; people have unseen telepathic powers vention and endows it with a sinister edge. Nature in the third and the fourth. he Cold War overtones does not reassure. It becomes progressively alarm- are heightened in he Kraken Wakes with its suging, monstrous, predatory. his is most pronounced gestion of unseen armies preparing beyond the Iron in he Day of the Triids, where England’s green and Curtain, and in he Chrysalids where a conformist pleasant landscape conceals a malign threat. community is ruled by a repressive autocrat. Wyndham’s 1951 story of a modern cataclysm All four Wyndham books are now categorised as swivels on the consequences of three accidents science iction, but this was not the case when he involving advanced technology. New satellite Day of the Triids appeared in 1951, the genre then weapons orbiting the earth have exploded, blind- being identiied with space adventures and highing the world’s population with their spectacular tech futuristic fantasies. Instead the novel’s roots in atomic lashes. hen, within a fortnight, a virulent the surrealist and neo-romantic imagery of the war plague developed for biological warfare gets loose years were apparent. Shaping visual metaphors to and spreads through Britain. he third element is articulate a wartime anxiety, certain English artthe protein-rich triids, walking plants genetically ists had portrayed wooded countryside as wildly engineered by Russian scientists, animated: dark trees rose up, leafy and which are widely farmed as a shrubs writhed, boughs sprouted major crop. Following the other thick thorns, creepers grasped at his quartet of catastrophes, the carnivorous trifsolitary igures. Pastoral innocence Wyndham novels uses was suspended. Ainities between ids break free from their enclosures landscape to suggest predatory triids stalking across the and prey upon the diminishing human population. land and the uneasy neo-romantic a world out of kilter: vision he Day of the Triids was the irst of John Minton, Graham gone were those past Sutherland, Paul Nash, Michael in a quartet of novels Wyndham wrote in quick succession. With Ayrton and John Craxton were conventions, the he Kraken Wakes (1953) he has the impossible to miss. Besides, this earth’s oceans invaded by aquatic comforting countryside quartet of Wyndham novels likealiens who adapt the planet to their wise uses landscape to suggest a of Tory England. environmental needs, raising sea world out of kilter: gone were those levels and dropping the planetary past conventions, the comforting temperature as they harvest humans like cattle. countryside of Tory England. he Chrysalids (1955) is set in a Canadian farming he Midwich Cuckoos starts by evoking a picturecommunity after an atomic war. he settlers there, postcard village, replete with a Domesday Book who live in palpable fear of mutations in their crops, mention, the stabling one night of Cromwell’s horse, livestock and, especially, children, are unaware that and a visit from Wordsworth to view the ruined youngsters among them have telepathic abilities. abbey: “Midwich has lived and drowsed upon its And he Midwich Cuckoos (1957) takes place in an good soil in Arcadian undistinction for a thouEnglish village where, due to alien intervention, all sand years,” the book explains. he rustic overtones women of child-bearing age have been implanted are put to best efect when Wyndham describes with modified embryos. Once the clone-like the village rendered unconscious by alien intrudchangelings are born and begin to mature it ers. Having dubbed it a day when “no birds sang” emerges that, besides being physically superior to (a phrase redolent of Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame normal infants, they share advanced intelligence, a Sans Merci”), the author eases into prose laden with collective consciousness, and an ability to control pastoral associations: people mentally. (he Midwich Cuckoos was later While the rest of the world began to ill the day ilmed as Village of the Damned.) with clamour, Midwich slept on. Its men and hese books tap a fear of unseen danger, much women, its horses, cows and sheep; its pigs, its like Heinlein’s he Puppet Masters, which probably poultry, its larks, moles and mice all lay still. echoes Britain’s recent history of spy scandals. Even here was a pocket of silence in Midwich, broken before Fleet Street erupted with news of Donald only by the frouing of the leaves, the chiming of Maclean and Guy Burgess leeing to Moscow, the the church clock, and the gurgle of the Opple as scientists Klaus Fuchs and Allan Nunn May had it slid over the weir beside the mill … separately been caught passing vital atomic secrets to the Soviets. he invisible danger was a public An unseen force interrupts nature. Wyndham fear. Hence humans are blind in Wyndham’s irst story; aliens are out of sight on the ocean’s bottom even has the children who will menace this T 82 Quadrant November 2014 Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation traditional “Winshire” village—and threaten the pattern of agrarian life—born at the harvest. he Chrysalids similarly begins with allusions to a Golden Age, that mythical time when all was harmonious as man lived in accord with nature. However, the reader quickly learns of recurring mutations caused by insidious radioactive fallout; which the farmers interpret as heavenly retribution for human sin. Still, none of Wyndham’s apocalyptic stories disturbs as much as he Day of the Triids, his tale of killer plants beleaguering idyllic England. Much is due to a use of tangible detail. he narrator Bill Masen’s walk through paralysed London starts at a version of the Chelsea Royal Hospital, takes him to Hyde Park Corner, then along Piccadilly and around into Regent Street, briely wending into Soho, then back to Regent Street where he gets a car and drives along Portland Place to Regent’s Park, heading for St John’s Wood. For those familiar with the West End it is easy to visualise the mess described. Likewise with the survivors’ exodus through Sussex, Wiltshire and Dorset: ixing the counties already sets readers’ imaginations supplying the contours for typical villages. he irst impression is of a rural idyll, as in Wyndham’s description of one hamlet: we had a view of the whole of Steeple Honey as we descended the hill. It clustered at the further end of a stone bridge which arched across a small, sparkling river. It was a quiet little place centred round a sleepy-looking church, and stippled of at its edges with white-washed cottages. It did not look as if anything had occurred in a century or more to disturb the quiet life under its thatched roofs. But like other villages it was now without stir or smoke. And then, when we were half-way down the hill, a movement caught my eye. he place is infested with triids ready to ambush the unwary. Another striking passage occurs when, several years after relocating to a Sussex farm, Bill and Josella Masen visit a derelict seaside town: Viewed impressionistically from a distance the little town was still the same jumble of small red-roofed houses and bungalows populated mostly by a comfortably retired middle class— but it was an impression that could not last more than a few minutes. hough the tiles still showed, the walls were barely visible. he tidy gardens had vanished under an unchecked growth of green, patched in colour here and there by the descendants of carefully-cultivated lowers. Even the roads looked like strips of green carpet from this distance. When we reached them we should ind that the efect of soft verdure was illusory; they would be matted with coarse, tough weeds. hat image of weeds taking over is packed with meaning. And there seems a symbolism to the creeping behaviour of plants. In the middle parts of the novel, the triids consistently lurk in English gardens, those man-made eforts to fashion a natural paradise. he irst victim succumbs to a triid within a shrubbery, which then invades a home through French windows opening on the lush garden. Later, the stress shifts to the Georgic. When the triids swarm around the few ongoing farms, it emerges that they are attracted by the robust sounds of agricultural labour. hey may not be as overtly political as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or Eric Ambler’s Judgment on Deltchev (1952), yet the catastrophe novels of John Wyndham are sounding boxes for Cold War unease. If the horrors threatening civilisation appear far-fetched, themes recur that are symptomatic of the mental climate: a concealed menace, foreign invasion, scientiic impotence, the atomic peril, mutant life forms, social breakdown, human extinction, and light through a landscape rendered hazardous. Humanity does survive— Wyndham ends with a positive note—but there is an appalling cost. S ober discussion of post-war catastrophe iction has been impeded by the neon aura of popular culture. If the better imaginary novels are savoured by a broad public, talk revels in a shallow mix of prattle, fawning and incessant trivia. No popular work has sufered more from this idolisation than Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), probably the best Cold War invasion allegory to come from the United States in mid-decade. It is 1976, the American bicentenary, and the nation is not celebrating. Catastrophe has occurred. here was a war a few years earlier, Matheson slowly reveals, although the reader is not told who the enemy was, nor how the globe has been afected geopolitically. All one learns is there was ighting in Central America, and the arid zone from Mexico up through Arizona and Nevada is now unsafe. he grit carried by severe dust storms blowing from those deserts (in reality, the site for nuclear tests) is especially hazardous. Robert Neville lives alone in an average home in a deserted Los Angeles. Materially he has everything he needs. He has illed a spare room with crates of tinned and processed food. He has installed Quadrant November 2014 83 Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation a generator and has well-stocked freezers. here are supplies aplenty. Neville has books to read, a record collection he enjoys, a new car. He has suicient fuel and batteries to keep going for years, and anything he lacks is acquired on foraging expeditions to shopping malls or Santa Monica’s commercial precinct. But Neville, who has converted his suburban home into a bunker-cum-fort, lives under siege after sundown. America has been ravaged by a post-war pandemic which killed nearly everyone, and left the survivors—apart from Neville—repulsively changed. Seven years earlier Albert Camus had used a virulent epidemic to symbolise the German Occupation with his distinguished novel he Plague (1947). But I Am Legend is a very diferent type of book, intended for a popular readership: disease is a metaphor for invasion. Matheson signiies people embracing a corrosive political idea by having the ictional infection transform its victims. hey become malevolent. So those who do not succumb to the bacillus are murdered by those who do, because the infected take on vampire attributes. I Am Legend is not a gothic novel. here are no satanic monsters, no occult thrills, no dark uncanny forces. he author avoids the formulas of the horror genre. His vampire survivors do not frighten. hey are sickly, anaemic, pathetic, at moments ludicrous, and they behave towards Neville more like ranting demons that taunt and tempt a lonely St Jerome. While Matheson refrains from horror, he does blend motifs rich with signiicance. he character Robert Neville calls to mind a 1950s wave of domestic survivalists then preparing for war, men who expected to emerge from home shelters and resettle the land after an atomic war. And Matheson’s pen sporadically alludes to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, having the protagonist muse on his plight in a manner recalling the castaway. his is echoed in the author’s engaging descriptive prose, with his clean journalist-like sentences drawing the reader along at steady pace. Behind these emphases is an American folk archetype: the resourceful selfreliant frontiersman, a variant of historical igures (such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett) central to popular myths of how the heroic “American spirit” was forged. And Neville is playing this role by midway through the novel, struggling to clear the land of diseased vermin. his heroic persona comes unravelled in the inal section, which is set two years later. Following the emergence of a new viral strain, the infected humans have changed. hey are re-establishing civic order. hey have a city council with elected oicials, and they have set up assorted basic services and restored a legal system. After years of anarchy the mutated 84 humans are rebuilding the American nation. And Neville’s violent conduct undermines law and order. So a party is sent to arrest him. Later, in prison, Neville looks through his cell window at the diseased crowd waiting outside the city court: hen someone saw him. For a moment there was an increased babbling of voices, a few startled cries. hen sudden silence, as though a heavy blanket had fallen over their heads. hey all stood looking up at him with their white faces. He started back. And suddenly he thought, I’m the abnormal one now … Abruptly that realisation joined with what he saw on their many faces—awe, fear, shrinking horror—and he knew that they were afraid of him. Reasoning that humanity has moved on, leaving him the sole survivor of a warring past, Neville takes his own life. B y mid-decade a pattern was evident in British and American catastrophe iction. English writers followed the lead of John Wyndham in stressing a world physically transformed. his was not surprising given their experience of saturation bombing during the German Blitz, followed by the random terror of V-2 lying bombs. War ruins were a feature of British cities, and English writers knew the immediate human toll of war. No wonder there was a stress in English iction on changes to the land, rendering it dangerous, as well as the efects on traumatised survivors. The American imagination had no domestic precedent for disaster. Notwithstanding the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, no city, no town, no street in the continental United States had been bombed to smithereens. So the visceral reality of attack was unknown. his is surely mirrored in the casualness of Robert Heinlein’s narrator, who mentions that America has a couple of radioactive craters where entire cities once had been. Bombing is an abstraction. Likewise Ray Bradbury’s he Martian Chronicles has the nuclear apocalypse happen of-world; and I Am Legend handles war in a vague manner, with only hints about lingering dangers in the Nevada desert. Atomic attack is not an issue in American catastrophe iction. However, the prospect of invasion plainly is the urgent fear. Heinlein’s he Puppet Masters is a template for this outlook, indeed his storyline was reworked in assorted novels, and B-grade ilms like Invaders from Mars, where aliens conquer smalltown America by absorbing its citizens one by one. he allusions to popular conceptions of communism are direct. Converted earthlings are regimented, Quadrant November 2014 Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation have no emotions, and lack personal identities: “No more love, no more beauty, no more pain,” an altered human boasts in the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. his is more than the alarm call against intellectual repression of Fahrenheit 451 (1951), Ray Bradbury’s earnest response to the plight of East Europeans under the new Soviet Cominform (hence the Germanic name of his book’s protagonist, “Montag”). Aliens symbolise a communist menace invading by stealth. I Am Legend marks a shift in position. Richard Matheson was writing in those uncertain months after Stalin’s death when liberal-minded Americans hoped the Soviet leadership was about to relax. hey had reason to dream. Winston Churchill, who was once again Britain’s Prime Minister, urged the US President Dwight Eisenhower to negotiate a diplomatic compromise. his mood is mirrored in the ending of I Am Legend, where the new viral strain alters the vampiric humans and leads them to restore civilised values. Russia did not change. Having come down hard on the East German uprising, repression continued across the Soviet Union; hence the renewed paranoia in Jack Finney’s he Body Snatchers (1955). his capable suspense thriller merged the alien and plant metaphors for communist iniltration by having a Californian town invaded by creatures that have sprouted from extraterrestrial spores. Miles Bennell, the local GP, and his girlfriend Becky helplessly watch members of their community converted into aliens, the pair lingering until they ind themselves trapped, afraid and hunted in their home town. What most frightens Bennell about the changed humans is their inability to write, indeed books and literature gently add to the building tension. he only other townspeople who doggedly resist the extraterrestrials are, signiicantly, a novelist and his wife. Hunting for a reference in old volumes, this couple initially ind the inanimate body of an alien concealed in a closet at their home. It is lying on cardboard boxes of books. Later, when Miles and Becky use the public library, not only is it empty of users, but they realise the librarian (a converted alien) is censoring materials by cutting out passages with a razor. In a crucial scene, Miles notices that creative ambition and endeavour are beyond the aliens, with both an academic and a professional giving up personal writing projects after being converted. hey are incapable of pursuing their former intellectual passions. he aliens will be defeated by American resourcefulness in the last chapter: the positive resolution was mandatory. However, English writers were sceptical about America. his was a low-key trend across British popular iction. In Ian Fleming’s spy novels, for example, James Bond deals with threats in the Bahamas and the Caribbean—that is, America’s doorstep—which Washington has neither noticed nor is capable of handling. In British catastrophe iction the Americans are unable to save themselves after global cataclysm, let alone anyone else. Shocked survivors in he Day of the Triids keep predicting that “the Americans” will arrive and ix the mess. hey never do. he Americans are powerless to assist the world in he Death of Grass, closing their borders and themselves struggling to survive. A US Naval leet is efortlessly wiped out by alien invaders in he Kraken Wakes. And he Chrysalids is set in a Canada ravaged by radioactive fallout following a nuclear war that obliterated the United States. No abiding faith is placed in Uncle Sam. B ritain is in crisis again in John Christopher’s he Death of Grass (1956), the most plausible of postwar catastrophe ictions. A virus fatal to grasses and cereal crops has broken out in China. Despite quarantine measures and scientiic eforts to control it, the plant disease has mutated and is spreading across the globe. Rice and wheat crops are blighted. Pastures have died, leaving livestock with nowhere to graze. Europe faces the prospect of being unable either to produce or import meat, grain, poultry and dairy products. Worldwide famine appears likely. Already 200 million people have succumbed in the Far East. he novel swivels on John Custance, a structural engineer, and Roger Buckley, a high-placed civil servant, both contented family men living in middle-class London. With a story carried by dialogue, the deteriorating situation is explained in two early conversations they have over meals: a hearty lunch at the Custances’ Highgate home, and, a year later, an unappetising dinner at a St James club. he conidential whispers Buckley hears in Whitehall are grim. When national food reserves run low, and the army is about to lock down Britain’s cities, the pair take their families on a hazardous journey to a relative’s farm in the Lake District. English life, so civil and secure, has come to an abrupt end, leaving these level-headed professionals reduced to refugees leeing through a ravaged landscape. It looks as if another of those catastrophe adventures à la Wyndham is in the oing; where, as the British writer Brian Aldiss justiiably moaned, “the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying of”. But John Christopher has little time for such daydreams. Brutal reality confronts his characters midway through their irst day on the road, when the group halts at a deserted house: Quadrant November 2014 85 Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation It was easy enough to see, as [Custance] looked in, where the noise had come from. A woman lay in the middle of the loor. Her clothes were torn and there was blood on her face; one leg was doubled underneath her. About her, the room was in confusion—drawers pulled out, a wall clock splintered. It was the irst time he had seen it in England, but in Italy, during the war, he had observed not dissimilar scenes. he trail of the looter; but here, in rural England. Christopher’s characters are conscious of their ethical choices as they watch familiar constraints cast aside: “Before all this is over,” Ann Custance asks early on, “are we going to hate ourselves? Or are we just going to get used to things, so that we don’t realise what we’re turning into?” Not wanting to be responsible for cold decisions, Roger gives up leadership to John; although both repeatedly defer to the unnerving Pirrie, a ruthless operator they have met in a gun shop. As the journey lengthens, and more people join their party, the moral standards the travellers wrestle with intensify. he author has little faith in the innate goodness of the English, that jolly decency Wyndham’s characters exuded in a crisis. Catastrophe leads people into barbarism—this theme had loudly reverberated through literature since French Existentialism provoked speculation on links between warfare, social breakdown and moral behaviour. he Day of the Triids touched on it (“In an environment reverting to savagery,” Bill Masen muses, “it seemed that one must be prepared to behave more or less as a savage”) although it was William Golding who famously probed “savage” and “civil” behaviour through his novels Lord of the Flies, using modern children, then he Inheritors, using Neanderthals. Sure enough, when published, he Death of Grass was perceived by some as assembled from the materials of such books: Lord of the Flies for a doomed circle of mismatched people, he Day of the Triids for a hostile disintegrating landscape, Camus’s he Plague for disease as an invasion and alienation metaphor. But the author employed more traditional means to portray moral decay. Overarching John Christopher’s novel is the tale of Cain and Abel. An alert reader may wonder early whether the engineer protagonist will resort to fratricide. Sure enough, inding a barricade closing of the family farm, Custance sneaks through at night and shoots his brother: the Abel igure is murdered by a modern Cain. In this moral schema there are latent touches of a biblical quest for a promised land as the group treks across a world made strange, stopping periodically to deal with dangers. However, Christopher’s narrative takes the path of 86 those bleak modern quest novels, Mark Twain’s disturbing Huckleberry Finn and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, by having the travellers watch civilisation unravel and humanity sink into brutality. he countryside itself has changed as the group nears its goal, exposing the depravity that has been unleashed: he moors had been more or less deserted, but when they descended to cross the lower land north of Kendal, they witnessed the signs, by now familiar, of the predatory animal that man had become: houses burning, an occasional cry in the distance that might be either distress or savage exultance, the sights and sounds of murder. And another of their senses were touched—here and there their nostrils were pricked by the sour-sweet smell of lesh in corruption. Instead of things improving when the destination is achieved, Custance looks into the heart of darkness of Western man, wondering if it has any redeeming qualities: “he felt a great weariness of spirit, as though out of the past his old self, his civilised self, challenged him to an accounting”. he Death of Grass marks the start of a shift in British catastrophe iction. In this novel the contagion that imperils a green, pleasant land is an evident symbol for colonial decline. Beginning in the Far East, much of undeveloped Asia rapidly succumbs to the virus, followed progressively in that region by the countries of the newly formed British Commonwealth. he rest of the world follows. Hope is placed in ongoing support from Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which have resisted the disease and continue to stock British warehouses with agricultural produce. But eventually their freight ships halt. On his second night of travelling north, Custance muses on the fall of empire: here will be legends, he thought, of broad avenues celestially lit, of the hurrying millions who lived together without plotting each other’s deaths, of railway trains and aeroplanes and motor-cars, of food in all its diversity. Most of all, perhaps, of policemen—custodians, without anger or malice, of a law that stretched to the ends of the earth. John Christopher’s view of government is blunt: pessimism. Whitehall is incapable of managing the impending crisis. It takes for granted that the virus will be speedily cured by local “boins”. heir eforts fail. So then it expects the USA to solve the problem as well as sending endless food. Meanwhile Quadrant November 2014 Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation the cabinet bickers and there is an opportunistic is infertile, ashy and has been baked by immense struggle for the prime ministership. With saving heat. Trees and shrubs are grey and crumble to dust the nation the last thing on politicians’ minds, the when touched. he sky is clear, lacks moisture, and army is mobilised to seal of cities and larger towns, the planetary atmosphere is contaminated with toxic although this triggers civil disorder. Leading the radioactivity. he travellers reason the planet been revolt is Leeds. H-bombs are used against the rebel rendered sterile by appalling weapons. city. hen the group discovers a gleaming futurishe literary historian Roger Luckhurst connects tic city. Within it dwell the race of Daleks, creathis distrust of power to the Suez Crisis, which was tures responsible for the war that has killed their played out in its entirety while Christopher wrote planet. hese malign aliens, utterly convinced of his manuscript. he silhouette of Anthony Eden is their own biological and intellectual superiority, apparent in a scheming mediocre prime minister; have attempted to annihilate all other sentient life. and the lacklustre performance of the Anglo-French However, the resulting high level of planetary radiopowers directly spills into a crucial paragraph where activity has caused them to mutate physically so that the craven British and French cabinets together they must live inside armoured machines. Alarmed lee to America. Power is abused, by the arrival of the travellers, the people are expendable, authority Daleks plan another radioactive disintegrates. he inaugural Dalek device to render the surface eterBritain’s surprise invasion of nally uninhabitable. story was a Cold Egypt late in 1956, which angered he BBC’s inaugural Dalek story the nation, also afected the book’s was a Cold War cautionary tale for War cautionary tale depiction of the military. Having children. Penned shortly after the for children. Penned Cuban Missile Crisis of October served in the war, Custance and shortly after the Buckley implicitly trust the army. 1962, when the world stood at the British servicemen encountered are Cuban Missile Crisis brink of nuclear conlict, the prolikeable, although the travellers do gram used aspects of existing catasof October 1962, the trophe iction to illustrate the peril think them naive in obeying questionable orders. Then the RAF program used aspects of “Mutually Assured Destruction”. obliterates Leeds. Soldiers are now The confrontation between the transformed into a threat. hey raid of existing catastrophe Soviet Union and the United iction to illustrate States had galvanised British public villages and prey upon refugees: the resting travellers are attacked at the peril of “Mutually opinion, and the television show’s night by a well-armed squad roamambitious young producer, Verity Assured Destruction”. Lambert, tapped community feeling Westmorland. English writers were electriied ings on what was a pressing moral when he Death of Grass appeared. issue. “With Christopher,” Brian Aldiss recalls, “catastroTerry Nation, the scriptwriter, used his childphe lost its cosiness and took on an edge of terror.” hood memories of the Second World War as he plotChristopher’s creative accomplishment was high- ted his storyline, giving the aliens many qualities of lighted when John Wyndham’s he Midwich Cuckoos totalitarian societies. he creatures are militaristic, hit bookshops twelve months later. Wyndham’s technocratic, hostile by disposition, and, convinced schema was too familiar: small town is invaded; they are the supreme species, are relentlessly driven friendly authorities are outclassed; emotionless aliens to destroy all others. hey are also physically indisblend in, are identical, have a group mind, and con- tinguishable, lack individual identities, and each trol villagers mentally. he former leader of English alien is armed with a lethal weapon it uses withcatastrophe iction had adopted an American-style out compunction. hese extraterrestrials lack love, Cold War format. empathy and positive human emotions: at one point a Dalek tells the travellers that pity is a sentiment its hildren’s television in Britain changed on race does not possess. December 21, 1963. That evening the first Recalling Hitler’s speeches heard over radio instalment was broadcast of a seven-episode adven- broadcasts, Nation decided the aliens should have ture in Doctor Who, a new weekly BBC children’s harsh metallic-sounding voices. He also insisted drama: and the story employed many motifs already that, at moments, they would call in excited uniidentiied. Using a vehicle that enables them to son, “Destroy!” or “Exterminate!”, much like Nazi journey across time and space, the lead characters or Soviet zealots chanting slogans at party rallies. land on an alien planet that seems dead. he soil Finally, the writer gave the ruthless creatures an T C Quadrant November 2014 87 Triffids, Daleks and the Fragility of Civilisation East European-sounding name, “Dalek”. Due to an overwhelming positive response from audiences, the BBC commissioned Terry Nation to write another Dalek story for Doctor Who’s second season. his time he employed further features of Cold War catastrophe iction, moving the story’s focus now to domestic invasion by a frightening enemy. Nation had the travellers go into a future where the militaristic Daleks have conquered Earth. London is in ruins, traumatised Britons are enslaved, and the Daleks rule by using a uniformed force of unfeeling “Robomen”. hese are captured members of a resistance movement who have been brainwashed—the Daleks employ mind-control to turn rebellious individuals into an army of compliant soldiers. Most humans are corralled into labour camps, with the Daleks summarily killing those too weak or ill to work. E ven as British television embraced catastrophe iction, popularising the Cold War form across the broadest of audiences, a sea change was under way. In recent years novelists including Brian Aldiss, Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard and the American Robert Bloch had voiced mounting annoyance with the literary situation. Besides disputing the consignment of much speculative writing to the “science iction” label (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was classiied as SF), they loathed the formulaic, escapist conservatism of that genre. Especially targeted were the mainstream novels of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and others, which—having thinkers and scientists serve military interests—depicted civilisation’s future as a benign, implicitly American space empire. And certain writers would not stomach that. J.G. Ballard’s speculative oeuvre commenced with three novels. he Drowned World (1962) takes place in a European metropolis half-submerged under a tropical lagoon; he Burning World (1964) begins and ends in a modern city laid waste by encroaching desert; he Crystal World (1966) focuses on a mining settlement in equatorial jungle which is metamorphosing into iridescent crystals. hese catastrophe ictions are not at all, as is now customarily claimed, warnings-cum-predictions of climate change. Ballard’s stated intentions were ixed on what happens to mankind psychologically—to how we think, our process of cognition—when our cultural environment, the lived-in world of civil society, is taken away. It is seventy years into the future in he Drowned World, and Europe has been abandoned. Puzzling rises in solar activity have rendered much of the overheated planet unfavourable to mammals. With the oceans rising, the diminishing population of 88 the northern hemisphere has relocated decades ago to Greenland and Siberia. Human extinction is a possibility. Robert Kerans is on a technical team visiting an unidentiied city to conduct a periodic survey. Much of the metropolis has vanished. Residential and industrial suburbs are lost under murky tides of silt, while insects, reptiles and amphibians thrive in the profuse jungle that has taken hold around decaying buildings in the business districts. Sailback lizards bask in the sun atop mouldering concrete towers, mosquitoes the size of dragonlies lit through the shade of giant ferns, crocodiles swim along deep channels that once were bustling streets. Catastrophe is not imminent: it happened two generations ago. his is a world without lags. Powerful nations are barely a memory. Kerans ponders whether to return to Greenland or stay in the jungle as the survey nears completion. He stalls a decision by delay, then sabotage. his is needless, because, watching those around him—they regress into tribal violence and ritual—he comes to see a futility in human actions. Kerans himself is listless. He is not melancholy or depressed: instead his problem is existential, for Kerans sufers ennui, as if life has worn out. He also feels his mental architecture shifting, as if he is on “a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance”. Kerans takes a boat and heads south through sun-hammered swamps. As weeks pass he seemingly reverts to a pre-hominid way of construing the jungle. he tale ends with Kerans choosing to embrace, not defy, oncoming annihilation. here is an absorbing complexity to Kerans. Ballard crafted him using aspects of Albert Camus’s iction, the controversial psychiatric theories of R.D. Laing, as well as Ballard’s own experiences in Japanese internment during the war years (later depicted in his roman à clef Empire of the Sun). His internment especially afected his outlook, giving insights into how modern people respond to the removal of a supportive environment, of what the human creature is capable of; and it left him with an awareness of the fragility of society, how easily civilisation might fall. his was the viewpoint underpinning he Drowned World, he Burning World and he Crystal World. Here was a vision of imagined catastrophe, English critics agreed, that disturbingly symbolised the industrial and imperial decline of the West. Dr Christopher Heathcote wrote on Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle in the June issue. A footnoted version of this month’s article appears on Quadrant Online. Quadrant November 2014