The Day the Machines Stopped by Christopher Anvil, issued back in the prophetic days of 1964, is a disaster story dealing with the kind of popular themes we’ve seen since Richard Jeffries published After London, back in 1885. The end of the world is an idea that’s never far from the surface. In the pre-industrial age, end of the world literature still abounded — only it was religious apocalyptic. Post industrialisation, end of the world literature has been scientific or political in nature — and although it’s sometimes aliens, generally it’s been science or nature or even politics that are going to bring an end to things — not the Hand of God.
This Epic Volume features an epic blurb:
The day the machines stopped began in an ordinary way. There was little warning of the impending disaster.
Suddenly, all electrical energy was destroyed on the earth. Planes, cars, rockets, machinery of all kinds became useless.By week’s end, total chaos enveloped the world as the wheels of civilisation ground to a halt. Then ruthless leaders began to emerge, seeking a way to gain control of the almost helpless population.Only a handful of scientists remained to fight the inexplicable phenomenon — until they were captured and forced to use their knowledge to help the ruthless power combine take the world back to the Dark Ages.
It’s telling then that the most
sustained and energetic nuances in The Day the Machines Stopped are
saved for what is the core story of the book — not the end of the world,
but an office romance, which is frankly nothing more than barely
suppressed office lust. The true story of The Day the Machines Stopped
is that an office nice guy is harassed by an office bad ass who is
better paid and higher up the chain, but who frustratingly is a nasty
and unpleasant person. On top of this, the hero feels his low pay and
low status will not net him the girl, despite him being an upstanding
and pleasant person.
These are the reader dilemmas in The Day
the Machines Stopped. The mundane start which shows a man arriving at
work is typical of much workaday science fiction — the fictional
scientist in this case just can’t get it together, but you know he’s
bound to come good by the end.
It’s one of the problems of The Day the
Machines Stopped, a lack of confidence in the material, which is a
shame, because the task couldn’t be simpler. Even if Christopher Anvil
had stuck to the synopsis he’d written, he would have felt the angelic
powers of his writing flash into action, instead of watching them become
bogged down in the sort of office badinage which might entertain for a
page or two, but which sets up the scene so thoroughly, it takes nearly a
sixth of the book.
Never mind. The mundane is also an
apocalyptic theme. In Tomorrow! (1954) and Triumph (1963) by Philip
Wylie presents no relief from totally destructive holocausts, which is
what one hopes for in earnest. There is a great 1984 novel by Janet
and Chris Morris, titled The 40-Minute War, in which the nuclear war is
triggered by Islamic jihadists, and in Suzy McKee Charnas’ Walk to the
End of the World (1974) the war has already come and gone, and exists as
a back story, if you will. These are conceits that confidently engulf
the reader, and leave me to see The Day the Machines Stopped as a a more
half hearted effort.
See also The Shadow on the Hearth (1950)
which is in keeping with classic survival SF such as The Shrinking Man,
as it shows a New York housewife taking practical measures to cope with
a nuclear attack, and a slightly sanitised version of the same in the
very popular Alas, Babylon (1959) by Pat Frank, which sees a Florida
town coming to terms with a similar apocalyptic strike — there was so
much more going on in 1950s and 1960s apocalyptic.
Consider: Not This August (UK: Christmas
Eve) (1955) by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Vandenberg (1971) by Oliver
Lange, both describe a post-nuclear USA governed by Soviets. This
semi-realist approach works best of all in Nevil Shute’s On The Beach
(1957), which shows a group of survivors awaiting the arrival of the
nuclear fallout, a great subject. These novels place the disaster
centre stage, creating a darkened and strangled world — the sort of
places the author of The Day the Machines Stopped seeks to avoid.
Post the fallout, the theme is sometimes
a return to agrarian or a pre-industrial ruin, as in Ape and Essence
(1948) by Aldous Huxley or The Wild Shore (1984) by Stanley Robinson. In
books like Alfred Coppel’s Dark December (1960) and James Morrow’s This
is the Way the World Ends (1985) the landscape is broken, people are
shattered and there’s little hope at all.
While I am here then, two special
favourites of nuclear fiction must be mentioned, being A Canticle for
Leibowitz (1959) by Walter M. Miller, and Riddley Walker (1980) which is
a post-nuclear-style Canterbury Tales, which presents a fascinating and
mutated England, with plenty punning, bastardised language and
effective combinations of the ancient (Adam and Eve, for example) and
the futuristic (splitting of the atom):
Eusa wuz anger he wuz & he kep pulin on the Littl Man the Addoms owt strecht arms.
So while The Day the Machines Stopped is
a disaster story, it is at times a tad confused by the medium. There
are points when it inadvertently conjures up the sort of imagery we see a
lot later in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and these arise from small
conversations about what’s happening further down the storyline.
The villain is called ‘the Duke’ — think
Escape from New York — and the ultimate war zone is a country that
turns out to be ‘Not America’ — a fact that belies the novel’s real
locus — the fascist past, as opposed to the broken down future. This is
one vision of the end of the world, but it is one that looks to the anti-fascist and anti-communist wars of the recent 20th Century, finding all it need to shock in the factual apocalyptic of extremist politics.
If you make it to America, tell them to come as soon as they can. The teaching in the schools here is changed; all the children swear allegiance to the Duke, and the secret police plant spies in every town and in every house. My own daughter is in it, and she’d turn me in as soon as she’d spit, except that this morning (sic) she’s away at a group meeting.Brian stared at him. “That bad? But what do you mean, ‘If you make it to America’? This is America.”Barnaby shook his head. “No it isn’t. I mean, where they still fly the flag. Where they still vote.”
More apocalyptic worlds at http://epicvolumes.com
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