Twilight World

My copy of Poul Anderson's Twilight World, published in London in 1984, says that the book was first published in the USA in 1983 and is copyright 1981 by Poul Anderson. However, that must have been a renewal of the copyright and this cannot be a complete publishing history because I am sure that I read (another copy of) this book while I was in my teens at secondary school in the 1960's. In fact, I am surprised that the copy in my possession is not still that earlier copy. I must have parted with it and later replaced it even though I have not subsequently reread the book.

There were at least three standard futuristic scenarios in science fiction:

interplanetary travel;
interstellar travel;
post-nuclear war Earth.

Anderson's Maurai future history and Twilight World are two examples of the third scenario. In fact, the latter is set after a mixture of atomic and bacteriological warfare:

atomic bombs;
radio-active dust bombs;
bacteria bombs;
blight bombs (p. 6).

In the five-part Prologue, the destruction has stopped because it has become impossible to continue it and the world is very slowly starting to recover with a large number of mutants in the population. The viewpoint character, Hugh Drummond, says:

"'...we can't go back to the old ways. We've got to start on a new track - a track of sanity.'" (p. 16)

In the 1960's, I was immature and uninformed enough to think that post-nuclear survival might be a great adventure, in that way similar to the space travel scenarios. It would mean the end of the society upheld by my elders and I did not regard such an ending as a bad thing. Of course, a nuclear winter would also mean the death of every blade of grass on Earth. Although that was not known then, I was certainly very superficial in thinking that there could be anything good in trying to survive after a nuclear exchange.

Anderson tried to imagine how people might survive and rebuild but not with any idea that this would be a good process to go through.