most sf, spaceships;
a minority of works, nuclear war aftermath.
Poul Anderson, as ever, wrote both kinds and spaceships were built even after nuclear devastation. Where are we at now? The idea of nuclear winter ruled out surviving a nuclear war. We can discuss how plausible Robert Heinlein's Future History or Anderson's Technic History might be and Anderson imagined a very different kind of future in Genesis but what we mainly have to worry about right now is the aftermath of an ecological collapse and that has become extremely urgent.
13 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Another subgenre of SF might be called "catastrophe" novels, speculations about what kinds of world we might see after this or that disaster. Two examples I've thought of Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven's LUCIFER'S HAMMER, or S.M. Stirling's THE PESHAWAR LANCERS, giving us speculations about what happened after Earth was struck by asteroids. Another would be Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, and Michael Flynn's FALLEN ANGELS, set during a very near future or contemporary Ice Age on Earth.
Offhand, I can't think of Anderson writing similar stories. TWILIGHT WORLD collects and "unifies" into a novel some stories about a post nuclear war future. Altho I think it was open to being critiqued in the use and aftereffects of nuclear weapons. It was written quite early in PA's writing career.
AFTER DOOMSDAY, maybe? But that too is not quite in the same subgenre as ALAS, BABYLON.
Happy New Year! Sean
Nuclear winter didn't rule out surviving nuclear war; it just meant the damage would be even larger than people had thought. Some people would have survived even a full-scale exchange in the 1980's, though I'd have preferred to have been in New Zealand if that happened.
Note: in 1982, a family who'd moved from Britain to the Falklands to better survive a nuclear war found their remote home right in the path of the Argentine invasion.
Life's little ironies...
Poul's THE WINTER OF THE WORLD is a post-apocalyptic setting, only very, very "post".
And there's that story where a time-dilated spaceship comes back and finds that the remote descendants of automated sea-harvesting robots have taken over after the Terrestrial ecology collapses in the aftermath of nuclear war.
There's another he did with a time-travel angle -- a discontented member of a base in the remote past (dinosaurian period) finds out that the US government has actually sent him and his comrades to this very hostile environment because they know that life on Earth is going to be wiped out by nuclear war in the immediate future.
Those stories are "Epilogue" and "Wildcat."
One version of nuclear winter (I think) has a radioactive cloud covering the whole Earth, blocking out sunlight and irradiating the surface, killing every blade of grass.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Paul beat me to citing "Epilogue" and "Wildcat." (Smiles) And I thought the former and esp. interesting story, with Anderson's use of the idea of von Neumann machines "evolving."
Also, we don't see a nuclear winter in TWILIGHT WORLD. And I might also mention Harry Turtledove's three SUPER VOLCANO books, about what happens to the world if that hot spot under Yellowstone blows up.
Paul: I don't remember that story by Amderson, re grass. It reminds me of TWILIGHT WORLD, tho.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
That's not an Anderson story. It's a theory of the consequences of nuclear winter.
Paul.
The more drastic nuclear winter scenarios didn’t stand up to examination. They were more like what you’d get with a large asteroid impact.
NB; the very large oilfield fires after the first Gulf War in 1991 provided a useful testing baseline for correcting those studies.
Well that is some kind of relief. I still don't want to see nukes used, though.
Kaor, Paul!
I think it's a near certainty SOMEBODY will use nukes at some point in time. A crazy despot like Kim Jong Un or jihadists who got their hands on nukes.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The longer nukes exist, the more likely they are to be used, but it is curious that they have not been used again after WWII. Is there a realization that anyone who does use them will be universally reviled?
Paul.
Paul: people like that generally care more about being feared.
It’s more a matter of those who can get the weapons having a healthy fear of retaliation.
It’s not a coincidence that 1945 saw the first use of nuclear weapons and the last straight-up, all-out war between industrialized Great Powers. At the political level, states don’t start wars unless they have at least some hope of getting what they want thereby.
It’s the Peace of the Mushroom Cloud.
Kaor, Paul!
Again, somebody like Nicholas or Stirling beat me to making points far more clearly than I would have.
It's not fear of being reviled that has stopped anyone from using nukes, so far, it's fear of what would happen to them PHYSICALLY that has stopped them. And I still wonder how long that Peace of the Mushroom Cloud can last.
Ad astra! Sean
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