I knew Leigh Brackett as the writer of the first draft of Empire Strikes Back. It was only when I came across an old copy of The Long Tomorrow at a used bookstore that I learned she was a prolific science fiction author as well. The Long Tomorrow is a fascinating read—I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a work of fiction with this many Mennonites, let alone with them as the main characters—and also apparently an outlier from the planetary romances she was more known for. Yet this novel of an American society in the aftermath of nuclear war is a striking work of classic science-fiction.
The conceit—nuclear war has left the world desolate and we follow members of an agrarian society with strict, religious laws—was immediately familiar. John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids has a similar premise, albeit with a forbiddance of mutants instead of cities and technology. Both books deal with young men from those societies who want something more than the life offered to them, both men go on a trek away from home on account of that, and both novels were published in 1955. I will confess that I hold The Chrysalids close to my heart (ever since first reading it after receiving it from a teacher for my thirteenth birthday) and find its somewhat hopeful view of the future more appealing than the bleakness of The Long Tomorrow, but it’s fascinating how two books by two very different authors from opposite sides of the Atlantic hit on similar ideas.
I’m not an expert on 1955 so I can’t really speak to what exactly was in the zeitgeist at the time, but there is the obvious: The Cold War had kicked off and the specter of the atomic bomb loomed large. Ten years prior the Americans had dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. Six years earlier it was confirmed that the Soviet Union had developed their own. Five years later, nuclear strategist Herman Khan would analyze the potential aftereffects of nuclear war and chillingly ask “Will the survivors envy the dead?” The question of what a society would like on other side of nuclear war was no doubt fertile ground for the imagination.
One of my favorite things about science fiction is how the genre reflects the ideas and the dreams of when it was written. Both Brackett and Wyndham were thinking of how people would act a century after the bombs fell and those anxieties and tensions are given form in their novels. When The Long Tomorrow’s Len reacts with unfathomable horror towards atomic power (despite being someone who wants desperately to be a man of science and the future) it’s not hard to recognize in it the cognitive dissonance that the same technology that created those weapons of mass destruction might lead to a brighter future, no matter what President Eisenhower’s speech said. It’s all a mirror. I wonder how science-fiction of today, be it Andor or Ken Liu’s The Gods Will Not Be Chained or Project Hail Mary will be seen decades from now. What will be idle fancy, what will be a time capsule of the thoughts of today?
Essays, Not Rants! 