UFO - the fall of the puppets

Gerry and Sylvia Anderson are remembered for their groundbreaking children’s TV animatronics from the 1960s. Thunderbirds, Stingray, Fireball XL5 (even I am not old enough to recall its first showing!) and Captain Scarlet among others opened up a universe of sci fi to young minds still young enough to think that it was quite realistic - and quite the opposite of a 2017 study, oddly but honestly now debunked by its own authors, that science fiction "makes you stupid" by commanding less attention than other genres.

The Andersons had bigger ambitions than children’s TV though and in 1970 produced UFO, a science fiction series pitched at an adult, especially American audience. Unfortunately, it did not get recommissioned although a second series was planned and instead the Andersons went on to develop the longer Space 1999 franchise with somewhat higher production values and a more expansive storyline. However, I have recently nostalgically watched the single but substantial run of 26 episodes of UFO, some of which I don’t recall seeing before at all, others half-remembered. A particular pleasure is how “1980” flashes up in the title credits to signal its amazing setting in the future!

It is a curious cross-over from puppetry to live action. It still uses scale models for many outdoor scenes, often very evidently so, though by contrast a couple of space-walk scenes are incredibly well done and would easily hold up in the digital era. But in the bunker-like headquarters of SHADO (a secret organisation protecting the Earth from alien UFOs that prey the planet sometimes to steal human organs and other times simply to cause maximum damage), real actors take the place of the Andersons’ puppets (many had notably voiced puppet characters in earlier programmes) though I do have a friend who once watched an episode almost all the way through thinking the actors were actually mannequins.

Leading SHADO is Commander Ed Straker, played by the late American actor Ed Bishop. And this is where things get surprising. Straker’s character at first seems cold and one -dimensional, but back stories about his divorce and the loss of his son, as well as a hinted drink problem, allowed Bishop to develop the role into a rather humane but tortured, dutiful but exhausted character with much more depth than immediately apparent.

Less so is the case with most of the others: Alec Freeman, Straker’s deputy, played by George Sewell is a credible foil to Straker, but beyond that the characters slip into single dimension and there are some inventive but ludicrous concepts. Inexplicably, on Moonbase female operatives wear purple wigs and shiny outfits which leave you expecting them to burst into some 1970s disco number while the crew on the Skydiver submarine are equally bizarrely togged out in string vests. Meantime, on land for some reason SHADO’s secret base is located below a film studio where Straker pretends to be a producer. When he talks into a cigar box (almost everyone smokes, even on spaceships) the whole room sinks underground to his base rather than have the Commander just use the stairs or the staff lift.

Essential 1980s Lunar gear

Although many later well known faces from British TV can be found as guest actors, the scripts are variable and sometimes include a lot of rather baffling shouting and some stormingly bad one liners. In the first couple of episodes there is a deeply off-putting welter of sexist stereotyping, while, when an African man worries about facing racist hostility when he is appointed Commander of Moonbase, Straker off-handedly dismisses the issue as having “gone out the window five years ago.” 

So that would be sometime around 1975. If only... 

It strikingly recalls just how very different the nostrums of popular culture were back then - this was the era of Man About The House, Til Death Do Us Part (Alf Garnett) and Love Thy Neighbour. To be fair (just), SHADO personnel do have a markedly greater degree of racial diversity than the norm for 1971 TV and later episodes cast some strong female characters as leaders and show male emotional vulnerability as acceptable.

Many of the storylines are rather intelligently developed and themes include a degree of ambiguity about the alien enemy: their motives are shown as desperate and survival-focused, and at times they demonstrate compassion towards the humans. The ethical limits of authority and secrecy are explored, as is the toil on individuals of constant struggle. Notably, the series cleverly anticipates the impact of later developments like electric cars and solar energy, mobile phones, voice identification and mass surveillance - although it does not question the need for the latter in fighting the alien threat.

The ambience is effectively done. Although the 1980s never looked as predicted, the detailed set designs by award-winning architect Norman Foster and fashion by Sylvia Anderson (wigs and sewage-coloured cars aside) do  provide a sense of a fairly credible alternative future. Doubtless if made now it would look even better, and while it is all too easy to reminisce and snicker at it, for its time it represented an enjoyable and thoughtful development in science fiction.

So UFO is worth watching if you are an aficionado of sci fi or if like me grew up in the 1970s and would like an affectionate stroll down the old memory lane of vintage fantasy. There’s even a very seventies soundtrack with background organ and electric guitar muzak permeating each and every episode. 

Also enjoyable are the occasional politically-oriented nuggets, apparently echoing Bishop’s progressive political views - a Green Party activist, he first met his third wife while dressed as General Pinochet when he gatecrashed an arms trade fair to protest against weapons sales. As well as many references to protecting the Earth from environmental degradation, I smiled at one of his best lines when, faced with a private mining company’s activities threatening the security of Moonbase, Commander Straker growls contemptuously, “Corporations? There’s no place for corporations on the Moon!”

Trailer here:UFO

Book Review: A Secret History of Time To Come

Above - Post-apocalyptic art by Rolf Bertz

History has its turning points, but even if it is ultimately a linear process, are its contents nonetheless circular, endlessly recurring? Does humanity's nature condemn us to repeat ceaselessly the mistakes of the past? Are we fixed to a future where this most innovative and intelligent of species is nevertheless trapped, inert and doomed forever to not realise its potential?

Robie MacAuley's 1979 novel, "A Secret History of Time To Come", posits this at the very heart of its narrative: a story of a wanderer, Kinkaid, in future centuries, several generations on from an apocalyptic conflict that destroyed the industrial world and left in its wake scattered communities eking a lonely living among the decayed, overgrown ruins of the forefather days. Folk memories and snatched bits of history recall the times of the war between the "burnt" people and the ancestors, of waggons without horses and boxes that spoke over long distances.

Set in an arc from Cleveland to Chicago to Memphis, the journey of Kinkaid has been inspired when, as a child, his father gave shelter to a dying stranger in his home village in Pennsylvan-land far to the east. The man had an ancient ESSO ROAD MAP OF THE NORTH CENTRAL STATES with a line marked on it to a point named Haven. Now, as a young man, he is tracing the line back to seek the origin of the stranger. As he traverses a landscape largely empty of humans but replete with the artefacts of the past and the thick, choking vegetation of today, reclaiming the lands once conquered from Nature itself, he is drawn into his surroundings: "a dream of infinity - a green enigma of trees and bush, vaster than comprehension, stretching about him not miles but centuries..."

Into his dream comes repeatedly one of the "burnt" people of the past. A man in strange clothes carrying something for him, something he does not know or understand.

And it is in dreams that MacAuley's tale not merely links but binds the future and the past: for Kinkaid's dream is shared in time by an unnamed narrator from the 1980s who appears juxtaposed with him in the future in the initial chapters. This is a black journalist who is drawn into a devastatingly vicious race war as the USA is riven by unrest, civil conflict and, though unnamed, ethnic cleansing by what remains of the white-led government. In his own dreams, he sees the man in homespun clothes and a broad hat coming through the forests of the future, or perhaps the past, seeking something from him and, in time, he realises the importance of recording events to leave an account, secreted away, maybe for his future companion to find and learn.

The future world is a harsh one: genetic mutations, plague and the incomprehensible dangers from the forefather ruins haunt the small groups of tomorrow's people huddled behind their stockades. A few keep reading and writing alive, often like medieval monks in their scriptoria transcribing from old books passages they only sporadically understand. Ancient manuals for cars, maintenance guidance for recording equipment, cooking instructions for dishes with strange contents sit alongside tales of Robin Hood, the random reading of some forefather. Like the jumbled contents of our own bookshelves, what would be made of them, outside any context at all, salvaged by our descendants in a world where the chord of learning was snapped aeons before?

Yet in this world there remains so much of today - ego, violence, slavery, lust and love - tied back and ever repeating like the narrator and Kinkaid's visions. Across golden flatlands, along breathtaking rivers and through the deepest, verdant forests pierced with difficulty by the old roadways, and most striking of all amidst the "cliffs" - Kinkaid's word for the crumbling shells of the skyscrapers in the ruins of Chicago - his odyssey encounters suspicion, threat, hostility and friendship as he trades his skills in healing for bowls of food from his hosts' hearth-pots.

MacAuley's prose is rich, hauntingly lucid, evoking a world we know but have never seen other than in our own dreams, or maybe nightmares. It is a world where the familiar is fading and our species, bar a few individuals, seems to be sleepwalking, oblivious to its continuing self-harm. The major difference, perhaps, is that in this future humanity appears as a threat only to itself - it is no longer powerful enough to threaten the world, which is in any case gradually re-absorbing homo sapiens into the thick canopy of the endless forest.

There was a chance, he thought, that this might be the place of refuge of the forefathers he'd often pictured in his mind and that there might be sleeping people of the old race over there as he watched. But the sense that came to him from the silent towers was of emptiness. There was no light except for the moon's and no sound came over the water and no smells of life - only the river smell. The great place almost seemed to speak of its death.

MacAuley's writing is filled with empathy, not only for Kinkaid and the companions he befriends, but even for his opponents, and chillingly enters the mind of a psychopathic horseman, the ironically named Hurt. In one particularly striking passage, Hurt is drawn to the physique of a young woman captive thus: He seemed to see the lines of the bay colt his father had given him when he was a boy; the forefather gun, curled lines drawn in its metal and polished stock, that once he'd owned; the white-winged birds he'd seen sailing one morning in the northern sky. He didn't know why these things came to him. The colt had died; his father had traded the gun; the birds had flown away.

Robie MacAuley, 1919 - 1995

Born in 1919 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Robie MacAuley grew up in a family of artists and publishers and was consequently drawn towards a literary life. After studying under the novelist Ford Maddox Ford, he served in US Counter-Intelligence in Europe and Japan in the last years of the war. He was involved in the liberation of Flossenberg concentration camp in April 1945.

"Most of the bodies that I saw had been stripped and it was impossible to tell which were those of Jews and which of Christians. Nazi murder was a great leveller, fully ecumenical... Hitler's bell tolled for all."

It is an account that has clear echoes in one early passage in A Secret History, just as his wartime experiences informed a number of short stories he wrote in the late 1940s. However, after ending his military service in the early 1950s, his main focus was to be on teaching American literature in colleges and later on as a literary critic, including editorship of the prestigious Kenyon Review. Perhaps more controversially, in the 1970s MacAuley was Fiction Editor of Playboy. There, he published work by a wide range of prominent writers including Doris Lessing, Saul Below, Ursula K Le Guin and a host of others.

He wrote only two other novels, on completely unrelated themes - one set in the Alps during the Great War and another about a university love affair - although he did produce a wide range of short stories. He received praise from his literary peers but was largely unrecognised as an author before his death in 1995 from cancer.

A Secret History of Time To Come is a novel I have read six times now over almost thirty years (I have the 1983 edition). On each of my journeys with Kinkaid, there has been something new, something previously unnoticed to discover and oftentimes delight among the verbal dexterity and visual ingenuity. There is a clear narrative, its pace rising as the book continues, but it is also a meditation on memory, on connection and on solitude, on time and, above all, on hope. For this is a world where, like our own, it might be all so easy to stagnate, seduced though unstimulated by the familiar, the known. But, driven by a map from the past, a dream about a stranger and an inherently human thirst for knowledge, Kinkaid endures and more than that explores, goes ever on, out from the dark thickets of forest and onwards under the boundless sky.

√ -1 = Reason Without Reason: A review of Zamyatin's "We"

"We" - 2006 edition from Modern Library (New York)
ISBN 0-812907462-X

Yevgenny Zamyatin was a revolutionary: a Bolshevik agitator against the Czar, he was arrested and beaten up by the police in 1905, kept in solitary confinement and then sent on internal exile - the punishment of choice of the Romanov authorities: Russia was large enough to send dissenters far enough away to neutralise them, but still within the purview of the God-anointed Father of All-Russia.

After the collapse of the Imperial regime in 1917, Zamyatin's hopes were high as the social liberal experiment of the Soviets began - initially unsullied by the dogmatic centralism of the Leninist Bolsheviks. He enthusiastically participated in Maxim Gorky's House of Arts at Ryabushinsky in Petrograd, blazing a trail with others in developing Soviet "NeoRealism" in writing - the florid, repetitive language of the Old Days was to be swept away. The Revolution was not just about breaking down the old barriers and extreme inequalities; it was also about a new way of thinking, living and expression - rational, efficient, and all the more powerful for it. One word should convey what in the past a dozen were used to describe; "written with 90-proof ink", as he put it.

But like many artists and thinkers who initially supported both the liberal and socialist revolutions, Zamyatin began to diverge from the strain of Bolshevik thinking that placed the Party at the centre of all things. This vanguard of revolution not only crushed the bourgeois liberals and Kadets, but also turned on fellow socialists in the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary parties before weeding out wrong-thinking Bolsheviks, such as Kollontai and those in the Workers Opposition. It is no coincidence that his completion of "We" in early 1921 coincided with an upsurge of strikes by trade unions and leftists across Russia against the privations of the increasingly repressive Bolshevik regime - a cycle of unrest that concluded only with the extermination of the Social revolutionary sailors at the Kronstadt Fortress as Lenin reasserted his authority. Later that year, all factions within the Bolshevik Party were abolished, apart from his own.

Sensing where these changes were leading, Zamyatin penned "We" as a breathtaking combination of science fiction, political allegory, mathematics and romance. Set a thousand years after the tribulations of the Two Hundred Years' War swept away current society, this unlikely combination resides in the mind and, as the story develops, the soul of the protagonist, a cypher (as people are called by then), D-503. In a glass city hermetically sealed from the natural world, men and woman are designated with a letter and reference number; children are raised by the One State under the benevolent guidance of the Benefactor; sex is reduced to a series of appointments via pink slips; people march in step with each other and everyone lives and works to times set out in the Table of Hours. All mail is read by officials and everywhere, the Aeros of the Guardians with their proboscoid cameras hover above the city, watching and listening, seeking out any remote sign of dissent, any threat to order - even the cyphers' rooms have glass walls and ceilings, a true police-state Panoptican.

Ryabushinsky - site of Gorky's House of Arts

George Orwell clearly owed a great debt of the imagination to Zamyatin, but that is a side-issue: "We", written as a series of notes left by D-503 as he struggles to come to terms with the challenge of his love for the mysterious I-330, is a fast-paced assault on the senses. Zamyatin's NeoRealism may reduce people to curves (D-503's regular sex partner is O-90, who is described as a circle) and angles (the exciting new I-330 is portrayed as an X), but at the same moment it captures humanity at its most intimate and genuine.

D-503's battle to reconcile his role as the Builder of the One State's great scientific project, a space machine, "The Integral", and his painful physical and emotional reactions to his growing love for I-330 is contrasted with his lifelong anxiety as a mathematician of being unable to determine the square root of minus one.This is a torture begun by his school teacher that has plagued him ever since. In a world built on reason alone, how can there be such a conundrum as the square root of minus one? If maths can explain everything, how can there be a question with no answer? And if cyphers are to exist efficiently and happily, surely the irrationality, the emotions of love, can only be a malady - D-503 turns to his doctor to get a sick note for his love.

Zamyatin's dystopia was founded on the centralist drive of the Bolsheviks who, by 1920, had seen off their White, Black and Green opponents in the Civil War at huge human cost (a price, to be fair, exacted by all parties in the conflict). Lenin and his cohorts were already tarnishing dissent of any hue with the badge of counter-revolution. And so, in "We" part of the debate is about whether there can ever be a final revolution: Zamyatin clearly saw humanity functioning in continually evolving cycles, never reaching any End of History, while Lenin's interpretation of Marx was that the communist revolution was the ultimate phase in the history of social relations.

As part of his pretty idiosyncratic interpretation of Marx, one rejected by the vast majority of socialists before and since, Lenin truly exalted the collective above the individual - not only in terms of social equality and security, an objective that IS shared by most socialists - but in terms of valid existence and free will. To this end, he was initially repelled but then fascinated by the writings of the US labour theorist Frederick Taylor.

Taylor was a proponent of the then-nascent field of scientific management and saw the most efficient organisation as one which broke the means of production down to the lowest single process-step. Workers would be trained to repeat the same tasks over and over endlessly. In this way, by reducing the individual to mere cogs in a huge machine, Taylorism argued that maximum efficiency of production and design would be achieved - the worth and needs of the individual human within this no longer mattered.

Lenin had taken a similar approach in the brutal days of the Civil War, sacrificing millions of civilians and military to combat, cold and starvation for the sake of the Revolution, and he extended this into the functioning of the new Soviet State. Taylor's thinking (also much loved by arch-capitalist Henry Ford) was transposed to the USSR and developed further by Alexei Gastev, head of the Institute of Soviet Labour, who advocated workers as "proletarian units" and came up with the idea of exchanging names for cypher designations. There was no compassion, no humanity - these were old, bourgeoisie concepts, necessary sops to the need to survive in Czarist times but at best diversions and at worst obstacles to progress in the New Era . Logic and reason, cold but ultimately True, come in replacement of the former barbarism.

Taylorism Triumphant - Cyphers at work: from Fritz Lang's Metropolis

In "We", Zamyatin refers to Taylor as the spiritual guide of the all-powerful One State: children are taught to revere him and he is central to the lives of the cyphers. Thus, D-503's love-sickness juxtaposes as powerfully as anything the world-views of Zamyatin and Lenin. Just as Bolshevism originated to create a fairer society but was warped by ideologues, so the One State's ultimate purpose was originally benign, aiming to free its citizen-cyphers from the chains of uncertainty and unhappiness: "What", asks the Benefactor, "have people prayed for, dreamt about and agonized over? They have wanted someone, anyone, to tell them once and for all what happiness is - and then to attach them to this happiness with a chain..."

Yet while the novel takes the political philosophy of Lenin to its logical conclusion of a de-humanised state, its final objective epitomised by The Operation, which will isolate and remove the imagination of all cyphers, it is not by any means a pessimistic tale. Unlike Orwell, there is no boot stamping forever on the face of humanity - rather, even after a full Millennium of the One State, people's essential humanity is intact, no matter how suppressed or self-controlled or, as D-503 contemplates his hairy hands, how frighteningly misunderstood.

"We" was almost never published in the Soviet Union - its allegory meant it did not get past the newly-reconstituted censors and a single manuscript had to be smuggled out to be published in Czechoslovakia. Zamyatin was himself twice arrested by the Soviet police under suspicion of counter-revolutionary activities. "We" was finally released to his compatriots to read legally only in 1989, in the dying days of Lenin's state. In a fine demonstration of their ideological bigotry and narrow-mindedness, the Soviet authorities by their actions completely validated Zamyatin's case.

As Stalin assumed power in the years following Lenin's death, Zamyatin disagreements with the new Communist state and his fears for his personal safety grew. With the intercession of his friend and patron, Maxim Gorky, he successfully requested permission to leave the USSR in 1931 and settled with his wife in Paris, where he worked on script-writing with film director Jean Renoir. He died in 1937.

The Twentieth Century owes a huge debt to this little known author, both for the creation of a genre of science fiction which is powerful in its warnings for the future, but also for a message that is ultimately deeply humane and optimistic. His arguments may have been forged in the chaos of revolutionary Russia, but they speak as much to us today with societies gripped by the supposedly irreplaceable system of capitalism and under surveillance whether electronically or by Aero-like drones. Just like the cyphers of the glass city, our lifestyles are increasingly geared to ignoring and sealing us away from the seeming unpleasantness of natural reality - from the weather to our food, to the plight of our fellow humans.

The One State, with its fixed elections and social conformity, is not unknown to any of us - but equally, the cri de coeur for change remains, as does the inherent power and potential that is within our species. Even in the dark winter streets of frozen, starving 1920's Petrograd, Yevgeny Zamyatin saw this and in "We", his Opus Magnus, he released the true spirit of revolution - one which may indeed be guided by the thoughts and writings of scientists and moral philosophers but ultimately is born in the soul, in the beating compassion and great love of the human heart.

"True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics" - Yevgeny Zamyatin

Dreams of Apocalypse

Post-apocalypse London* 

Since time immemorial, humans have been asking the same key questions: who are we? Why are we here? And where are we going?

For millennia, religion was used to offer the response: whether we were created from, then absorbed and re-shaped and endlessly recreated anew from the matter of the Universe, as the Hellenic and Buddhist faiths proclaimed. Or alternatively we are shaped in the image or purpose of a Divine Creator, who set rules for us to follow and will in the End come to render Judgement, as the Abrahamic faiths believe.

The Big Bang Theory of scientific creation and evolution similarly holds to a beginning and end of sorts – though like the Hellenic and Buddhist schools, each end heralds a new cycle. A new beginning, whereas the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic themes see the End of Life and in turn of the Universe as points of departure to a different plain, to Heaven – or by some reckonings, to Hell.

Although both Jews and Muslims believe in an Ultimate Judgement by God on all humanity, it is the Christian Book of Revelations, purportedly written by the Evangelist John towards the end of the First Century, that most explicitly (though in many respects also in the most obscure fashion possible) sets out the End and the Judgement. The Four Horsemen - sometimes identified as War, Famine, Pestilence and Death - will be sent out near the End Times to proclaim the coming Judgement of Souls (notably a concept derived from the Egyptian God Anubis, who weighed the souls of the dead). 

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - harbingers of the Last Judgement

While many of all faiths have argued that humans are stewards of God’s Creation for the future, US fundamentalists, who comprise over 20% of the population, hold that, if the world is due to end anyway, it exists for our exploitation rather than needless conservation. 

Indeed, one such believer, James Wyatt, dreadfully appointed by President Reagan as US Interior Secretary in 1981, chillingly told a bewildered Congressional Committee that “When the very last tree is felled, then Jesus Christ shall return.” He was, unbelievably, responsible for the environment policy of the most powerful nation on Earth – and the ruin of our planet was a divinely-ordained inevitability he was actually looking forward to. (He has in recent years denied meaning and, sometimes, even saying this - alternately claiming he was taken out of context. What is beyond doubt was his implying that environmentalists should be gunned down because of the "trouble" they cause.)

Yet he was (and is) far from alone: both US churches and, unsurprisingly, the internet are awash with fundamentalists eagerly awaiting the destruction of our world and the return of Christ. If through war and resource destruction they can help that day along, they will willingly do so. Apocalypse Soon website depicts global warming as the culmination of God's Plan, not the result of human greed and folly - there is nothing we can do to prevent it and, indeed, as seeking to do so runs counter to God's Will, those who argue for clean energy and resource conservation are in effect blasphemers. There an ironic consensus between the prophetic fatalism of some religious thinking and the believe of many secular progressives that if the planet continues on its current trajectory, the dreams of apocalypse revealed by Saint John all these centuries ago may well come true.

Science has shown us that there have been Mass Extinctions before on the Earth – five in all, and many now talk openly of a Sixth Extinction: this is opening up rapidly with the destruction of a record number of animal and plantspecies every year, a trend that is escalating almost daily. Sitting atop the thin membrane that is the Terran biosphere, human society is increasingly under pressure as our current economic system of unalloyed global capitalism fosters growing consumption and an obsession with short-term profits rather than any form of restraint or long-term planning. Taking its cue from the Abrahamic Genesis myth that sets Man’s Divinely-granted Dominion over Creation (including over women), Capitalism holds that anything and everything may be commodified and bought and sold as long as there is a demand for it and some degree of scarcity (i.e., it is not freely available to all – such as air, for now at any rate).

In consequence, the economic system blindly drives forward the prospect of oblivion: and while there may be elites who even now enjoy obscene levels of wealth, their control over the course of events is as illusory as ever. Whether the Bilderbeg Group actually means anything or not, nothing and no one is ultimately in control of capitalism. Our species is riding an increasingly ravenous tiger and no one is going to come riding to the rescue. There is no Free Market White Knight – because had such a mythical figure ever actually existed, he would have rented out his armour and sold the horse.

And it is this prospect of our world of today gone totally out of control that, more recently, has spawned an alternative cannon of literature, counter-posed to the stories of Revelations which culminate in the arrival of Divine Judgement. For over a century, science fiction writers have asked the three key questions over and over again, and some of the most compelling visions they have created have been in response to the third enquiry of where we are headed. Whilst tapping into both our natural curiosity about what could be, as well as our morbid mix of fear and fascination with what might go wrong, few of the greatest texts offer an optimistic vision.

Meal-time for Morlocks...

H.G Wells blazed a trail with his short novella, “The Time Machine”, which sees the protagonist hurled forward to a time when civilisation has collapsed and humanity is divided into two newly evolved branches - the cattle-like Eloi who are farmed and eaten by the ferocious, troglodyte Morlocks – each a response to a world gone awry. This  inspired Russian Yevgenny Zamyatin's 1921 novel "We", which projected the man-machine theories of the early 20th century nearly a thousand years forward to imagine a de-personalised totalitarian nightmare. This was to be evoked further in films like Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and novels like Huxley's "Brave New World" and, of course, Orwell's "1984" - all of which projected then-current schools of thought about social and bio-engineering to extreme but logical conclusions. Zamyatin's efforts in particular attracted the wrath of the nascent Bolshevik regime as it began to clamp down on the torrent of free thought briefly unleashed by the collapse of Imperial Russia and propagated by the herculean efforts of Maxim Gorky.

In subsequent decades, writers conjured up many versions of how the world as we know it might end, each responding to some of the threats of the writers’ times: in the years following the war, with atomic deadlock between the West and the Soviet Bloc, both literature and cinema focused on the potential for nuclear holocaust.

Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” movie posits a world of extremes where the the justification of nuclear arsenals lead to a suitably Freudian Love of The Bomb. Obsession with nuclear weaponry, which led to many in the American military positing the concept of “limited” nuclear war (helpfully “confined” to Europe), was to be parodied at its most extreme a few years later in “Beneath the Planet of the Apes”, where a mutant human community worship a planet-killing plutonium missile and sing hymns in its praise.

More meal-time...

Over-population was one of the first big environmental themes to be raised by the mass media in the 1960s, spawning films like “Soylent Green” depicting  a world of massive social injustice, authoritarian politics and the total devaluing of human beings. Less successfully, “Logan’s Run” depicted a future society which controlled over-population via a mythological re-birth which permitted the elaborate ritualised execution of everyone reaching their 30^th birthday. In tandem, the threat from man-made viruses accidentally unleashing a species threatening plague provided the foil for films such as “The Omega Man” (later remade as “I Am Legend”) and books such as “Earth Abides”.

 (NB It should be noted here that the frequent appearance of arch-Republican and avowed capitalist Charlton Heston in several of these films was almost certainly contingent with the size of his cheques as opposed to any endorsement of the movies’ premises – indeed, Serling commented that Heston was so bigoted that his narrow worldview meant he just didn’t notice the range of progressive political messages in the first two Apes films, even when later on they were explained to him!)

Technology has also both fascinated and terrified humans since the first loom was invented: and again, science fiction has offered up dystopian visions of a future run by robots, whether the prophetic Thatcheresque android of “Metropolis” or the indistinguishable-from-human replicants of Ridley Scott’s “Bladerunner”, which was based on Philip K Dick’s story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”  1970’s “Colossus: The Forbin Project” combined several themes – nuclear war, overwhelming technology and scientific hubris- to create a nightmare scenario of artificial intelligence deposing its human creators that was far more convincing than the later series of Terminator films, which again portrays profit-seeking companies developing robotic weaponry endowed with independent thought seeking to destroy humanity.

With many artificial life form programmes now underway and within striking distance of recreating human-levels of intelligence, and last month the Disney Corporation perfecting the ability to graft human-like faces onto robots “for entertainment purposes”, this theme remains as pertinent today as 80 years ago in Lang’s Berlin studios.

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as father and son

However, perhaps the bleakest tale of all is one of the most understated. Published in 2006 and made into a strikingly beautiful but harrowing film, “The Road”, by Cormac McCarthy, tells the story of a man and his son walking an endless road in a dead world, hopelessly seeking some solace among the debris. It is hauntingly written and evokes so powerfully the relationship between the father, who has known a world of abundance, and his boy, who has known nothing but grey skies, ash-covered landscapes, scavenging for the last few tins of food and hiding from the dangers of cannibalistic strangers. All the hopes and dreams a father might have for his child are gone – all he can do is try to keep his offspring alive, hoping against all logic that somehow they might find something to offer just the faintest chance of a future. The cause of the apocalypse is unstated, but the skin deep nature of civilisation is revealed as the survivors scramble to secure what resources remain. Appropriately, much of the film version was made in the deserted and devastated streets of post-flood New Orleans.

This is one scenario, a sudden collapse. Other novels tell of more gradual endings – “A Secret History of Time to Come”, by Robie Macauley, is set three or four centuries on from a race conflict that destroyed the USA and presaged global conflict and the collapse of society. In this tale, a wanderer, Kincaid, follows an old ESSO road map around the Great Lakes of the Mid-west, encountering remnants of the old societies – while most live in wooden huts and barter for goods, occasionally some half-remembered title or post comes up such as a “Shirrf” in charge of one community. But in this world, no one travels far and strangers are seen as a threat and so Kincaid frequently encounters hostility. Underpinning his Odyssey is a concept of embedded biological memory – he keeps seeing an image of something which drives him ever on towards a destination he does not understand. This haunting book, while not as desperate as “The Road”, nevertheless shows how the human society we cling to now has shallow roots and how, left untended through a combination of greed and complacency, can wither and die faster than we dare contemplate. All that remains are the empty shells of once great buildings and the overgrown highways traversed by the solitary figure of Kincaid on his journey to nowhere.

Perhaps, though, the most assertive rebuttal of humanity’s claim to Dominion over the planet and the other species on it is to be found in Paul Dehn and Rod Serling’s film adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s “Monkey Planet” – 1968’s “Planet of the Apes”. In this, two thousand years from now, humanity’s remnants have lost all power of speech and reason, roaming the Savannah in search of crops to sequester from the farmlands of the now dominant Simians. The Apes have an evidently deep hatred and fear of these seemingly docile if destructive creatures. Their conservative society is unable to come to terms with the true reasons for this antipathy, but in their religious writings and the repressive actions of their Government in the form of Minister Doctor Zaius, humanity’s destructive potential is clear: “Beware the beast man, for he shall make a desert of his home and yours.”  A desert area known as the Forbidden Zone is described as having been a paradise, ruined by mankind. The facts are long lost, but the folk memory of the Simian culture that has emerged stretch far enough back to recall however vaguely the inherent folly of our degraded species.

It is perhaps the most apposite illustration of the potential outcome of our current complacency as we face both deep resource scarcities and environmental degradation of catastrophic proportions – too often, we are told by both greens and the media that we must “save the planet”. Yet the truth of the matter, which much apocalyptic science fiction tells us, is that it is not the planet that is in danger – it is us; it is humanity, as well as many of our companion species.

It is said that good science fiction tells you more about the world in which it is written than it has to say about any alternate realm. And in this respect, the nightmares of tomorrow, forged in the minds of the authors of the last century or so, are a far more powerful warning and road map than any of the fantastical and whimsical dreams of apocalypse conjured up by Saint John. And science fiction is decidedly not prophetic – as often as not, it is a warning, a call to arms against folly and injustice. Unlike the writings of Saint John, where our species is so damned it has no means of redemption or escape other than by Divine Fire, the visions of tomorrow created by contemporary writers draw both on our very human fascination of our potential destinies and on our potential for action.

By depicting the very worst of outcomes, whether the big bang of Strangelove, the subversion of our own creations in Bladerunner or the poisonous legacy of the Apes films, science fiction offers choices. On a range of threats to our species survival, it portrays the possible – but not the inevitable. Where are we going? is a question that we can answer for ourselves; it is not pre-ordained by a spiteful deity intent on revenge against his own creation – we have no right to absolve ourselves of the responsibility of the stewardship of our planet so easily. In all the scenarios painted above – nuclear holocaust, environmental destruction, artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation and so on, the protagonist is not God, or Nature, or aliens. It is us, people. And just as we are the threat, so we can be the solution. Our behaviour, our choice of economic system and the social norms we adopt, our exploitation of the natural habitat and our damaging of our biosphere – all of it is our choice, our Free Will.

Unfortunately, with born again Christians mobilised to powerful effect in the US elections, and increasingly making their political presence felt in other countries too, it is the chilling Visions of Divine Inevitability that are more likely to inform public policy in the near future. As the Believers rapturously eye up the final trees and sharpen their apocalyptic axes, we need more than ever the authors of alternative futures to sharpen their pens and help to save us from leaving behind the most dystopian of legacies.

We deserve better. 

*Post-apocalypse London picture - credit to Hellgate London pc game