Alas Babylon (Harper Perennial Olive Edition) Read online

  Human beings can’t be all that bad, we would think. Or else that spasm-war would already have killed our nation, mortally wounded the planet, and destroyed all hope. That hasn’t happened. Not yet. So our present difficulties are small potatoes by comparison.

  In parallel worlds, like Alas, Babylon, people have real problems.

  Which brings up survival, the theme most strongly associated with Alas, Babylon. Whatever historical and philosophical and political colorations and insights one might find here, it is the adventure tale that keeps readers coming back, captivating generations, from when I read this book at eleven years old until my son did, only last month, at the same impressionable age, devouring chapters in a state of total immersion as the brave citizens of Fort Repose battle to protect something decent. Something more than just their own lives.

  Is Alas, Babylon a grandfather of survivalist fiction?

  Earlier tales followed intrepid characters through scenarios of “after the fall.” But before the 1950s, most of these apocalypse stories portrayed latter-day Noahs struggling against natural or supernatural disasters. Wrath pouring out of heaven, or the sea, or the bowels of the Earth. Few ever focused on the range of possible catastrophes that Technological Man might wreak upon the world with tools of his own making. But that was about to change.

  Books and films that followed the detonations at Bikini and Eniwetok became, of course, a genre unto themselves. Starting with cheap monster movies about mutant giant insects, cinema seemed especially eager to exploit the dramatic impact of manmade apocalypse. Some of the best, like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (filmed in 1957) and the later TV miniseries Testament, took on the role of dire warnings, provoking shivers of fatalistic gloom, and perhaps girding some viewers to fight harder against the sort of political or technological errors that might end it all.

  Two books that emerged at roughly the same time as Alas, Babylon were Eugene Burdick’s Fail Safe and Peter George’s Red Alert, which later inspired Stanley Kubrick to make the magnificently humorous and thoughtful Dr. Strangelove. As archetypes of the useful dire warning, each dissected a specific possible failure mode, bringing it to the awareness of so many that, ironically, their particular type of debacle became much less likely.

  Indeed, the “self-preventing prophecy” may be the highest and most useful species in all of the vast, imaginative genus of speculative fiction. In much the same way that Orwell’s 1984 girded millions against “Big Brother,” these tales may have helped to keep their own nightmares from coming true. In other words, our most vivid nightmares may have been utterly practical, helping to save our lives.

  At the same time, the core genre of literary science fiction was busy. For example, Ward Moore, Alfred Bester, Philp Wylie, Andre Norton, Ray Bradbury, and Judith Merril, all published novels about nuclear holocaust during the early and mid-1950s. Walter Miller’s famed A Canticle for Leibowitz, appearing the same year as Pat Frank’s novel, projected a thousand-year-epic of catastrophic war, followed by a new dark age, then a gradual climb back to technological civilization.

  At a very different extreme were the apocalypses that creators and producers fashioned to look somehow, well, attractive. Especially in countless exploitive movies in which the fall of civilization was portrayed as a chance for tough, taciturn fellows to wear cool black leather; drive motorcycles real fast; and shoot a lot of bad guys wearing Mohawk haircuts—without any further thought about prim laws or consequences. This kind of tale, with its theme of ultimate liberation, is sometimes unfairly called a “Mad Max Story…” unfairly because I privately feel that the main character of Mad Max and its sequels broke with the tedious pattern that somehow got named after him. (In those films, Max was never portrayed as having fun, but rather in torment over civilization’s fall—despite all the shooting and driving and cool leather togs.)

  What I find interesting is that a few works in the postapocalypse genre do not fit into either of these categories—as dire warnings or escapist fantasies. Alas, Babylon, for example, seems to strike out in a different direction.

  While it preaches a frightful admonition, this novel is not solely a tale of foolish error followed by pain and lamentation. Pat Frank certainly criticized some contemporary attributes that he saw in his fellow citizens—shortsightedness, political myopia, and slowness to correct racism, for example. But he also perceived a majority of them as basically good, capable of cooperation and deserving—if possible—a second chance.

  In his novel, the characters are not only knocked down by cruel fate. They get to stand up. He lets them try and rebuild. It’s no fun. But there is perseverance. There is hope.

  Without any doubt, Alas, Babylon played a role in shaping my own attitudes, leading ultimately to The Postman, my contribution to postapocalypse fiction. There, too, the price of error is terrible—even more terrible than Pat Frank depicted. For in my opinion, he downplayed some of the horrors that would have attended any nuclear spasm. Frank’s description of the overall death toll feels a bit dry and detached, never going into details. He downplays the inevitable flood of wounded and starving refugees who would have flooded into poor, unprepared Fort Repose. But these small faults are forgivable, in the context of that time.

  What both books share at their core is an assumption that devastating calamities do not have to mean the end of human aspiration. There are as many good things about civilization as bad. Perhaps more. And we would miss them. From toothbrushes to electric lights. From clean water to democracy. From bookstores to the kind of gentle, tolerant argumentation that never resorts to violence and allows for the slow changing of opinions,…and the gradual and diverse evolving of everybody’s minds.

  The core of what we now know that it means to be civilized.

  We would miss these things, if they were ever taken from us. We would miss them terribly. We would never, ever be satisfied again, until we got them back.

  The flaw in your classic doom scenario is the blithe assumption—conveyed by so many misanthropic writers and film directors—that humanity in general is dreadful, and therefore only individual heroes matter. A solitary bold protagonist, plus maybe a love interest, and a few sidekicks.

  But if that’s so, why even bother to warn us?

  Likewise, those escapist romps that portray leather-clad heroes neglect to show them, later, weeping over children and wives who languish and die as typhus and polio and starvation return to vex us, as they did nearly all of our ancestors, distracting even the survivors from any thought beyond survival.

  What Alas, Babylon says—that a few others say, as well—goes beyond “look at what we all might lose through carelessness.” It goes on to say “think about how much we’ll miss, once it is gone.”

  The reader is invited—along with Randy Bragg and the novel’s other characters—to join in fighting to save what can be saved. To help bring something back from the brink.

  So no, this is not part of that ancient tradition. The age-old pattern of storytelling that dwelled on punishing hubris and forecasting inevitable decline. On poignant decay and viewing the future as an enemy. For even as Alas, Babylon participates in the helpful process of criticism, finding failure modes to warn against, it mixes warning with that other message.

  One calling for optimism, pragmatism, and a belief that all problems might be solved, with enough courage, determination, good will, grit, patience…

  …and hope.

  —David Brin, June 2005

  Preface

  I have an acquaintance, a retired manufacturer, a practical man, who has recently become worried about international tensions, international missiles, H-bombs, and such.

  One day, knowing that I had done some writing on military subjects, he asked: “What do you think would happen if the Russkies hit us when we weren’t looking—you know, like Pearl Harbor?”

  The subject was on my mind. I had recently returned from a magazine assignment at Offutt Field, Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, several
SAC operational bases, and the Missile Test Center on Cape Canaveral. More to the point, I had been discussing just such a possibility with several astute British staff officers. The British have lived under the shadow of nuclear-armed rockets longer than we. Also, they have a vivid memory of cities devastated from the skies, as have the Germans and Japanese.

  A man who has been shaken by a two-ton blockbuster has a frame of reference. He can equate the impact of an H-bomb with his own experience, even though the H-bomb blast is a million times more powerful than the shock he endured. To someone who has never felt a bomb, bomb is only a word. An H-bomb’s fireball is something you see on television. It is not something that incinerates you to a cinder in the thousandth part of a second. So the H-bomb is beyond the imagination of all but a few Americans, while the British, Germans, and Japanese can comprehend it, if vaguely. And only the Japanese have personal understanding of atomic heat and radiation.

  It was a big question. I gave him a horseback opinion, which proved conservative compared with some of the official forecasts published later. I said, “Oh, I think they’d kill fifty or sixty million Americans—but I think we’d win the war.”

  He thought this over and said, “Wow! Fifty or sixty million dead! What a depression that would make!”

  I doubt if he realized the exact nature and extent of the depression—which is why I am writing this book.

  —1959

  1

  In Fort Repose, a river town in Central Florida, it was said that sending a message by Western Union was the same as broadcasting it over the combined networks. This was not entirely true. It was true that Florence Wechek, the manager, gossiped. Yet she judiciously classified the personal intelligence that flowed under her plump fingers, and maintained a prudent censorship over her tongue. The scandalous and the embarrassing she excised from her conversation. Sprightly, trivial, and harmless items she passed on to friends, thus enhancing her status and relieving the tedium of spinsterhood. If your sister was in trouble, and wired for money, the secret was safe with Florence Wechek. But if your sister bore a legitimate baby, its sex and weight would soon be known all over town.

  Florence awoke at six-thirty, as always, on a Friday in early December. Heavy, stiff and graceless, she pushed herself out of bed and padded through the living room into the kitchen. She stumbled onto the back porch, opened the screen door a crack, and fumbled for the milk carton on the stoop. Not until she straightened did her china-blue eyes begin to discern movement in the hushed gray world around her. A jerky-tailed squirrel darted out on the longest limb of her grapefruit tree. Sir Percy, her enormous yellow cat, rose from his burlap couch behind the hot water heater, arched his back, stretched, and rubbed his shoulders on her flannel robe. The African lovebirds rhythmically swayed, heads pressed together, on the swing in their cage. She addressed the lovebirds: “Good morning, Anthony. Good morning, Cleo.”

  Their eyes, spectacularly ringed in white, as if embedded in mint Life Savers, blinked at her. Anthony shook his green and yellow plumage and rasped a greeting. Cleo said nothing. Anthony was adventurous, Cleo timid. On occasion Anthony grew raucous and irascible and Florence released him into limitless freedom outside. But always, at dusk, Anthony waited in the Turk’s-cap, or atop the frangipani, eager to fly home. So long as Cleo preferred comfortable and sheltered imprisonment, Anthony would remain a domesticated parrot. That’s what they’d told her when she bought the birds in Miami a month before, and apparently it was true.

  Florence carried their cage into the kitchen and shook fresh sunflower seed into their feeder. She filled Sir Percy’s bowl with milk, and crumpled a bit of wafer for the goldfish in the bowl on the counter. She returned to the living room and fed the angelfish, mollies, guppies, and vivid neons in the aquarium. She noted that the two miniature catfish, useful scavengers, were active. She was checking the tank’s temperature, and its electric filter and heater, when the percolator chuckled its call to breakfast. At seven, exactly, Florence switched on the television, turned the knob to Channel 8, Tampa, and sat down to her orange juice and eggs. Her morning routine was unvaried and efficient. The only bad parts of it were cooking for one and eating alone. Yet breakfast was not her loneliest meal, not with Anthony ogling and gabbling, the six fat goldfish dancing a dreamy oriental ballet on diaphanous fins, Sir Percy rubbing against her legs under the table, and her cheery friends on the morning show, hired, at great expense, to inform and entertain her.

  As soon as she saw Dave’s face, Florence could sense whether the news was going to be good or bad. On this morning Dave looked troubled, and sure enough, when he began to give the news, it was bad. The Russians had sent up another Sputnik, No. 23, and something sinister was going on in the Middle East. Sputnik No. 23 was the largest yet, according to the Smithsonian Institution, and was radioing continuous and elaborate coded signals. “There is reason to believe,” Frank said, “that Sputniks of this size are equipped to observe the terrain of the earth below.”

  Florence gathered her pink flannel robe closer to her neck. She glanced up, apprehensively, through the kitchen window. All she saw were hibiscus leaves dripping in the pre-dawn ground fog, and blank gray sky beyond. They had no right to put those Sputniks up there to spy on people. As if it were on his mind also, Frank continued:

  “Senator Holler, of the Armed Services Committee, yesterday joined others of a Midwest bloc in demanding that the Air Force shoot down Sputniks capable of military espionage if they violate U.S. air space. The Kremlin has already had something to say about this. Any such action, the Kremlin says, will be regarded the same as an attack on a Soviet vessel or aircraft. The Kremlin pointed out that the United States has traditionally championed the doctrine of Freedom of the Seas. The same freedom, says the Soviet statement, applies to outer space.”

  The newsman paused, looked up, and half-smiled in wry amusement at this complexity. He turned a page on his clipboard.

  “There is a new crisis in the Middle East. A report from Beirut, via Cairo, says that Syrian tanks of the most modern Russian design have crossed the Jordanian frontier. This is undoubtedly a threat to Israel. At the same time Damascus charges that Turkish troops are mobilizing….”

  Florence flipped to Channel 6, Orlando, and country music. She did not understand, and could not become interested in, the politics of the Middle East. Sputniks seemed a closer and more personal menace. Her best friend Alice Cooksey, the librarian, claimed to have seen a Sputnik one evening at twilight. If you could see it, then it could see you. She stared up through the window again. No Sputnik. She rinsed the dishes and returned to her bedroom.

  As she wrestled with her girdle, Florence’s thought gravitated to the equally prying behavior of Randy Bragg. She adjusted the venetian blinds until she could peer out. He was at it again. There he was, brazenly immodest in checked red and black pajamas, sitting on his front steps, knees akimbo and binoculars pressed to his eyes. Although he was perhaps seventy-five yards distant, she was certain he stared directly at her, and could see through the tilted louvers. She ducked back against the bedroom wall, hands protecting her breasts.

  Almost every evening for the past three weeks, and on a number of mornings, she had caught him at it. Sometimes he was on the piazza, as now, sometimes at a second-floor window, and sometimes high up on the captain’s walk. Sometimes he swept the whole of River Road with his glasses, pretending an interest elsewhere, but more often he focused on her bungalow. Randolph Rowzee Bragg a Peeping Tom! It was shocking!

  Long before Florence’s mother moved south and built the brown-shingle bungalow, the Braggs had lived in the big house, ungainly and monolithic, with tall Victorian windows and bellying bays and broad brick chimneys. Once it had been the show place of River Road. Now, it appeared shabby and outmoded compared with the long, low, antiseptic citadels of glass, metal, and tinted block constructed by rich Northerners who for the past fifteen years had been “discovering” the Timucuan River. Still, the Bragg house was planked and
paneled with native cypress, and encased in pine clapboard, hard as iron, that might last another hundred years. Its grove, at this season like a full green cloak flecked with gold, trailed all the way from back yard to river bank, a quarter mile. And she would say this for Randy, his grounds were well kept, bright with poinsettias and bougainvillea, hibiscus, camellias, gardenias, and flame vine. Florence had known Randolph’s mother, Gertrude Bragg, well, and old Judge Bragg to speak to. She had watched Randolph graduate from bicycle to jalopy, vanish for a number of years in college and law school, reappear in a convertible, vanish again during the Korean War, and finally come home for good when Judge Bragg and Mrs. Bragg were taken in the same year. Now here was Randy, one of the best known and most eligible young men in Tumucuan County, even if he did run around with Pistolville girls and drink too much, a—what was it the French called it?—a voyeur. It was disgusting. The things that went on in small towns, people wouldn’t believe. Florence faced the bureau mirror, wondering how much he had seen.

  Many years ago a man had told her she looked something like Clara Bow. Thereafter, Florence wore her hair in bangs, and didn’t worry too much about her chubby figure. The man, an imaginative idealist, had gone to England in 1940, joined the Commandos, and got himself killed. She retained only a vague and inexact memory of his caresses, but she could never forget how he had compared her to Clara Bow, a movie star. She could still see a resemblance, provided she sucked in her stomach and lifted her chin high to erase the fleshy creases in her neck—except her hair was no longer like Clara’s. Her hair had thinned, and faded to mottled pink. She hurriedly sketched a Clara Bow pout on her lips, and finished dressing.

  When she stepped out of the front door, Florence didn’t know whether she should cut Randy dead or give him a piece of her mind. He was still there on the steps, the binoculars in his lap. He waved, grinned, and called across lawn and road, “Morning, Miss Florence.” His black hair was tousled, his teeth white, and he looked boyish, handsome, and inoffensive.