7 ms·

It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction. In addition to "There Will C

It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction. In addition to "There Will Come Soft Rains" we have short stories like Stephen Vincent Benét’s "By the Waters of Babylon." In that story, society has been bombed back to the stone age. Even religion is a stone age recreation. Something like hot and cold running water seems like it must come from gods’ magic. This short story was particularly meaningful for me when I read it in school. I lived the same distance from New York City as the protagonist. And this was during the last days of the Soviet Union, which had placed my small hometown on its top 10 places to bomb list. In Walter M. Miller Jr.'s book A Canticle for Liebowitz, we’re back in society that's recreating itself, with the Catholic Church acting as a centralizing force again, as after the fall of Rome and European plagues. Monks discover, collect, copy, and maintain shreds of texts. Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents.

vidarh 2mo ago
Reading Philip K. Dick's short stories in publication order is also quite something in that respect. It was so pervasive in his early stories.
schiffern 2mo ago
>It seems quaint now, It goes up and down. Some days I wish it seemed more quaint.
dbspin 2mo ago
Beautifully articulated, but I have to disagree with you on nuclear power. We're close to the point where renewables and battery tech are a solution to all our power needs. Remaining obstacles being primarily political / geopolitical. Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  and the climate is so hot that nuclear power plants are having to be shut down so their waste heat doesn't sterilize their cooling rivers.
- jltsiren 2mo ago
  Incidentally, Finland just took a key step today towards issuing an operating permit for the Onkalo repository. After today, the permit is mostly matter of bureaucracy, and the final disposal of spent nuclear fuel could start by the end of the year. The issues with renewables and nuclear waste are similar. The general solutions have been known for decades, but progress has been slow, as people have been unwilling to commit to them.
  - dbspin 2mo ago
    They're not remotely similar. The consequences for a spill of nuclear waste - either from a storage facility that's been compromised or hit by a strike during a war, or for example the sinking of a delivery ship that's transporting waste - are enormous. Ditto the largely unsolved costs of decommissioning.
billiam 2mo ago
Quaint? We are the closest we've ever been to nuclear annihilation, according to the experts: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/ https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/
- apelapan 2mo ago
  Nuclear annihilation on any sort of global scale is further off than ever in the past 60-70 years or so. The doomsday clock is mostly worrying about climate change, conventional war and Facebook boomers spreading and believing fake news. I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.
  - adamc 2mo ago
    No. The past year has substantially nudged things in the other direction.
    - NoImmatureAdHom 2mo ago
      I'd say it's tough to say. On the one hand, one of the major nuclear powers is embroiled in a war in Europe. Which is extremely bad news and clearly makes the probability of nuclear war increase. On the other hand, we're getting better and better at targeting, which means much smaller warheads can get the job done. We have little use for 50MT behemoths any more (excepting doomsday weapons).
      - kjs3 2mo ago
        Er...the 50MT device was a cold war dick measuring stunt, not the demonstration of a practical strategic weapon. But, yeah, we (the US) don't even build 1MT devices any more, because 1) we have to fit them into submarines and bombers where size and weight (and economic) requirements limit yield, and 2) we figured out pretty quick that due to diminishing returns on destructive footprint, bigger bombs were pretty much a waste of effort (and produced other side effects like more fallout). Among other gotchas, you're constrained by the cube-root law; ten times more yield is not anywhere close to 10 times more destruction on the ground. So, since we saw first-hand what devices of ballpark 20KT yield did to an urban environment, numerically most of the operational US nuclear weapons are around 100KT (margin of error and all that)[1]. So, yeah, better targeting, smaller warheads, yada yada. Still one-shot/one-kill for an entire city and the surrounding area. I mean, McNamara could handwave with statements like "optimistically, only millions dead" (paraphrased), but I don't think that kind of thinking has aged well. That said, things are not worse because the Big Three have Big Bombs (or don't). It's because the strategic landscape has changed. One of the big 3 is lead by a guy who thinks nuclear weapons are just like big hand grenades or something and that negotiation is a zero-sum game. Another bit three leader is maybe just holding on to power by his teeth (or not...who knows) and came of age in the 'nuclear war is winnable' era. And there are more players at the table. Israel has nukes. North Korea. France and the UK. And India and Pakistan. South Africa had them before, and could again. And Iran will get them at some point, sooner or later. And we're apparently going to give the Saudis all the required tooling and expertise required, though there's apparently a firm pinky-swear no weapons will come of it. So we aren't looking at a 'simple' US/USSR cold war, with some Chinese spice in the mix. We have regional power, some of them not known for long-term stability, some with extremely volatile regional situations, with the ability to knock over the apple cart. So what is the escalation/deescalation path if, say, KYI has a real bender one night and decides that NK nukes Seoul? Or Tokyo? Or what if they just pull a June 1950 and march all the way to Pusan conventionally? Do we nuke Pyongyang? All their nuclear facilities (the ones we know about)? Or glass over the whole place? And what then does China do, us having set off a nuke in their literal back yard on top of their Little Buddy? Under such circumstances, I do not expect the current administration to take a measured step back and say "we need to think this through...". Uncertainty. That's why a lot of us (who lived in the Cold War) think things look a little shakier than usual. [1] To head off the inevitable "well ackshually...": Yes, the big players still have big bombs. I haven't been involved in this area in a while so things have probably changed a bit, but we still have some of the big boys in the 300KT+ range sitting on Minutemans for old times sake. I assume the Russians still have a bunch of their 1/2 to 1MT devices in silos. And the Chinese were pretty proud of their absurdly large 4MT+ devices, supposedly still in service.
piltdownman 2mo ago
Miller's situation is a little more nuanced - he was crew on an Allied Bomber that levelled the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy during World War I, falsely believing it was occupied by German troops. His subsequent PTSD was a driving force behind his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism, and he uniquely imbues the novel with the structure and lexicography of a closed order. His fear was not so much war - atomic or otherwise - as it was the loss of knowledge and tolerance as a consequence of the cyclical and barbaric nature of human society. Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction. As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors. Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.
lantastic 2mo ago
On topic of fear of nuclear war: After reading Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, I'm surprised we as a species are still around.
- arch_deluxe 2mo ago
  A book I highly recommend, but personally found distressing to read, especially the chapter on the strategy of targeting civilian populations, which continues to haunt me.
seizethecheese 2mo ago
We also don't fully appreciate how much this shaped the American Baby Boomer psyche. My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school.
- epc 2mo ago
  Or a certain cohort of Gen X who were old enough to watch The Day After or Threads and comprehend the possibilities.
- PopAlongKid 2mo ago
  >My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school. The boomer generation covers 18 years. While such drills may have been common for those in school during the 1950s, I suspect it was much less by the 1960s.
prpl 2mo ago
It’s been a very long time, but I read Alas, Babylon in middle school. I remember aspects of their modern existence also being problematic (IIRC a house in florida with lots of windows doesn’t fare well without AC)
UncleOxidant 2mo ago
When I was in high school (late 70s) we lived on Hood Canal in Washington state less than 10 miles from the Bangor Nuclear submarine base. My dad would often joke that it was probably the best location to live when WWIII starts because we'd just be instantly annihilated instead of having to suffer through some kind of post-nuclear hellscape.
fallinghawks 2mo ago
It shouldn't be astonishing. The bombs dropped in Japan did create nuclear shadows of human beings when their bodies were annihilated. When Bradbury wrote it (1950), that was very, very fresh.
ThrowawayR2 2mo ago
> "It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction." Quite the reverse. That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war and that's not a normal state of affairs. The 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by war after war between major powers, culminating in the First World War ("the war to end all wars" remember?) and then Second World War in the first half of the 20th century. It was very surprising to everyone that another global war hadn't materialized by the 1980s. Fear not, military rearmament spending worldwide has shot upwards as nations prepare for the inevitable wars to see who will be the new global top dog. We are all about to re-learn some old lessons, albeit at a heavy cost.
- Gud 2mo ago
  Indeed. We are sleepwalking into WW III and no one seems to care.
  - Schlagbohrer 2mo ago
    We need to permanently retire the term "sleepwalking into war". When world leaders call for war, prepare for war, threaten war, and then cause as much war as they can, that's not sleepwalking.
    - krunck 2mo ago
      "We" means us, the non-billionaires, the distracted by screens, the "it's too distressing to think about" class. We are sleepwalking. Always have been. Until our friends and family start falling, then, maybe, we'll take action.
- 8bitsrule 2mo ago
  > That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war... Apart from perceptions, however real they were ... the hundreds of silos and missiles and thosaunds of bombs, whoever built them (names??) made a shit-ton of money (on both sides). 'Defense' spending relies on the manufacture of fears.
dudinax 2mo ago
quaint? I don't think we're going to make it.
shawn_w 2mo ago
Interestingly, By the Waters of Babylon was written in 1937, before WW2 and the development of atomic and nuclear weapons - events that obviously and understandably triggered that theme in later writing like Bradbury's.
mrloopex 2mo ago
Lucifer has fallen! “Canticle” blew my 14 year old mind. Really sad ending but the mutations really got under my skin. Didn’t Plato call sad music a “false construction” when outlining justice?
King-Aaron 2mo ago
> It seems quaint now There was a very real likelihood only a few months back that there would be a nuclear exchange starting in Iran. In fact it seemed as if 'the plane was in the air' at one point. We're astonishingly close to these scenarios but I feel the powers that be (governments, media, etc) aren't prioritising the discussion due to other agendas. The most powerful people in our society continue to build fallout shelters however.
inciampati 2mo ago
Oak Ridge huh? What other small town would be a target?
zackmorris 2mo ago
> Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents. That's completely the wrong take. The toxic positivity you speak of is what will actually get the world destroyed, while the rest of us are working over years and decades to prevent and repair the damage that colonizer/rape culture inflicts upon humanity and the natural world. I'm troubled that yours is the top comment, and that I'm seeing ostrich head in the sand sentiment spreading so widely among young people. Your bio says that you are a university professor. Is this really what you're teaching? If I misinterpreted your comment, then please clarify.

vidarh 2mo ago

Reading Philip K. Dick's short stories in publication order is also quite something in that respect. It was so pervasive in his early stories.

schiffern 2mo ago

>It seems quaint now, It goes up and down. Some days I wish it seemed more quaint.

dbspin 2mo ago

Beautifully articulated, but I have to disagree with you on nuclear power. We're close to the point where renewables and battery tech are a solution to all our power needs. Remaining obstacles being primarily political / geopolitical. Meanwhile, after 70 years we're still no closer to a safe long term solution for nuclear waste. Every new and untested nuclear reactor design falls into the same pro-innovation bias of failing to address it's own unintended consequences. Like the utterly wild and rarely estimated cost of decommissioning older plants.

inigyou 2mo ago
and the climate is so hot that nuclear power plants are having to be shut down so their waste heat doesn't sterilize their cooling rivers.
jltsiren 2mo ago
Incidentally, Finland just took a key step today towards issuing an operating permit for the Onkalo repository. After today, the permit is mostly matter of bureaucracy, and the final disposal of spent nuclear fuel could start by the end of the year. The issues with renewables and nuclear waste are similar. The general solutions have been known for decades, but progress has been slow, as people have been unwilling to commit to them.
- dbspin 2mo ago
  They're not remotely similar. The consequences for a spill of nuclear waste - either from a storage facility that's been compromised or hit by a strike during a war, or for example the sinking of a delivery ship that's transporting waste - are enormous. Ditto the largely unsolved costs of decommissioning.

billiam 2mo ago

Quaint? We are the closest we've ever been to nuclear annihilation, according to the experts: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/ https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/timeline/

apelapan 2mo ago
Nuclear annihilation on any sort of global scale is further off than ever in the past 60-70 years or so. The doomsday clock is mostly worrying about climate change, conventional war and Facebook boomers spreading and believing fake news. I don't mean that things are fine, just that Nuclear annihilation is less of a concern than some make it out to be.
- adamc 2mo ago
  No. The past year has substantially nudged things in the other direction.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 2mo ago
    I'd say it's tough to say. On the one hand, one of the major nuclear powers is embroiled in a war in Europe. Which is extremely bad news and clearly makes the probability of nuclear war increase. On the other hand, we're getting better and better at targeting, which means much smaller warheads can get the job done. We have little use for 50MT behemoths any more (excepting doomsday weapons).
    - kjs3 2mo ago
      Er...the 50MT device was a cold war dick measuring stunt, not the demonstration of a practical strategic weapon. But, yeah, we (the US) don't even build 1MT devices any more, because 1) we have to fit them into submarines and bombers where size and weight (and economic) requirements limit yield, and 2) we figured out pretty quick that due to diminishing returns on destructive footprint, bigger bombs were pretty much a waste of effort (and produced other side effects like more fallout). Among other gotchas, you're constrained by the cube-root law; ten times more yield is not anywhere close to 10 times more destruction on the ground. So, since we saw first-hand what devices of ballpark 20KT yield did to an urban environment, numerically most of the operational US nuclear weapons are around 100KT (margin of error and all that)[1]. So, yeah, better targeting, smaller warheads, yada yada. Still one-shot/one-kill for an entire city and the surrounding area. I mean, McNamara could handwave with statements like "optimistically, only millions dead" (paraphrased), but I don't think that kind of thinking has aged well. That said, things are not worse because the Big Three have Big Bombs (or don't). It's because the strategic landscape has changed. One of the big 3 is lead by a guy who thinks nuclear weapons are just like big hand grenades or something and that negotiation is a zero-sum game. Another bit three leader is maybe just holding on to power by his teeth (or not...who knows) and came of age in the 'nuclear war is winnable' era. And there are more players at the table. Israel has nukes. North Korea. France and the UK. And India and Pakistan. South Africa had them before, and could again. And Iran will get them at some point, sooner or later. And we're apparently going to give the Saudis all the required tooling and expertise required, though there's apparently a firm pinky-swear no weapons will come of it. So we aren't looking at a 'simple' US/USSR cold war, with some Chinese spice in the mix. We have regional power, some of them not known for long-term stability, some with extremely volatile regional situations, with the ability to knock over the apple cart. So what is the escalation/deescalation path if, say, KYI has a real bender one night and decides that NK nukes Seoul? Or Tokyo? Or what if they just pull a June 1950 and march all the way to Pusan conventionally? Do we nuke Pyongyang? All their nuclear facilities (the ones we know about)? Or glass over the whole place? And what then does China do, us having set off a nuke in their literal back yard on top of their Little Buddy? Under such circumstances, I do not expect the current administration to take a measured step back and say "we need to think this through...". Uncertainty. That's why a lot of us (who lived in the Cold War) think things look a little shakier than usual. [1] To head off the inevitable "well ackshually...": Yes, the big players still have big bombs. I haven't been involved in this area in a while so things have probably changed a bit, but we still have some of the big boys in the 300KT+ range sitting on Minutemans for old times sake. I assume the Russians still have a bunch of their 1/2 to 1MT devices in silos. And the Chinese were pretty proud of their absurdly large 4MT+ devices, supposedly still in service.

piltdownman 2mo ago

Miller's situation is a little more nuanced - he was crew on an Allied Bomber that levelled the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy during World War I, falsely believing it was occupied by German troops. His subsequent PTSD was a driving force behind his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism, and he uniquely imbues the novel with the structure and lexicography of a closed order. His fear was not so much war - atomic or otherwise - as it was the loss of knowledge and tolerance as a consequence of the cyclical and barbaric nature of human society. Indeed he takes some other significant cues from Bradbury - who faced a similar, if less poignant, Road to Damascus moment upon learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. For example, the concept of 'Booklegging' is lifted wholesale from Fahrenheit 451, published a few years prior. Bradbury has oft-cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, and Miller makes his views very clear by the time we encounter the flanderised Atheist in the final third of Canticle - reinforcing his core theme of the juxtaposition of scientific progress and moral wisdom, and the shared thematic motif expressed by Montag in Fahrenheit 451 that the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction. As such, it is clear to me that the fear of war - and the trendy nihilism imbued by the then innovative atomic variant - doesn't so much affect mid-century fiction as the cultural and societal upheaval seen as the Baby Boomers assumed their place as the generation in ascension. In many ways this echoed the post-WW1 Brideshead Revisted era of England, merely substituting a surplus of capital for a dearth of inheritors. Thus, while both can be read as atomic jeremiads, they are more appropriately realised as treatises to the social and political mores at the time. The scare for the average American wasn't so much Nuclear as it was 'Red' - something that can be seen in the stubborn cargo-culting of very American Institutions and Practices in the post-apocalyptic canon. As can be seen across the US Sci-Fi Canon, preservation of self is often secondary to the preservation of American Exceptionalism; be it via an ICBM or the stochastic terrorism of McCarthy.

lantastic 2mo ago

On topic of fear of nuclear war: After reading Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, I'm surprised we as a species are still around.

arch_deluxe 2mo ago
A book I highly recommend, but personally found distressing to read, especially the chapter on the strategy of targeting civilian populations, which continues to haunt me.

seizethecheese 2mo ago

We also don't fully appreciate how much this shaped the American Baby Boomer psyche. My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school.

epc 2mo ago
Or a certain cohort of Gen X who were old enough to watch The Day After or Threads and comprehend the possibilities.
PopAlongKid 2mo ago
>My dad talks of regular Nuclear War drills in elementary school. The boomer generation covers 18 years. While such drills may have been common for those in school during the 1950s, I suspect it was much less by the 1960s.

prpl 2mo ago

It’s been a very long time, but I read Alas, Babylon in middle school. I remember aspects of their modern existence also being problematic (IIRC a house in florida with lots of windows doesn’t fare well without AC)

UncleOxidant 2mo ago

When I was in high school (late 70s) we lived on Hood Canal in Washington state less than 10 miles from the Bangor Nuclear submarine base. My dad would often joke that it was probably the best location to live when WWIII starts because we'd just be instantly annihilated instead of having to suffer through some kind of post-nuclear hellscape.

fallinghawks 2mo ago

It shouldn't be astonishing. The bombs dropped in Japan did create nuclear shadows of human beings when their bodies were annihilated. When Bradbury wrote it (1950), that was very, very fresh.

ThrowawayR2 2mo ago

> "It seems quaint now, but it’s astonishing how much the fear of war (especially nuclear annihilation) affected mid-century fiction." Quite the reverse. That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war and that's not a normal state of affairs. The 18th and 19th centuries were wracked by war after war between major powers, culminating in the First World War ("the war to end all wars" remember?) and then Second World War in the first half of the 20th century. It was very surprising to everyone that another global war hadn't materialized by the 1980s. Fear not, military rearmament spending worldwide has shot upwards as nations prepare for the inevitable wars to see who will be the new global top dog. We are all about to re-learn some old lessons, albeit at a heavy cost.

Gud 2mo ago
Indeed. We are sleepwalking into WW III and no one seems to care.
- Schlagbohrer 2mo ago
  We need to permanently retire the term "sleepwalking into war". When world leaders call for war, prepare for war, threaten war, and then cause as much war as they can, that's not sleepwalking.
  - krunck 2mo ago
    "We" means us, the non-billionaires, the distracted by screens, the "it's too distressing to think about" class. We are sleepwalking. Always have been. Until our friends and family start falling, then, maybe, we'll take action.
8bitsrule 2mo ago
> That people say that the fear of war (nuclear or not) is "quaint" means that the wealthy and privileged first world has forgotten about war... Apart from perceptions, however real they were ... the hundreds of silos and missiles and thosaunds of bombs, whoever built them (names??) made a shit-ton of money (on both sides). 'Defense' spending relies on the manufacture of fears.

dudinax 2mo ago

quaint? I don't think we're going to make it.

shawn_w 2mo ago

Interestingly, By the Waters of Babylon was written in 1937, before WW2 and the development of atomic and nuclear weapons - events that obviously and understandably triggered that theme in later writing like Bradbury's.

mrloopex 2mo ago

Lucifer has fallen! “Canticle” blew my 14 year old mind. Really sad ending but the mutations really got under my skin. Didn’t Plato call sad music a “false construction” when outlining justice?

King-Aaron 2mo ago

> It seems quaint now There was a very real likelihood only a few months back that there would be a nuclear exchange starting in Iran. In fact it seemed as if 'the plane was in the air' at one point. We're astonishingly close to these scenarios but I feel the powers that be (governments, media, etc) aren't prioritising the discussion due to other agendas. The most powerful people in our society continue to build fallout shelters however.

inciampati 2mo ago

Oak Ridge huh? What other small town would be a target?

zackmorris 2mo ago

> Apart from increasing society-level anxiety, that focus on the dramatization of nuclear war is considered to have turned people away from nuclear power. Imagine the different potential outcomes had our authors not been so talented. You can go back to Plato’s Republic for explanations of why sad music, for example, is bad for society. But maybe the real effect was on swaying public opinion, protest movements, regulations, and where people choose to focus their productive talents. That's completely the wrong take. The toxic positivity you speak of is what will actually get the world destroyed, while the rest of us are working over years and decades to prevent and repair the damage that colonizer/rape culture inflicts upon humanity and the natural world. I'm troubled that yours is the top comment, and that I'm seeing ostrich head in the sand sentiment spreading so widely among young people. Your bio says that you are a university professor. Is this really what you're teaching? If I misinterpreted your comment, then please clarify.