Citation
from: Wolfe, Gary K.. Evaporating Genres : Essays on Fantastic Literature. Middletown,
CT, USA : Wesleyan University Press, 2011 .
The Remaking of Zero
n Ray Bradbury's 1950 short story "The Highway," Hernando, a poor Mexican farmer who lives beside a highway from the United States, enjoying such
odd fruits of this link to ted1nology as sandals made from tire rubber and a
bowl made from a hubcap, is startled by the sudden appearance of cars speeding northward in great numbers, aJI filled with mysteriously panic-stricken
American tourists returning home. At the end of the flood comes an aging
Ford, packed with young Americans who stop at Hernando's shack to ask for
water for their failing radiator. The driver explains the exodus: "The war! ,., he
shouts, "It's come, the atom war, the end of the world!" -the tourists are all
trying to return to their families. After the young people leave, Hernando
prepares to resume his plowing. When his wife asks him what has happened, he
replies, "It's nothing," and sets out with burro and plow, pausing to muse,
"What do they mean , 'the world?' " 1
This little parable of nuclear holocaust-it's hardly realistic speculation,
since Hernando's life obviously will be altered in radical ways that he is unaware
of-raises in Bradbury's best elliptical form some fundamental issues of stories
that begin at or near the "end of the world." Bradbury suggests that Hernando's
simple and apparently self-sufficient world will continue much as it has (although, one assumes, without the interruption of tourists), while the "world"
that has been destroyed is the world of technology and profligate wealth represented by the highway. As in most postcatastrophe fiction, the "end of the
world" signifies the end of a way of life, the end of a culture and its system of
beliefs-but not the actual destruction of the planet or its population (although
this population may be reduced severely). For this reason, it is perhaps most
helpful to regard such stories as tales of cosmological displacement: the old
concept of "world" is destroyed and a new one must be built in its place.
Economic and political systems, beliefs, and behavior patterns are destroyed,
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but more often than not the Earth abides, and so, at least in part, does humanity. This type of"end of the world" has occurred fairly often in human history,
most obviously in such dramatic genocides as the destruction of Native American civilizations or the Nazi death camps, but also, in a broader sense, such
historical movements as urbanization or the Industrial Revolution. Often these
endtimes are associated with new technologies or the introduction of technologically superior weaponry, and in fact many of the apocalyptic anxieties of
the post-World War II period arose from just such a technological innovation:
nuclear weapons. But in the fiction of catastrophe, the world often is transformed by a reversal of this historical process: technologies are removed from
the world, rather than new ones being introduced as in conventional understandings of the forward movement of history. Much of the impact of such
fiction arises from the speculations that it offers about the effects of the loss of
technology on machine-dependent populations-such as the tourists flowing
past Hernando in .. The Highway."
Bradburfs story reveals a number of themes common to post-holocaust
fiction. The highway represents the mobility of a society that contrasts sharply
with Hernando's own deep relationship with his plot of land by the river; the
larger society, no longer as mobile, will have to learn quickly the value of such a
relationship. Technology appears in the story in four guises. First, the "big long
black cars heading north" suggest a whole complex of industrial civilization:
the availability of mechanics; the dependability of industries that produce and
transport gasoline, rubber, metal, and plastic; the efficiency of governments in
maintaining roads and bridges. After this initial flood of well-kept cars has
passed, a second, more ominous image of the same technology appears: the
dilapidated Ford, its top gone and its radiator boiling over. While this machine
is part of the same society that produced the earlier ones, dependence upon it
has dearly become precarious. As it wears out, the car no longer offers protection from such discomforts of the natural world as rain, and it must be repaired
frequently by whatever means are available-in this case, well-water from a
farm. Significantly, the Ford is driven byyoungpeople, since it is the young who
will have to make do with sud1 machines in the remnants of a mechanical
civilization that has lost the means to service and maintain its machines.
But the story contains a yet more ominous image of what is to come for
these young people. At the bottom of the river that runs by Hernando's hut lie
the remains of a big American car that had crashed there years earlier. Sometimes the wreck is visible, and sometimes it is obscured by t11e muddy waters; in
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101
a few years the sediment of the river will cover it entirely. From this wreck,
Hernando has salvaged the tire from which he carved his rubber sandals, just as
his hubcap-bowl has been salvaged from a hubcap that had flown off another
car. These images suggest what may become of technology after even the old
Fords are gone: The machines themselves will be turned into raw materials,
their parts stripped for primitive implements and clothing before they are
reclaimed by the natural world.
A fourth image of technology suggests what might happen still later, when
even salvaging the remnants of technology is insufficient. This image, the last in
the story, is one of life and hope: Hernando sets his plow in the furrowed soil
and begins tilling the land. It is at this point that he wonders, "What do they
mean , 'the world?'" and the question is an appropriate one, since Hernando's
present world resembles closely the world that may come to pass after industrial
technology has faded altogether and the survivors are forced to return to that
most basic of aU machines, the plow. In the end , Bradbury's story is perversely
optimistic in its suggestion of a return to a simpler, less complex life. Such a
vision is presented also in Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950) , in whid1
the Martian colonists, like the Americans in "The Highway," return home en
masse at the outbreak of nuclear war on Earth. One family, however, escapes to
Mars, and there the father ceremonially burns such symbols of the old world as
stocks and bonds. This suggestion of starting a new world symbolically cleansed
of the sins of the old is not only in keeping with earlier millenarian traditions,
but is also common in literary works that begin at or near the world-ending
events. 2 As we shall see later, one of the richest of such novels, George R.
Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), conforms closely to the postapocalypse pattern
we find in Bradbury's "The Highway."
Although the very notion of beginning a narrative wid1 a "world-ending''
event seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be
optimistic, such a fantasy is very much in line with millenarian thought. As
Mircea Eliade writes, "the idea of the destruction of the World is not, basically,
pessimistic."3 Norman Cohn has traced medieval millenarian movements to
the unrest, disorientation, and anxiety of the rootless poor who sought to
improve their lives but found little cause for hope in existing social and economic structures. ·w hile contemporary science-fictional versions of the end of
the world differ in key respects from these earlier millenarianists- few involve
supernatural agencies, for example (although the most popular millennialist
series of the 1990s, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's Left Behind novels, was so
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steeped in Christian fundamentalism it could hardly count as science fiction)they often share the belief that a new order can come about only through a
complete destruction of the old. Tn Eliade's terms, "life cannot be repaired, it
can only be re-created by a return to sources." 4 Or, in the words of]. G. Ballard,
one of science fiction's master catastrophists, "I believe that the catastrophe
story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the
imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying
void of a patently meaningless universe by d1allenging it at its own game, to
remake zero by provoking it in everyconceivableway." 5 After surviving a mysterious plague that all but wipes out humanity, the protagonist of Stewart's Earth
Abides thinks, "Now we have finished witl1 the past. ... This is tl1e Moment
Zero, and we stand between two eras. Now tl1e new life begins. Now we commence tl1e Year One." 6
The promise inherent in the idea of ''remaking zero" is certainly one of the
reasons the post-apocalyptic story has survived as long as it has, and in so many
guises. On the simple level of narrative action, the prospect of a depopulated
world in which humanity is reduced to a more elemental struggle witl1 nature
provides a convenient arena for the sort of heroic action that is constrained in
the corporate, technological world that we know. The "true" values of individual effort and courage are allowed to emerge once again, and power flows
eventually, after initial conflicts over such resources as weapons or stockpiled
food , to tl1ose who possess these attributes-to a "natural aristocracy" uninhibited by the previous world's political and economic complexities. (Perhaps,
in this sense, the ancestry of the modern disaster novel should include James
Fenimore Cooper, whose works also depict the emergence of a new aristocracy
in the wilderness of a new world where the conventions and constraints of the
old have been supplanted by new imperatives.) This simplification of relationships also permits a simplification of tl1e forces of good and evil , making it
possible to depict a world of easily discernible heroes and villains. Thus, in
terms of the action story, tl1e notion of starting tl1e world over is appealing.
Furtl1ermore, end-of-the-world stories provide a convenient means of exploring at least h-vo of science fiction's favorite themes-the impact of technology
on human behavior, and the relationship of humanity to its environmentwithout necessitating the sometimes cumbersome narrative apparatus usually
associated with these tl1emes. The impact of technology on human behavior is
most often dealt with through the introduction of new tecl1nologies into fictional worlds-robots, time machines, spacecraft, computers, and the like. But
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103
the problems of developing both the details of the new technology and the
details of the fictional world create a rather complex dialectic for the reader,
who must try to understand the impact of a fictional technology on a fictional
world and draw from that some insights concerning our own world and our
own technology. By removing familiar technology from a familiar world, however, the end-of-the-world story simplifies this dialectic considerably, allowing
the author to explore issues of ted1nology and society by speculating on the
effects of their loss.7 A number of science fiction stories-including E. M.
Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909), S. S. Held's "The Death of Iron" (1932),
Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis's Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1972, based in part
on an earlier episode of the Doomwatch TV series}, and Kevin}. Anderson and
Doug Beason's Jll Wind (1995) - construct the entire catastrophe around the
failure of machines; the latter three stories concern worldwide plagues that
affect only mad1ine parts such as iron and plastic.
The other significant science fiction theme made accessible in postapocalyptic fiction is that ofhumanity's relationship to its environment, or its
alienation from that environment. As with new ted111ologies, new and strange
environments are likely to require a great deal of narrative exposition concerning alien planets, climates, and the like; in the post-holocaust story, this problem can be circumvented by defamiliarizing familiar environments through the
transformations wrought by the disaster. A city emptied of its people, whether
through nuclear disaster or disease or environmental catastrophe, becomes a
strange and alien place. Similarly, a pastoral landscape becomes a foreboding
wasteland by the implied danger of holocaust survivors reduced to savagery,
disfigured by radiation, or given to strange new beliefs. Leigh Brackett's The
Long Tomorrow (1955) and John Wyndham's Re-Birth (1955) depict wasteland
journeys detailed with such geographical verisimilitude that they can be traced
on current maps of North America; the territory is familiar, and yet so alien
that we have no idea what it may contain. Robert Merle's Malevil (1972) spends
much time before the holocaust detailing the landscape surrounding the ancient fortress ofMalevil , so that we can better appreciate the devastating transformation this landscape has undergone. Generally, geography is an important
recurrent element in post-holocaust narratives, and almost always it serves to
establish a link between the strange new environment and the world we know.
Related to these familiar science fiction themes is what is probably the
fundamental reason for the emotional power of post-holocaust narratives: the
mythic power inherent in the very conception of a remade world. The sources
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