Parenthetical

Apocalypse how? Aliens. The Clordians didn’t want to compete with humans for habitable planets to colonize, so they wiped us out. The Clordian Sweep “rapid[ly] disintegrat[ed]… all carbon compounds, which destroyed all life.” (Not to mention all paper records of knowledge, all wooden structures… the thoroughness of this destruction is impressive.)

Some people, plants, and animals survived, of course — some underground, like in Strange Tomorrow, another novel set in this world; some in the spaces between the Sweep’s overlapping fields, as in the first story of this collection.

The stories go on: people live in tiny fertile valleys, often only big enough for a family, and when a new person comes along, someone has to leave and find a new home (or, more likely, perish in the badlands in between valleys). As fertility returns to the land, villages get bigger. People start rediscovering the technology of the pre-Sweep Old Ones, and developing their own.

And then, because this was the ’70s, people discover that the Sweep changed them. They have mental powers we never had, “a force, an energy within [them]selves.” It’s not telepathy; more like the Force of Star Wars. Children go on “sequesterings” to learn to use this force, to “develop [their] inner unity.” When the Clordians come back, this force shows the aliens that humans cannot be conquered, but must be left alone with their inner unity and their one-ness with all life.

From there the stories get really hippie-dippy, as humans learn the awkwardly named “self-space-placement” (they couldn’t just say “teleportation”?) and start exploring other planets populated by sentient, meditative plants and whatnot.

13 vs. 31: I loved the hippieness of it all as a kid, the hope represented by humans moving away from violence and towards unity with all life. As an adult, it makes me roll my eyes a little bit, but it’s still hard not to feel soothed by it. By the end, humans have created something of a galactic utopia, and I am enough of a naive optimist to be drawn to that.

My favorite part of the book, when I first read it and now, is the conceit that it’s “Stories of a Future Past” (as the subtitle claims). These stories are meant to be historical fiction, written from the point of view of that galactic utopia. There are “Notes on Sources” at the end, little write-ups of what is known about each time period, given the surviving records or lack thereof. Nothing says “hope” like the idea that happy, fulfilled humans are telling the story of an apocalypse from far in the future. “It’s going to be rough for a while, guys, but it all gets better. We promise.”

Fun fact: Jean E. Karl was a bigshot in children’s publishing as well as an author. She edited the Earthsea trilogy and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler!(!!) (Her own writing is somewhat less luminous, though she does tell some damn inventive stories.)

Covers: Man, these are some weak covers! The top one is the edition I have now, which makes it look like a collection of sci-fi horror stories. The second one was the edition of my childhood. It’s a good thing the book has a good title and my library had a small children’s science fiction section, or I would never have picked this up. It looks like a geometry textbook.