Before Kellen was born, the world was on the brink of nuclear war, followed by a terrible plague that wiped out most of the planet’s men but stopped the war. His father, a teenage boy at the time, survived, along with a handful of others in isolated pockets. Now Kellen is a teenager himself, a rare boy in a world of women. The world is better this way, he’s taught: no war, no fear. Men live under strict control in cities, or as loners in rural areas. The female:male ratio is kept very high by women like Kellen’s mom, who has an important job with the Population Apportionment Council. When Kellen overhears some secret PAC business about a plague outbreak in his dad’s loner community, he and his new friends Sunday and Tia take off to warn his dad… and discover that Everything They Thought They Knew Was a Lie.

Whew, that was a lot of explaining! There’s a lot of explaining in this book, too. Within the first couple of chapters, the protagonists go to school, wherein they have a convenient lesson in plague history — followed by some convenient homework in pre-plague history. I have a higher tolerance than many SF readers for “apocalypse how?” but this was too ‘splainy even for me.

And in part because everything got explained so thoroughly, the Big Secrets were too obvious, too soon. You might have figured out the first one just from my first sentence (which is no more spoilery than the first couple of chapters themselves), or from the movie-style tagline on the cover, “What price would you pay for a perfect world?”

Fortunately for my perception of the characters’ intelligence, that secret doesn’t drag out for the whole book. And once Kellen, Tia, and Sunday head out of town, the action moves pretty fast. This is an exciting page-turner, for sure, and it does raise some interesting (if unsubtle) questions about what a world run by women would be like. Unfortunately, it also gives too many easy answers.

I think it will appeal to kids who want a fun adventure book, but for older folks who actually want to consider the difficult gender questions, read Y: The Last Man instead.

Also reviewed by: The Book Smugglers, Steph Su Reads, and Jen Robinson.

If you somehow missed these books, the premise is that aliens invade, in giant metal Tripod conveyances. They enslave all human adults with mind-control Caps and use people as slaves in their huge Cities. The small human rebellion depends on converting kids before they’ve been Capped. In the first book, Will, Henry, and Beanpole join the rebels; in the second, Will, Beanpole, and a new boy named Fritz infiltrate a Tripod City. Pool of Fire is the last book, the climax of the rebellion.

Apocalypse how? Aliens. Big, green, tentacle-y aliens who breathe green air. ‘Nuff said. The world is pretty rural, and there’s mention of human city ruins. I only re-read the last book so I don’t remember, but I think the implication is that the aliens blasted us back to the Middle Ages.

13 vs. 31: The world sure changed in the 10+ years between this book and most of the ones I’ve reviewed this month. Most immediately obvious to me is that there is not a single woman in this book. No named characters, certainly, but not even a shopkeeper or mother of a future revolutionary. (S theorized awesomely that the Tripods killed all the women, but the men were too depressed by this to deal with or even mention it. This interpretation does add a new dimension, you must admit!)

The casual racism and Eurocentrism is also excellent. The final assault on the three Tripod Cities needs to be done at the same time, by different rebel groups in different parts of the world. When they get word that one attack didn’t succeed, Will immediately jumps (incorrectly, as it happens) to, “The one in the east? The little yellow men failed then…” This is particularly interesting given the conclusion of the book, which has our heroes heading off to bring the world’s people together, now that they have the freedom to choose peace or war. I like to think Christopher meant this juxtaposition to be ironic. (I could say so much more about international relations in the Tripod books, but I want to post this sometime this month.)

Most fascinating to me was the portrayal of Julius, the rebel leader. At the beginning of the book, he’s challenged by another man, Pierre, who wants more democracy in their decision-making. Julius shuts him down:

“There will be a time… for us to discuss among ourselves how we shall be governed…. Until then, we have no room for squabbling or dispute…. Nor do we have room for dissension, or the suspicion of dissension.”

Ok. There’s an argument to be made for despotism in wartime. But it’s a tricky one at best, and in a modern novel, a statement like this would be challenged, by the text if not by the characters. The book would make the risks of this way of thinking a theme.

This book ends with a parallel Council meeting, in which the leaders of the new free world are, in fact, “discuss[ing] among [them]selves how [they] shall be governed.” They’re all set to elect Julius as President, when Pierre starts talking again. He says some stuff that makes a whole lot of sense to me:

“We are expected, out of sentiment, to vote him back into office. We are asked to confirm a despot in power…. There were others who worked and fought for freedom — hundreds, thousands of others. We accepted Julius as our leader then, but that is no reason for accepting him now…. Julius wanted the Conference held here, among the peaks of the White Mountains, as yet another means of reminding us of the debt we are supposed to owe him. Many delegates are from low-lying lands and find conditions here oppressive….”

In a modern book, Pierre might be the hero. In this book, our heroes Will, Beanpole, and Fritz are horrified when the Conference votes against Julius. We could be meant to take this as blind loyalty on Will’s part; his shortcomings are a theme throughout the trilogy. Except that the delegates don’t even suggest any other candidates. Without Julius to lead them, the Conference falls apart and the delegates return to their respective countries. The text comdemns Julius’s ouster just as Will does, which strikes me as distinctly old-fashioned, or British, or probably both.

Ultimately, this book held up. It’s a classic for a reason. I particularly loved how scientific and careful all the planning was — there are no plot holes here. But I couldn’t ignore the datedness. Old-School indeed.

Covers: There’s time for a lot of covers in 30+ years in print! Here’s a selection. None are especially crazy, unfortunately.

So that’s it, folks! I hope you enjoyed Old-School Apocalypse April as much as I did. I now return to my regularly-scheduled diet of YA and middle grade published in the last few years, and I think none of it will be science fiction for a little while. One final plea: it’s easy get stuck on the “I have to read all the new stuff!” treadmill, but take some time to revisit old favorites. It’s definitely never boring.

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.

Fortunately they are in regular telepathic contact with Ashira and Varas, the tall and beautiful leaders of a civilization called Morrow, where everyone is telepathic and beautiful and civilized. It turns out that Tia and Rabbit are the second-generation products of an illegal experiment in artificial insemination by a Morrowan scientist. When Tia accidentally kills a village Father, Ashira and Varas guide the children’s escape across the wastelands of California to the sea, where the Morrowans’ shiny clean white ship of beautiful people will be waiting to meet them.

In Treasures of Morrow, Tia and Rabbit get used to their new life… until Ashira and Varas force them to return to their village as interpreters. Y’know, for science.

Apocalypse how? Human-created environmental:

As the ocean’s enormous masses of plankton slowly died from the filth man continuously spewed into the water, as the oxygen supply generated by the plankton diminished and the air continued to be heavily polluted, as the plants and trees on the land sickened and turned brown or yellow before death, the chain began to break, link by link, and the slow suffocation of life on the earth began.

The Base survived, presumably, because there was some provision made for sealing up military leaders, but they didn’t retain any technology. The Morrowans’ ancestors had retreated to an underground stronghold designed to survive for many generations, until the earth was habitable again. They kept all the accumulated knowledge of the past, plus epicurean tastes and a vaguely seventies-Californian religious sensibility (which they break as often as Kirk breaks the Prime Directive) called the Balance of the One. Oh, and they breed telepaths. Obvi.

13 vs. 31: As you might have guessed, this didn’t hold up as well as the other Hoover book I reviewed, This Time of Darkness. It ain’t a subtle book. The Base people are short and stocky and have “scraggly” beards and “oily” hair. The Morrowans are always described as tall, clean, and beautiful. The Base people do a lot of greedily lording over one another, and have somehow managed to go umpteen generations post-apocalypse without inventing anything of use. The Morrowans are refined armchair psychologists with hobbies like growing perfect peaches (and a shocking naivete about anyone who’s led a less privileged life).

Tia and Rabbit, of course, are somewhere in between. What is of interest in this book lies there, in their journey (literal and figurative) to understand who they are and where they fit. This would have worked for me a lot better, particularly in the second book, if Ashira and Varas hadn’t always been there guiding their development with annoying perfection. They’re like the parents in a sitcom before TV parents had flaws.

I had a penchant for “makeover” books as a kid, and this falls into that category. The maligned children got to remake themselves in a perfect new world — what lonely kid isn’t drawn to that? As an adult, though, I needed more nuance.

Covers: The Treasures cover is the one of my childhood, but neither of the Children ones are. My cover has a fairly faithful rendering of Tia, Rabbit, and Ashira (to the point that I remember being disappointed that Tia, my hero, wasn’t beautiful). In contrast, please enjoy the second cover above, with its fresh-faced Aryan children and Aboriginal-stereotype Base villain. Classy. (The book, while it judges its characters plenty, at least avoids racial descriptions.)

Apocalypse how? This is post-apoc in letter if not in spirit: “So Cord knew only vaguely about the Virus Decades, a century before, that had wiped out much of Europe and Asia and eastern America. And he had only a dim idea of the Organization, formed by rich and powerful people, that had taken charge of the wreckage of human civilization, and dragged the world out of its new Dark Age.” Blah blah vague apocalypse and Generic Repressive Government-cakes. All of the action takes place among the six characters on Klydor.

But I just remembered that it’s the start of a trilogy, one of the few I can think of from that era. And by the end of the trilogy, I dimly recall, the Klydoreans go back to Earth to stage a rebellion against the Organization.

13 vs. 31: I had to include a Douglas Hill, because for some reason I was obsessed with him. It’s hard now to remember why. I think I liked reading about tough heroes confidently joking around with their tough-guy friends and fighting for justice and survival… you know, toughly. In real life I was such a wuss.

As a slightly less wussy adult, the characters are still fun, but I care less about the fight scenes. I am also far less enamored of “he is so strong and heroic, but also so tortured.” The alien relationships echo Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, but with far less subtlety and, um, science.

S saw this on my coffee table last night and remarked that it looked like a comfort-food book. (His comfort-food books have giant worms and laser guns on them, which is one of the many reasons we get along.) How could I forget about one of the most important parts of nostalgic re-reading: cheesy cover art! Thus the array of editions above. The first one is the edition I have now, the second is the one from my childhood, and I found the third online.

Apocalypse how? Vague environmental apocalypse, a long time ago. The best we get is “back when you couldn’t breathe the air outside and the sun made people sick.” No one remembers how anything came to be — the city, the domes above the city where the rich people live, the farming town of Axel’s people — and in fact no one Outside or in the domes knows about the city, and the city dwellers don’t know about anything else. The Authorities, of course, keep everyone in ignorance, in the way that Authorities do.

One of the fantastic things about this book is how ignorant we are. As a kid there seemed great unresolved mysteries (and I read this book a lot). As an adult I was able to pick up on more clues, but even so, understanding requires inhabiting the space between the lines. The spare prose is powerfully subtle, and heartbreaking.

I find the ending fascinating, because (spoiler alert!) Amy and Axel don’t change the world. They don’t even try. They aren’t Katniss and Peeta fomenting revolution; they’re happy enough just to have “come up from level nine.” My instinct says that this has changed over time — in the ’70s and ’80s, the young characters survived their adventure and made it to a better place, and that was enough. Modern post-apocalyptic heroes need to overthrow the government and usher in a new era of freedom or the story doesn’t feel satisfying. (I haven’t done a comprehensive survey, of course, so I might be wrong about the shift, but it definitely struck me during this re-read. Anyone want to discuss some counter-examples?)

13 vs. 31: Oh, man. I can’t be remotely objective about this one; it was the start of my love affair with post-apocalyptic fiction. It consistently gave me chills as I re-read it, but who knows how much was nostalgia?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: H. M. Hoover is the best children’s author you’ve never read. I think this is one of her best books, but I’d be curious to discuss it with someone who has perspective.

In Jenna Fox and Skinned, the main characters spend chapter after chapter bemoaning what they’ve lost and how Wrong their new bodies feel. What’s fantastic about Eva is that, while she’s understandably a bit freaked out to see a chimp in the mirror, she realizes that she has to not just accept it, but be happy about it.

Okay, it was better than dying, but that wasn’t enough. You had to awaken and open your eyes and see your new face and like what you saw. You had to make the human greeting and the chimp greeting and mean them.

Her father is a chimp researcher, so she grew up with chimps and feels at home with them; suddenly being one is not such a terrible stretch for her. The book is not so much about Eva coming to terms with her chimp half as it is about the rest of the world doing so.

Apocalypse how? This is one of the few books I can think of that watches a slow apocalypse happen. At the start of the book you know that there are many, many more people on Earth than we have now, packed into every corner. Almost all animals that aren’t adapted to live with people have gone extinct — except for chimps, because of their research value. But the middle-class Western world, at least, is chugging along much like ours does. When the apocalypse comes, it isn’t a bomb or a natural disaster; it’s simply human beings, unable to live in the world we’ve created:

“It’s happening all over. The whole human race is thinking in shorter and shorter terms…. We’re giving up. Packing it in…. Trouble with us humans is we keep forgetting we’re animals. You know what happens when an animal population expands beyond what the setup will bear? Nature finds ways of cutting them back. Usually it’s plain starvation, but even when there’s food to go around something gets triggered inside them. They stop breeding or they eat their own babies or peck one another to death — there’s all sorts of ways. Us too. It’s in us. We can’t escape it.”

By the end of the book, crowds of people are putting rocks in their pockets and walking into the ocean. It’s one of the saddest, most beautiful apocalypses I ever read, and I think it had a heavy hand in shaping my values.

13 vs. 31: This absolutely holds up. Not only is it still a beautifully written book, it doesn’t seem dated at all, and in fact still manages to feel unique twenty years later.

Listen-alikes: I feel compelled to mention that in junior high my friend P and I were obsessed with how Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Walk on the Ocean” reminded us of this book. More than a decade later when I heard We’re About 9′s “Weight of the Ocean,” I had the same reaction.

Welcome to Old-School Apocalypse April!

I’ve been re-reading some childhood favorites from my YA Apocalypse Bookshelf (yes, I really have such a thing). Some hold up brilliantly, some not so much. Stay tuned for more doom-y goodness!

Chanda Phelan wrote this article based on her thesis, for which she looked at a ton of apocalyptic literature from 1826 to 2007 and charted the nature of the apocalypse. Click the image at the top of the article for a full-size version of her amazing chart.

See the spike in natural apocalypses right around the publication of Silent Spring (1962)! Note all the divine apocalypses when the first Left Behind book came out (1996)! I’m dying to get a look at her raw data, but just the graph is fun enough.

(All this discussion of doom books has inspired me to re-read some gems from my YA post-apocalyptic bookshelf. Old-skool apocalypse theme month coming in April!)

D, obviously. The YA lit world is exploding with talk of dystopias. This article from Publishers Weekly gives a good overview of what’s coming out, and theorizes about its current popularity:

“In the late ’80s, the government was seemingly more in control of terrorist things, and the financial system seemed more in control,” says Regina Griffin, executive editor at Egmont USA…. “People didn’t feel that same sense of perpetual unease that is invading books now.” In other words, the time is ripe. “The dystopic novel reflects the current mood of the new generation of young people who see that their future isn’t as rosy,” says child psychiatrist Elizabeth Berger, author of Raising Kids with Character.

As someone who read boatloads of these books in the late ’80s, I don’t know that I agree with this. I remember my 3-2-1 Contacts being full of acid rain and pollution, and anyone who grew up in a liberal household like mine was unsettled by the “traditional values” of the Reagan/H.W. Bush era. Maybe the government was “more in control of terrorist things,” but that just means that didn’t happen to be our Number One Fear at the time. Or maybe I was just a downer kid.

Diana Peterfreund, author of Rampant, tries to untangle “post-apocalyptic” from “dystopian.” (This is slightly easier than defining “fantasy” vs. “science fiction,” but only slightly.) It’s getting more common to lump the terms together, but Diana seems to prefer thinking of a dystopia as “a utopia gone horribly wrong” or “aiming for utopia and missing.”

I’m inclined to agree. Dystopias often follow apocalypses (cue Buffy line about “the plural of apocalypse”), but the beauty of the English language is specificity. We have two words for a reason. Uglies and The Ask and the Answer are both post-apoc and dystopian, The Forest of Hands and Teeth is just plain post-apoc, and Little Brother is just plain dystopian (assuming you would argue, considering the book takes place years later on the other side of the country, that Sept. 11th was not an apocalypse).

As Diana says, “Like a scientist, the author of a dystopian work of fiction creates a set of very particular conditions within which he runs his human experiment.” I love this; that’s exactly what appeals to me about dystopias. Whereas while post-apocalyptics can be this specific, they often boil down to the same themes, with the restrictive governments and/or warlord anarchy.

It does make me wish that we had a word that would lump the two sub-genres together, though, since as Diana points out, they appeal to the same readers. I usually say “speculative fiction,” but that’s not specific enough. Thoughts, clever readers?

Finally, Presenting Lenore is wrapping up Dystopian February, with a world of reviews and author interviews! Here’s one with Patrick Ness, of my beloved Knife of Never Letting Go.