George Allan England, Darkness and Dawn
Mar. 17th, 2010 09:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersI'm not sure why I finished this trilogy, which was first serialized by Bob Davis in the Munsey magazines in 1912, 1913, and 1914 and then collected into an omnibus book in 1914. It was a slog to read, and it took me well over a year to get through it, with long breaks between each book of the trilogy. Why a slog? It is priggish, mawkish, racist, and pretty much completely unbelievable. It has all the worst aspects of Edgar Rice Burroughs (a contemporary of England's) with almost none of the virtues of his imagination. Yet I did not bounce off it, as I did with Bellamy's Looking Backward, so I guess it wasn't boring. There was just enough interest in seeing how the story ended to keep me going.
The basic set-up is that an engineer and his secretary wake up in New York City after having been in suspended animation for a thousand years. There's a hand-waving explanation for the suspended animation. The city is in ruins and completely uninhabited. (The first book is called The Vacant World.) Happily (if completely unbelievably) enough goods from the past have survived a thousand years that they can begin to piece together a life using canned goods and ancient guns. Then a horde of black-skinned subhumans arrives on the scene, threatening the idyll.
And so it goes, from one adventure to the next. This is a post-apocalypse story, a survivalist story, an Adam and Eve story. It's about two healthy, clean-living young white people and how they begin to create civilization in a shattered world. The slate has been wiped clean (except for some handy technology), and they get to start the whole shebang from scratch. The appeal of the story is this sense that if we could start over, we could make a civilization without any of the thorny problems of the modern world. Is racial antagonism a problem? Well, what if we had a world in which there were only white people? (Those black-skinned folks aren't people.)
The other thing that drives the story, although at a lower level of tension, is the mystery of what happened to cause the collapse of civilization in the first place. In the first book, the engineer is able to determine that gravity is lighter than it once was and that there have been a few other massive changes to the world. There's a mysterious shadow hovering in a closer orbit than the moon's. In the second book, Beyond the Great Oblivion, they discover an enormous cataract in the Atlantic Ocean and then an enormous abyss in the middle of the continent. (By this point they have fixed a thousand year old plane and are able to fly. Right?) At the bottom of the abyss is a tribe of barbaric white (indeed, albino) people living on an underground lake. There's an old wise man who ... can speak English! He's from a long line of old wise men, you see.
And so the mysteries are gradually revealed. Meanwhile our hero and heroine (Allan and Beatrice) run around dressed in skins, with their smooth muscular bodies and hale and healthy appetites, and they are deeply in love and occasionally want to, you know, throw off the skins and make wild jungle love, but no, no, they must wait until they're married! There are several hilarious scenes of Allan mastering his desires. They call each other "boy" and "girl," and they practically chuck each other on the chin with hale and hearty affection. This is very reminiscent of the priggish attitude toward sex in Burroughs as well. I suppose it's a pale shadow of courtly love, but it certainly lacks the social context. It seems more like an attempt to keep up middle class respectability in the face of all extremes, and it just seems laughable. (Christopher Priest has a pretty good parody of this attitude in The Space Machine.) Eventually in the second book they have a wedding ceremony, and then somehow the chin-chucking leads to procreation in the aptly titled third volume, The Afterglow.
In the end, all obstacles are overcome, and the final two chapters zoom us into a utopian future. Civilization has been restored, but it's even better now. The fervor of these chapters would be moving if it weren't papering over some pretty unpleasant realities. As I've said before, I don't find utopias very interesting, which is part of the reason I bounced off of Bellamy's book. Here part of the victory of "civilization" is the complete annihilation of the subhuman Horde. Within the logic of the book, this is a victory over barbarism and animal nature. From outside the logic of the book, it's not hard to see this as an apology for American genocide against the American Indians, who have been furthermore merged with African slaves (it is vaguely speculated that the Horde might be the descendants of blacks).
All of this -- the priggishness, the mawkishness, the racism -- is pretty nauseating. England comes off as a real twit in the introduction he wrote for a later edition of the book, which is also interesting for its attitude toward what he calls pseudo-science stories. (You can make money writing this shit! And it makes you think, too! Unlike the other shit I write!) So why did I finish the damned thing? I guess it's because I'm interested in getting a broader picture of the field in this era. Either that or I'm an idiotic masochist with an addiction to weird adventure fiction.
The basic set-up is that an engineer and his secretary wake up in New York City after having been in suspended animation for a thousand years. There's a hand-waving explanation for the suspended animation. The city is in ruins and completely uninhabited. (The first book is called The Vacant World.) Happily (if completely unbelievably) enough goods from the past have survived a thousand years that they can begin to piece together a life using canned goods and ancient guns. Then a horde of black-skinned subhumans arrives on the scene, threatening the idyll.
And so it goes, from one adventure to the next. This is a post-apocalypse story, a survivalist story, an Adam and Eve story. It's about two healthy, clean-living young white people and how they begin to create civilization in a shattered world. The slate has been wiped clean (except for some handy technology), and they get to start the whole shebang from scratch. The appeal of the story is this sense that if we could start over, we could make a civilization without any of the thorny problems of the modern world. Is racial antagonism a problem? Well, what if we had a world in which there were only white people? (Those black-skinned folks aren't people.)
The other thing that drives the story, although at a lower level of tension, is the mystery of what happened to cause the collapse of civilization in the first place. In the first book, the engineer is able to determine that gravity is lighter than it once was and that there have been a few other massive changes to the world. There's a mysterious shadow hovering in a closer orbit than the moon's. In the second book, Beyond the Great Oblivion, they discover an enormous cataract in the Atlantic Ocean and then an enormous abyss in the middle of the continent. (By this point they have fixed a thousand year old plane and are able to fly. Right?) At the bottom of the abyss is a tribe of barbaric white (indeed, albino) people living on an underground lake. There's an old wise man who ... can speak English! He's from a long line of old wise men, you see.
And so the mysteries are gradually revealed. Meanwhile our hero and heroine (Allan and Beatrice) run around dressed in skins, with their smooth muscular bodies and hale and healthy appetites, and they are deeply in love and occasionally want to, you know, throw off the skins and make wild jungle love, but no, no, they must wait until they're married! There are several hilarious scenes of Allan mastering his desires. They call each other "boy" and "girl," and they practically chuck each other on the chin with hale and hearty affection. This is very reminiscent of the priggish attitude toward sex in Burroughs as well. I suppose it's a pale shadow of courtly love, but it certainly lacks the social context. It seems more like an attempt to keep up middle class respectability in the face of all extremes, and it just seems laughable. (Christopher Priest has a pretty good parody of this attitude in The Space Machine.) Eventually in the second book they have a wedding ceremony, and then somehow the chin-chucking leads to procreation in the aptly titled third volume, The Afterglow.
In the end, all obstacles are overcome, and the final two chapters zoom us into a utopian future. Civilization has been restored, but it's even better now. The fervor of these chapters would be moving if it weren't papering over some pretty unpleasant realities. As I've said before, I don't find utopias very interesting, which is part of the reason I bounced off of Bellamy's book. Here part of the victory of "civilization" is the complete annihilation of the subhuman Horde. Within the logic of the book, this is a victory over barbarism and animal nature. From outside the logic of the book, it's not hard to see this as an apology for American genocide against the American Indians, who have been furthermore merged with African slaves (it is vaguely speculated that the Horde might be the descendants of blacks).
All of this -- the priggishness, the mawkishness, the racism -- is pretty nauseating. England comes off as a real twit in the introduction he wrote for a later edition of the book, which is also interesting for its attitude toward what he calls pseudo-science stories. (You can make money writing this shit! And it makes you think, too! Unlike the other shit I write!) So why did I finish the damned thing? I guess it's because I'm interested in getting a broader picture of the field in this era. Either that or I'm an idiotic masochist with an addiction to weird adventure fiction.
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