e are fond, aren't we, of destroying the world?
Go back 50 years, to the first real wave of SF movies, and what do you find? George Pal's When Worlds Collide, in which Earth is smashed into bite-sized chunks by a rogue planetoid.
A year later, Pal brought forth War of the Worlds, with Martian war machines rampaging from Pomona to Los Angeles' city hall (laying waste to other parts of the world, too, of course).
Since then there have been dozens of catastrophes, in print and on screen, from good old nuclear war (On the Beach, ABC's The Day After) to smaller-sized astronomical objects (Niven and Pournelle's novel Lucifer's Hammer and the movies Deep Impact and Armageddon) to plague (Earth Abides, The Stand) and killer plants (The Day of the Triffids, No Blade of Grass) to killer weather (The Day After Tomorrow, not to be confused with the nuclear-war example up the page) to several novels by J.G. Ballard, in which Earth is destroyed by drought (The Burning World), flood (The Drowned World) and some kind of weird transformation of time (The Crystal World).
How has the field evolved in 50 years? Given that one of the summer's biggest movies was Steven Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds, and that another big flick in the pipeline is another version of When Worlds Collide, I would have to say, not much.
We love to destroy the world.
The question is, why?
Siding with the survivors
The first answer is that it's cathartic. We all harbor fears of forces bigger than we are—giant planetoids, tsunamis and megafloods, tornadoes—that could easily crush/drown/blow us away. By engaging with the hero/survivor of a cataclysm, we confront these fears and make them less fearful.
We are also exploring tangential or metaphorical fears. Many of the titles listed above were by English writers such as Ballard, John Wyndham, John Christopher ... you can go all the way back to Wells. The theory is, these writer were reacting to the long, ugly dismantling of the British empire.
Or some such psychobabble. It's also possible that we just like seeing stuff destroyed—especially if it happens to other people.
It's even more satisfying if we picture ourselves among the plucky survivors, able to build a whole new world without having to take into account the opinions of 5.8 billion other humans.
I've never been able to picture myself in that group. I come from a long line of red shirts and spear carriers ... people who were farmers or typical suburbanites or city dwellers who were ripe targets for storms, drought, plague, pestilence, earthquakes or suitcase-sized dirty nukes set off in a Bekins truck in downtown L.A.
To paraphrase an old Woody Allen joke about his draft status ("In case of war, I'm a hostage"), in case of global catastrophe, I'm "missing and presumed dead."
To me, the most terrifying moments of all these movies are when things start to get weird: The first sight of the freakish lightning in Spielberg's WoTW is enough to send me running for the basement.
A shadow on an X-ray can be a personal apocalypse. So can a bad news biopsy. (Ed Bryant beautifully equated cancer and the death of the universe in a short story called "Particle Theory" some years back.) The sight of a state trooper at your front door the night your child takes the car ... sudden shooting pains in your chest ...
Forget the large-scale disaster. The fear factor is directly proportional to how close it hits.
TV discovers the apocalypse
As if the December tsunamis weren't lesson enough, we have Katrina's devastation of New Orleans to educate us in the grim reality of an apocalypse. You're not likely to wind up a new Adam or Abraham, or even Charlton Heston ... you're most likely to lose your home and everything you own except the increasingly nasty clothes you're wearing. You'll lose touch with your parents, children, neighbors. You'll face disease, hunger, violence when you aren't worn down by neglect, depression and plain old boredom.
Your story would be the least-watchable sci-fi movie in history—always excepting Timeline.
It turns out that the reality of post-Katrina New Orleans has been portrayed in a science-fiction novel—Samuel Delany's Dhalgren (1975). This long, controversial work deals with the survivors (and mis-directed wanderers) in an American city that has been hit by an unspecified disaster—then largely abandoned. (I owe this connection to Bidisha Banerjee, writing at Reason online for Sept. 13, www.reason.com/hod/bb091305.shtml.)
The parallels are chilling—and not just for their prescience.
Several years ago, there was a cute theory floating around that SF stories and films were actually prophetic, or predictive. That is, our big-screen disasters presaged actual disasters to come. (The same theory was attached to various meet-the-alien films, beginning with Close Encounters.) The global zeigeist, working through the subconsciousness of a writer, was preparing an audience for what was to come.
Of course, this could be just more psychobabble. Or the equivalent of using the vague statements of Nostradamus to predict the horror of Paris Hilton. There's always something bad going on—some global badass to be this year's Antichrist.
And yet ...
Television successfully resisted the world-smashing idea on the logical grounds that it doesn't lend itself to many episodes. If you end the world—or tear up most of it—in the first half-hour, what do you do for the next 13 hours? The next 70? You have a pioneer story.
We've had TV movies and miniseries, of course, from Meteor to the most recent (and not as bad as I feared) Supernova that dealt with disasters. But not series.
Not until now.
I've been sampling Threshold and Surface and Invasion, and what do I see? Three series that combine the apocalypse with alien encounters.
Yes, I'm familiar with the way Hollywood works, where an idea suddenly bubbles up from the general buzz and results in competing projects (to re-cite Armageddon and Deep Impact).
Is our subconscious trying to tell us something? To get us ready for a significant and disastrous change in our world? Is some latent mammalian sense seeing a threat in the change in global weather patterns?
That's frightening. (And might make a good story. Hmmm.)
Michael Cassutt is the author of 11 books, a couple of dozen short stories and over 60 teleplays, none of them dealing with global-scale catastrophes. But you never know.
