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Apocalypse Wow!
From: Columbia University
| By:
Richard W. Bulliet |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 More than twenty years before the atomic weapons were first used in World War II, Pierrepoint B. Noyes, a well-connected American businessman-turned-WWI-peace-delegate wrote the first apocalyptic novel envisioning nuclear destruction. The book, the Pallid Giant, was republished in 1946 under a different title, once its graphic predictions were born out by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this exclusive essay, Richard Bulliet (right), professor of the history of technology and Middle East History traces the development of the twentieth century genre of nuclear apocalyptic fiction. |
Pierrepont B. Noyes devoted his life to peace, but as the author of the first apocalyptic vision of nuclear holocaust to be published in the United States after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he inaugurated a theme that haunts our collective imagination to the present day. His father, John H. Noyes, founded the utopian community of the Perfectionist sect near Oneida, New York in 1848. It was there that Pierrepont was born in 1870. Schooled in Oneida ideals of communal property, which included women, collective rearing of children, and peaceful cooperation, he eventually attended Colgate and Harvard and went to work for the Oneida silverware company. After a successful career building a national market for Oneida products, Noyes was tapped for a post in the wartime Fuel Administration, then sent by President Woodrow Wilson as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, and finally appointed to the international Rhineland Commission. |
 Disillusioned by these experiences, and convinced that the European powers were more interested in preparing for a new war than in making permanent peace, Noyes vented his frustration in the novel Pallid Giant published in 1927. In the manner of H. G. Wells, he recounts the annihilation of a pre-prehistoric human civilization whose records the story's heros discover while exploring a cavern in southern France. Once deciphered, the records tell of a lethal struggle among possessors of an atomic super-weapon. Mutual terror, the 'pallid giant' of the title, leads the competing groups finally to mutual and total destruction and the disappearance from the earth of all evidence that they ever existed. |
To make his parable clear, Noyes sets his tale in the context of the Peace Conference deliberations, and puts into the mouth of one character the words: "And the thing Markham is working on might be the most awful thing that's ever been invented. They're hoping to use atomic power in some form--splitting the atom. That's not a new idea, of course ... Every nation with enough resources has thought of it, and half of them are working on it, too. But Markham thinks the Germans are ahead of the field. If they should win--discover the secret first--they might have the rest of the world at their mercy"(p. 20). |
Though Pallid Giant did not sell millions of copies, Noyes was well connected, and his novel was not forgotten. It was republished in the Spring of 1946, less than a year after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its new title was Gentlemen: You are Mad!, a phrase borrowed from a March, 1946 article on atomic energy by Lewis Mumford in Saturday Review of Literature. Bernard M. Baruch, an eminent member of the newly formed United Nations Atomic Energy Commission wrote an introduction. "Now I am impressed," wrote Baruch, "with the prophetic nature of that story [i.e. Pallid Giant] and believe that a much wider circulation will help our people to realize that momentous changes, political, economic and perhaps social are ahead of the peoples of the world--if they would avert ultimate annihilation" (p. viii). |
Thus began the fantasizing of nuclear devastation and its aftermath, not just as a theme of popular culture, but as a powerful element in the formation of public perceptions of new technologies. At the outset, despite the mushroom clouds over Japan, fiction writers were uncertain what nuclear war would really be like. Noyes himself visualized an atomic disintegration ray. Wilson Tucker, in The Long Loud Silence, published the year after the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1951, depicted nuclear destruction of the U.S. east of the Mississippi more in terms of pestilence than of obliterated landscapes and lethal radiation. In 1954, Philip Wylie published Tomorrow, which presented a less than apocalyptic comparison between twin cities under nuclear attack. The city with a good civil defense system comes through pretty well, while its unprepared neighbor perishes.
Not until 1957 did a novel appear that took nuclear annihilation to its logical extreme in a realistic fashion. This was Nevil Shute's chilling On the Beach, which stands out among apocalyptic fantasies for its no-survivors scenario: Australians waiting for the inevitable spread worldwide of deadly radiation from a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Shute departed from the time-honored narrative technique of describing an apocalypse from the point of view or for the edification of its survivors. Where the descendants of Noah passed on the cautionary story of the great flood and readers of the book of Revelation could hope or presume themselves to be among the saved, Shute's protagonists know that they and everyone else will ultimately die. Nevertheless, Shute did embrace the broader theme of using fictional catastrophe to warn against misguided policies in the real world. |
Herman Kahn tamed the free-wheeling imaginations of novelists with his exhaustive and exhausting nonfiction treatise On Thermonuclear War, published in 1961. From then on, authors bent on describing nuclear conflicts had to set their narratives within more or less established parameters, or downplay the holocaust itself and move on to its aftermath. The apocalypse-and-aftermath theme had by then been too well set to be sidetracked by technical details. Indeed, nuclear annihilation was becoming a staple of pure entertainment. By the 1980s, with novels like Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980) and movies like Road Warrior (1981), audiences readily accepted the premise that nuclear holocaust--details no longer needed--would set human civilization back to a more primitive, and more fascinating, level. |
Other forms of popular culture followed suit. By the debut of television's near-future series Dark Angel in 2000, a single introductory sentence was deemed sufficient to inform viewers that nuclear explosions a few years hence would cause electromagnetic interference and collapse the American economy, transforming the country overnight from a superpower into a third world nation. In the dystopic comic book Give Me Liberty(1990) and its sequels, written by Frank Miller and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, nuclear devastation is just one ingredient of an apocalyptic cocktail that includes burning the Amazon rain forest and the inundation of New York City through global warming. |
Ironically, while the earliest nuclear holocaust fantasies were often written as warnings, the theme became sufficiently humdrum to be used as a premise for other sorts of stories just as the real destructive power of nuclear weapons was multiplying beyond imagining with the intensification of the U.S.-Soviet arms race. Thus in the 1990s, with the former Cold War adversaries still maintaining nuclear arsenals sufficient to destroy life on earth, the newly popular acronym WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) invited people to think of nerve gas and anthrax germs, previously labeled CBW (Chemical and Biological Warfare) agents, as equivalents of nuclear weapons. |
Fantasy writers were not slow to pick up on these fresher sources of apocalyptic scenarios. Twelve Monkeys, a screenplay written in 1994, visualized a world depopulated by the deliberate spread of horrible pathogens. Two years later, in Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling offered a moving account of a future gerontocracy and accompanying medical-industrial complex made possible by a massive, but unspecified, epidemic-caused die-off of world population in the early twenty-first century. Apocalyptic assumptions of other sorts gave birth to David Brin's Earth (1990), in which environmental degradation competes with a vagrant black hole in the Earth's core as a potential source of humanity's demise, and the movie Deep Impact (1998), which took a depressingly unflinching look, at least in its central story, at the possibility of life on Earth being annihilated by collision with a large meteor. |
It may well be argued that millennial catastrophizing, with its undeniable religious undercurrent, played a greater role in apocalyptic fantasies of the 1990s than hopes of being a modern Cassandra issuing (unheeded) predictions of doom for the House of Atreus. But the interconnection between real world technology and visions of disaster has been too close for too long a time to be dismissed as mere entertainment. Luddites broke knitting machines in 1812 to preserve their livelihoods from the unemployment they associated with technological change. My Harvard classmate Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unibomber, sent letter-bombs. Apocalyptic fantasists visualize the technology of the near future destroying us if we don't destroy it first . . . or second, in the case of The Matrix (1999), The Terminator (1984), and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991). |
Pierrepont Noyes wrote Pallid Giant to warn readers of the destructive power of fear, the sort of fear that might lead an otherwise rational people to annihilate its neighbor in the name of its own protection. Subsequent decades saw his scenario almost come to pass. But the fears of the Cold War were tempered, fortunately, by a realism that saved humanity from destruction. Indeed, there are those who maintain that the mutuality of fear, the acute awareness on both sides that they had crossed the threshold of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), is what saved the world from nuclear holocaust. So is fear the destroyer? Or the savior? |
In 1987, Alan Moore wrote and Dave Gibbons illustrated the graphic novel Watchmen, which culminates in the most ingenious apocalypse fantasy of the late twentieth century. At the cost of half the population of New York City, the world is led to believe that invasion of earth from another dimension is imminent. Mutual fear causes nations on the brink of war to step back and negotiate peace; people turn from various social pathologies to face their unknown but ghastly enemy together. The interdimensional threat, however, is a fraud perpetrated by a megalomaniac who sees himself as a reincarnation of Alexander the Great, uniting the world while callously eliminating whoever gets in his way. |
Juxtaposed to the new Alexander is a vile sociopath of extraordinary integrity, a man who will maim and kill without remorse, but who remains scrupulously faithful to his own warped vision of justice. For him, the fraud of the mock apocalypse stands as a moral offense that no ancillary benefit, even global peace, can excuse. Better, in his view, that people discard their unwarranted fears, whatever the cost, than that they cling to one another in mutual but unfounded terror. |
As we enter the new millennium, our fascination with apocalyptic scenarios focuses more on the heroism, grit, and ingenuity needed to survive than on the misguided policies that might be leading us to our doom. Pierrepont Noyes' hoped that his horrifying fantasy would show humanity the necessity of embracing altruism and brotherly love. Today we seem convinced that altruism works best when it is accompanied by paranoid suspicion, massive firepower, spectacular martial arts skills, and an inhuman capacity to endure pain. Were he alive today, Noyes could only feel that, like Cassandra, his was a warning destined to be unheard. |
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