Brian Aldiss | CW Hawes

Cozy Catastrophe Review: Earth Abides

The cozy catastrophe can have no better representative than George R Stewart’s Earth Abides. To the modern reader who is expecting a thrilling nail biter of a novel, oozing zombies at every turn, this is not the book for you.

However, if you are looking for a thought-provoking story of a person, a story of a person’s life, a story about a real person who is not always likable and yet has a vision that rallies people around him, a story of hope and inspiration — than this book is your cup of tea.

Earth Abides is about Isherwood Williams and his life after he survives a rattlesnake bite and a deadly pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s population. While the world of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and into the ‘60s quaked in its boots worrying over a nuclear holocaust, Stewart showed us there are other things about which we need to be concerned. Primary of which is our lack of concern about our impact on the natural world and its counter-impact on us.

When Ish, as he is called, comes down out of the mountains where he has been hiking and discovers the world as he knew it had died in a matter of weeks, we see a person befuddled by the enormity of the tragedy and yet one who as a result develops the resolve to not let knowledge die. He gets a car and drives from his home in California to New York City and then back to California, taking in a grand tour of the devastated country.

What Ish learns is that people don’t know how to survive for the most part and secondly, they never knew what to live for. What really matters in life. Earth Abides is in part philosophy masquerading as a novel. The questions Ish asks himself and what he eventually demands of the group that collects around him are important questions we should all ask ourselves before disaster strikes us.

Ish discovers that the world of businessmen and middle-class values does not prepare one for the real stuff of life. Stewart contrasts a southern African-American family with a Euro-American couple in New York City.

The poor blacks know more of life than the prosperous whites. The African-Americans set about to create a family of survivors: a man, a woman, and a young boy. Ish finds the woman pregnant. They have collected some farm animals and planted a garden. They make Ish realize that is what he needs to do rather than simply scavenge the detritus of the dead world.

The white couple in New York, by contrast, have no children, drink booze all day, play cards, read mysteries, and eat their meals out of tin cans, sometimes to Chateau Margaux. They have not given one thought as to what will happen when winter comes. Ish likes them for they are not despondent over what happened, but he realizes they will not survive because they don’t know how to and aren’t capable of thinking beyond their urban middle-class box.

George R Stewart wrote Earth Abides in the 1940s, it was published in 1949. His language is a bit dated by our politically correct standards and his science is also. But Stewart’s vision of hope is timeless. He was a professor of English at UC Berkeley. He was educated at Princeton, Berkeley, and Columbia. Dr Stewart was something of a polymath and unfortunately is virtually forgotten today. He wrote widely on a great array of subjects.

Stewart’s vision of a possible future for the human race is an interesting one. In a time when blacks were largely ignored by the greater society, Stewart shows them to hold the future in their hands. They know how to survive. Ish, whose name is symbolic, Ish meaning man in Hebrew, and is white marries a woman, Emma, who is at least partly African-American. That in an era in which miscegenation was very much taboo. Emma’s name is also symbolic for it means whole or universal. Ish calls her “the Mother of Nations”.

The style of writing is a partial throw back to the Victorian third person omniscient, which I find to put a certain distance between the reader and the story. For the story is told to me by an all-knowing narrator. Earth Abides is somewhat in this style and therefore creates a certain distance between reader and story. If one can overlook the manner of the telling, then one will find the classic that this novel truly is.

The detractors of the cozy, and I’m primarily pointing a finger at Brian Aldiss and Jo Walton and those websites that repeat their criticisms, have so narrowly defined what the cozy is, as though it is solely a British thing, they have turned off readers to a truly great treasure trove of fiction that can stimulate the best in us in the here and now. Earth Abides busts wide open what very much appears to be the self-loathing of Aldiss and Walton. Their own dislike of their own middle-class existence.

In Earth Abides, we see a college student collect together a band of largely working class people and craftsmen. He draws inspiration from a class and race that was marginalized in his day and age. The main character breaks the old taboos in his quest for a better society, but realizes he can’t do it alone. Earth Abides is not a tale filled with thrills and spills. It is one filled with ideas and filled with hope for a better world. Something we all want. It is the classic cozy catastrophe.

Comments are always welcome! Until next time, happy reading!

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Cozy Catastrophe Review: The Day of the Triffids

If you do a web search for “cozy catastrophe” you will come across quite a few websites parroting the nonsense that this form of the post-apocalyptic tale was written almost exclusively by white middle-class British blokes after World War II longing for the days of Empire and Tory government and that the cozy was simply their way of lashing out at the world they didn’t like.

Such a position simply reveals the ignorance of those making it. If one looks at the history of the form, one is quickly disabused of such a notion.

Of course the negative attitude of these critics has one source and that source is Brian Aldiss. Why Aldiss was seemingly so opposed to the fiction of John Wyndham baffles me and I will not attempt to understand what is probably not understandable.

Today we will take a look at The Day of the Triffids, the 1951 novel by Wyndham which is ultimately responsible for the term “cozy catastrophe”.

Below is the BBC’s version of the Triffid

The Day of the Triffids begins with a worldwide catastrophe that’s made most everyone blind. As if that isn’t bad enough, the blindness is followed by a fast killing plague. And then there are the Triffids: those giant, mobile, carnivorous, and seemingly intelligent plants created in a lab to be a supply of an exceedingly nutritious oil.

The hero, who was recuperating in the hospital from a triffid sting and had his eyes bandaged, wakes in the morning following a beautiful meteor shower to find nothing as it should be. Eventually he removes his bandages. He can see and discovers no one in the hospital can. Workers, doctors, and patients alike. Then he discovers everyone who saw the meteors has gone blind.

At first, only the hero, Bill Masen, realizes the danger posed by the triffids and no one will listen to him. No one except for Josella Playton, whose home is overrun by triffids early on.

The triffids are manmade. Masen also speculates the meteor shower was a manmade disaster. A weapons system of orbiting satellites that accidentally went off. Masen also speculates that the plague which soon breaks out is also a biological weapon created in a lab that somehow got free.

In 1951, the horror of World War II was only six years gone. The Korean War had started the previous year, the Cold War was being waged between Russia and the West, and the threat of a nuclear war occurring was a very real fear. I remember getting civil defense pamphlets in school. People stockpiled water and food and built bomb shelters. Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold is a time travel story about nuclear war and the salvation one man’s bomb shelter provides.

That everyone might be wiped out was something we all felt who were alive back then, if not consciously, certainly unconsciously.

At the same time, we all hoped for a better world. A world free from war and the threat of annihilation. Is it any wonder why the cozy catastrophe, with its message of hope, was so popular? And continues to be?

The Day of the Triffids posits two types of manmade disasters: biological warfare and plant modification gone awry. The latter reminds me of the current debate over GMOs. Wyndham was clearly warning us that our end may not come in a mushroom cloud, but may be due to the fact we need to eat and growing enough food for the world is a constant problem.

The storyline is very broadly typical of the cozy. A small group of survivors bands together and tries to continue some form of civilization. Of course each group of survivors has their own spin on what the new civilization will look like.

Seemingly the main criticism of cozies is that everyone’s middle class. In Triffids, certainly Bill and Josella are. But that isn’t necessarily the case regarding the other survivors we meet. The character Coker certainly appears to be from laboring class. Regardless, though, of whatever class people start out as, everyone, in order to survive, must become a laborer.

The catastrophe has made everyone equal. In fact, when some form of militaristic authoritarian government eventually reaches Bill and Josella, They flee. They want no part of the class structure to be imposed on them.

Ultimately The Day of the Triffids is about hope in the face of adversity, about an innate sense of goodness and decency which will rise up in the face of extreme suffering and calamity, freedom from authoritarianism, and about our dreams for better future.

Looking at the novel sixty-five years after it was published, I’d say it has much in common with Heinlein’s libertarian manifesto The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Triffids has none of the negative features pejoratively assigned to it by Aldiss and his ilk. In fact, I’d say it is the opposite. The book is about liberty, equality, and fraternity. It is a book showing that in the worst of times we can be at our best as human beings.

Comments are always welcome! Until next time, happy reading!

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The Cozy Catastrophe – Additional Thoughts

Above, Pripyat two decades after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Last week we looked at those elements which were essential to the cozy catastrophe. This week we’re taking a further look at the subgenre to dispel a couple misguided thoughts.

Formula Fiction

Ever since Brian Aldiss coined the term cozy catastrophe, the subgenre has gotten a bad rap by many both in and without the science fiction community. One of the charges against it is that it is formula fiction.

Jo Walton, on the TOR website, disparagingly wrote, “You could quite easily write a program for generating one.”

In response, I’d argue all fiction is essentially formulaic. Because stories fall into familiar patterns. Ronald B Tobias, in his book Twenty Master Plots, has not only broken down all story lines into twenty basic patterns, he goes further and enumerates the eight lowest common plot denominators. These are the eight things all stories must have to be a story. Now doesn’t that sound like putting together a formula?

Stories follow patterns. Doesn’t matter if they are mainstream, literary, experimental, or genre fiction. The pattern of boy meets girl has been told at least a million different ways. But the pattern — the formula — is the same: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl, and, depending on whether the story has a happy or sad ending, boy keeps girl or boy loses girl. Isn’t that a formula?

Ms Walton rather snobbishly condemns the cozy catastrophe of being formulaic and exempts other subgenres of science fiction. But if we look at space opera we find very definite formulas and tropes there as well. The classic good versus evil storyline. The underdog become hero. Spaceships that magically have gravity in a way that is scientifically impossible. All planets with life have an earth-like environment. What Ms Walton forgets is that we gladly suspend our disbelief in order to enjoy the story.

Back in the ‘20s and ‘30s, pulp fiction, which was all genre oriented and very formulaic, was exceedingly popular and similarly dismissed as inferior because it wasn’t literary. Yet the best writers and stories of the pulp era are still read today, while many literary writers have been forgotten and their works molder away in the catacombs of some library or have ended up as landfill.

The cozy catastrophe in the hands of a good writer is no more formulaic than any other story. Over the next few weeks we’ll look at some examples of novels categorized as cozies and hopefully I’ll demonstrate that cozies aren’t as formulaic as some may think.

Another view of Pripyat

Not a Survivalist Story

We enjoy survival stories. People versus nature. The good surviving the machinations of the bad. We cheer when they survive and weep when they do not.

Movies such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Road are survival tales, even though The Road is also post-apocalyptic. So are “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, My Side of the Mountain, Island of the Blue Dolphin, Robinson Crusoe, and Lord of the Flies. Even movies such as Play Misty for Me and Fatal Attraction have elements of the survival tale, which may account for their popularity.

In the cozy catastrophe, while survival is important, it is not the paramount concern. That the group will survive is essentially a given. At what stage of civilization the group will survive isn’t. That is where the conflict comes in.

The Road is a post-apocalyptic tale of survival. The question we keep asking ourselves is will the man and his son survive the wasteland the earth has become. At the end, we are left with some hope the boy will survive.

In Earth Abides and The Day of the Triffids, it is assumed the main characters will survive. The question is how and in what condition. This switch in focus is due to the cozy catastrophe being a story of hope, a story of our attempt to create utopia.

The cozy, while having elements of the survival tale, isn’t essentially a tale about survival.

A schoolroom in Pripyat

Not Dystopian

In our post-modern world, we have gone down two roads: one is a fantasy world where good battles evil and wins, thus giving us a measure of hope in a world where we don’t feel any hope; the other, is that of a dystopian nightmare where even if good (and good may not even be that good) wins and the impact is at best minimal. We are essentially doomed and the doom has only been forestalled.

I believe we have a love affair with dystopia because we have little hope. We no longer trust government, science, or religion to solve the crucial problems facing us. We no longer believe civilization is getting better with each passing generation. Things just seem to be getting worse and there is no stopping the free fall. We are reveling in our own demise.

We see this in movies, TV shows, and books such as The Iron Heel, Max Headroom, the Mad Max series, The Handmaid’s Tale, Soylent Green, Never Let Me Go, and The Hunger Games. It’s difficult not to think we’re screwed and we did it to ourselves.

In the cozy catastrophe, the tunnel may be very dark but there is a light at the end of it.

Hope

The cozy catastrophe is not dystopian, not primarily a tale of survival, nor is it formulaic tripe. It is, however, a tale of hope. The cozy is primarily utopian in nature. Brought to his and her lowest, people band together to survive and thrive. To rebuild the world and make it a better place than before.

That theme is stated over and over again in The Day of the Triffids, the classic work for which Aldiss coined the term.

And maybe that explains why contemporary writers, at least some of them, have such a difficult time with the subgenre. Things may have been bad before the great demise, but they weren’t all bad. The disaster, while horrible, gives us a chance to start over and get it right. We are Lif and Lifthrasir after Ragnarok making a new beginning. Goodness, hope, kindness, and justice will prevail.

Next week we’ll begin looking at some examples of the cozy catastrophe. We’ll examine the themes and storylines and see if we don’t find some truly wonderful tales — in spite of what the naysayers would have us believe.

Until then good reading! Comments are always welcome!

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What is a Cozy Catastrophe?

In the book Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss coined the term cozy catastrophe. He used the term to describe a particular type of post-apocalyptic writing as famously seen in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. This form of the post-apocalyptic tale was particularly popular in the UK in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Aldiss’s use of the term was at base pejorative. Coming from what seems to have been a politically radical leftist position, Aldiss dismissed the sub-subgenre as being some manner of wish fulfillment: the return of the Empire, praise of nature and the simple life, or a criticism of science and industrialization.

Time, however, marches on and even if we give Aldiss his due for the fiction published prior to 1973, the cozy catastrophe itself has changed and Aldiss’s observations are no longer accurate for today – if they were even accurate in his own day, which they may not have been.

Blogger russell1200 on his blog reflexiones finales posted a short but important article about the cozy on July 14, 2011. My thoughts have been influenced by his article.

If Aldiss’s description of the cozy catastrophe is no longer relevant, than what are the characteristics that make a cozy a cozy?

Why the term “cozy”?

Let’s begin with the term cozy itself. Why a cozy catastrophe? What on earth can be cozy about a world wide catastrophe? The general consensus is that the term was borrowed from the cozy mystery subgenre.

So what is a cozy mystery? It is a mystery solved by an amateur sleuth. Think here of Miss Marple, Father Brown, Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, or Sidney Chambers in Grantchester. An ordinary person solves the murder when the professionals cannot. Likewise with the cozy catastrophe, a group of amateur survivalists survive, when others cannot.

The Catastrophe

A group of ordinary people have survived a catastrophe. What kind of catastrophe? In the cozy, the catastrophe, the apocalyptic event must be worldwide and pretty much wipes out most of the human race. Animals and plant life may also be affected, but the emphasis here is on the destruction of people. The rest of the world remains basically intact.

Recognizable Setting

The setting needs to be recognizable and the story plausible as a real world event. Something that could happen right now, today, to us.

This is very much like the cozy mystery. The amateur sleuth comes across a murder in his or her everyday world and for one reason or another must solve it when the police can’t or won’t.

One thing to keep in mind here is that distant future stories must somehow be coherently and realistically connected to our present day world. If not, they fail the real world test. The Time Machine and After London pass this test. The Planet of the Apes, a nifty story in and of itself, unfortunately, does not.

The Small Group

The story generally focuses on the survival of a small group of people or perhaps several small groups. The group comes together, or sometimes is already together at the start of the story, and then sets about trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Conflict can come from both outside sources, other groups perhaps or wild animals, and internal dissension.

A Survivable World

Is the world survivable if the group makes the effort to survive? This goes back to the nature of the catastrophe. The worldwide disaster needs to primarily affect people, leaving much of the pre-catastrophe infrastructure intact, which allows the group a base upon which to rebuild society. Whether or not they succeed is the telling of their story.

In my mind, this is a key feature of the cozy catastrophe. The survivors are not mere survivalists. They are the recreators of civilization. Or they at least make a valiant attempt to recreate the world they lost.

A New World

Society, civilization, at some point is rebuilt. Generally speaking. An exception is On the Beach by Nevil Shute. The new society is hopefully better than the old, but in fact may not be. But the human race does not die off, it survives and a new world is born. Much like at Ragnarok, where the old world of the gods is destroyed and out of the destruction Lif and Lifthrasir survive and begin a new world.

The Message of the Cozy Catastrophe

Frequently the cozy catastrophe is a vehicle for anti-establishment rhetoric. The “evils” of the status quo, the establishment, brought about the catastrophe. Whether those evils be nuclear weapons or biological experimentation, or GMOs not turning out as intended — it is our own messing around with nature or our inability to live in peace with each other that very often causes the demise of our world.

In that sense, the subgenre can be made use of by radical liberals and libertarians alike to promote their agenda. There is often a philosophical underpinning to the cozy. Issues of morality and how we should be as people are very real parts of the story.

Next week, we’ll take a look at what the cozy catastrophe isn’t. Until then, good reading. Comments are always welcome!

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