These day , SF thrillers in which innate tragedy stop human lifetime as we know it are mainstream menu . But long before M. Night Shyamalan and J.G. Ballard flirted with disaster , the authors of SF ’s Pre - fortunate Age ( 1904 - 33 ) speculated wildly , and sometimes cannily , about the potential crusade of dire biospheric translation .
During science fabrication ’s Golden Age ( roughly , 1935 - 65 ) , scores of novel and history depicted vast raw catastrophe . If 9/11 was the real - spirit version of a New York catastrophe we ’d seen in SF many time before , Al Gore ’s melting - glacier slideshow in An Inconvenient Truth was , uncannily , only the latest of many global - warming cataclysms about which SF fans had read in novels about , for instance , sea - dwelling extraterrestrial ( John Wyndham ’s The Kraken Wakes ) , atomic examination ( Charles Eric Maine ’s The Tide Went Out ) , even the stalling - out of the Earth ’s rotation ( Brian Aldiss ’s Hothouse ) .
J.G. Ballard ’s sixties catastrophe tetralogy , and gilded - Age classics like George R. Stewart ’s Earth Abides helped legalize and popularize the eco - catastrophe novel . But the writing of the natural disaster , as Blanchot might put it , is a pre - gilded Age phenomenon . Richard Jefferies ’ 1885 romance After London vividly depicted an England that had retrovert to neo - chivalric civilization after a Planet Adam - comparable “ non-white body ” disrupt the Earth ’s climate ; and Camille Flammarion ’s popular Omega : The Last Day of the World ( 1893 - 94 French , 1897 English ) imagined the dissolution of the Earth ’s ambience after a comet strike . The Panama Canal undertaking also trip fear : In 1890 , H.C.M.W. ’s The Decline and Fall of the British Empire was among the first of many portrayals of the disastrous effects of meld the Atlantic with the Pacific via the Canal . Still , it was n’t until the early twentieth century that the eco - tragedy go forth as a literary zep - literary genre .
Here ’s a summing up — in no special order — of 10 eco - catastrophes from SF ’s Pre - Golden Age ( 1904 - 33 ) that are particularly enjoyable and/or significant . Those influential example on which I center in my Emily Price Post onPGA apocalypsesaren’t written up here .
https://gizmodo.com/the-10-best-apocalypse-novels-of-pre-golden-age-sf-190-5098861
1 ) PLANT - KILLING VIRUS , in J.J. Connington ’s Nordenholt ’s Million ( 1923 ; 1948 reprint shown here ) .
As denitrify bacterium inimical to plant development open around the humankind , causing farming blight , British motorcar manufacturer Jack Flint is bid to become director of operations at a vast survivalist settlement site in England ’s Clyde Valley . Superficially , Nordenholt ’s Million is a direct precursor of John Christopher ’s The Death of Grass ( 1956 ) , and many other Golden - Age SF novel . [ PGA fictions on the same topic include : Edgar Wallace ’s The Green Rust ( Aug. 7 - 28 , 1919 ) , and Charles J. Finger ’s The Spreading Stain ( 1927 ) . ] But Connington is also issuing a timely warning — he was writing between the two domain wars — about right - backstage politicians and rapacious businessmen eager to use any disaster as an excuse to dispense with republic , liberty , and Justice Department .
Flint get a line that his employer , the ruthless plutocrat Stanley Nordenholt , has blackmail the country ’s politicians in ordering to give his stronghold , of which he becomes dictator in all but name . What ’s more , Nordenholt ’s henchmen intentionally wreck what remains of British civilisation , direct to scenes of horrific mass violence and agony ; and the colony ’s workers are treated like serfs . ( Does this sound a fate like Ayn Rand ’s 1957 novel , Atlas Shrugged , except not so favorably disposed to the industrialist and capitalists ? Does to me , too . ) In the end , the plant - killing pestis come to the destruction of its cps . But things may never get back to normal . Nordenholt ’s collectivized serfs – Connington was also apprehensive about the Soviet Revolution – lose it . They decline to work on , blow up the factories on which their fragile residential district depends , and unite unearthly religious rage . playfulness facts : Connington was the pseudonym of Alfred Walter Stewart , the British pill roller who coin the term isobar as complementary to isotope .
2 ) METEORITE , in Fred MacIsaac ’s The Hothouse World ( serialize Feb. 21 - March 28 , 1931 ; 1950 reissue shown here ) .
George Putnam , a science scholar who ’s been in suspend animation since 1951 , wake up a century later in a technologically advanced utopia . He discovers that the vaulted urban center in which he now lives was built and stock – by a foresighted chemical group of scientists and their families – in brief before a comet struck the Earth in ’ 87 . Much of the planet ’s atmosphere was dissipated , and human and animal animation perished in the new Ice Age . Alas , the utopian metropolis twist out to be repressive ( hello , Logan ’s Run , uncounted others ) . When it becomes apparent that there are habitable areas outside the dome , the universe riot and Putnam seek to bunk , along with a heterodox scientist and – of course – the President of the United States ’s beautiful daughter .
3 ) DYING SUN , in Gabriel De Tarde ’s Underground Man ( w. 1884 , p. 1896 in the Revue internationale de sociologie as Fragment d’histoire future tense , p. 1905 in English ) .
By the yr 2489 , Plato ’s Republic has been realize , for better or speculative : a worldwide neo - Grecian acculturation of sophistication and creative thinking dominates ; selective breeding is exercise ; and weak and stupid individuals of every race are sent to fight wars . As a resolution , hunch and survival acquisition have been bred out of the universe . So when uranologist mold that the sun is going out , the citizens of this dystopian utopia apace lose the will to go on .
A sudden drop cloth in temperature wipes out entire populations ; the earth is covered in icing and snow . Europe ’s survivor flee to the Sahara and the Middle East , where the only plan their greatest minds can devise is an inadequate one : a Brobdingnagian , furnace - wake concrete dugout , situated over a rich coal deposition . “ Of the beautiful human subspecies , so impregnable and stately , take form by so many centuries of movement and brain by such an prolonged and intelligent pick , there would soon have been only left … a few century of haggard and tremble specimens , unique trustees of the last ruins of what had once been civilisation . ” [ I should channelise out that the survivalist sand trap mentality is give more favorably in other PGA fictions , include Clare Winger Harris ’s “ A Runaway World ” ( July 1926 ) , Morrison Colladay ’s “ When the Moon Fell ” ( 1929 ) , and John and Ruth Vassos ’s Ultimo ( 1930 ) . ] Humankind is save up when a fellow appoint Miltiades , whom the narrator trace as “ one of those who piously guard , deeply in their heart , the seeds of dissidence ” ( even in a utopian social order , that is ) , urge on the others to tunnel beneath the Earth’s surface of the planet , closer to the world ’s strong centre .
Once life has been established underground , a young civilization acquire . While every spring a few individuals who desire engagement with “ nature ” voyage to the aerofoil of the planet , never to render , the rest of the world prefer to contemplate esthetic and scientific representations of the raw world . Recordings of natural life on the planet ’s control surface are discovered , but the surreptitious men and women decide that stilted version of these sights and sounds are far superior . Tarde ’s Underground Man is , in other word , a prequel of sorts to Plato ’s Myth of the Cave . So when a “ madman ” reports that he ’s been to the surface of the major planet , where he ’s seen a animate Sunday fade the ice , the reader is not surprised when many of the citizens of this overly idealistic ( in the Platonic sense ) civilization refuse to investigate .
merriment facts : Tarde was a French sociologist , criminologist , and social philosopher who devote us such influential concepts as the “ mathematical group mind ” and economic psychology . Bruno LatourdescribesTarde as “ a truly daring but also , I have to admit , totally undisciplined mind . ”
4 ) GREEN TECHNOLOGY , in Andre Maurois ’ The Next Chapter : The War Against the Moon ( 1927 ; in English interlingual rendition , 1928 ) .
A meditation on the gullibility of the masses , and the dangerous influence of newspapers . Ben Tabrit , a big Moroccan scientist , invent a revolutionary “ wind - accumulator ” ; this is in 1963 , during a period of worldwide peace organise by five benevolent newsprint barons known as the Dictators of Public Opinion . Thanks to a combination of world tedium , the prospect of unemployment in the ember and vegetable oil industry ( because of wind free energy ) , and squabbling among nations about ownership of the populace ’s airy places , a new world warfare seems imminent .
Two of the DPOs conspire to forfend warfare by uniting the human race against a common outside enemy . ( Hello , Alan Moore ’s Ozymandias . ) The enemy ? The imaginary indweller of the Moon , whom hoax paper stories presently accuse of wiping out remote hamlet around the humans with powerful death re . All goes well , and a Worldwide Wind Company is established . But then the scientist Tabrit invents a expiry electron beam of his own , and fires it at the Moon . Unfortunately , it turns out that the Moon really is inhabited , and the Moon - men blare the city of Darmstadt . The Earth retaliates . The novella ’s final sentences : “ On February 7th , the city of Elbeuf ( France ) , Bristol , Rhode Island , and Upsala ( Sweden ) were cauterize to ash by the Moon . The earned run average of Inter - Planetary War had begun . ” Fun fact : Maurois was a distinguished French litterateur . Other eco - catastrophes need outlander : Homer Eon Flint ’s Out of the Moon ( Dec. 1923 – Jan 1924 ) , in which Lunarians contrive to cause a solar flash that will burn or seriously damage the Earth ; and Flint ’s The King of Conserve Island ( Oct. 12 , 1918 ) , in which a war between Earth and its Jupiter dependency is averted by a gimmick that makes the Dominicus go dim .
5 ) CAPITALIST system , in William Wallace Cook ’s “ Tales of Twenty Hundred ” ( serialize Dec. 1911 - May 1912 ) .
In 2050 , financial and industrial magnate Vincent Blake and his fiancée , Arlie Fortescue , fudge one snatch and character assassination attempt after another as Blake carry on with plan to stabilize climatic conditions by “ straightening the bloc of the planet . ” Although Cook , a prolific dime novelist , tend to satirize Vernian romanticism whenever he turned to SF , in these six yoke tale he ’s earnestly ideate a future Earth improved by technology in the hands of benevolent capitalists .
But is Cook in earnest ? The Blake character would today be portray as a villain , while the kidnappers and hit men – who are agents of the Federated States of South America , the leaders of which are fully aware that Blake ’s purportedly benevolent programme will benefit only his backer ( the US , Great Britain , Germany , Austria , Scandinavia , Japan ) , and will create topsy-turvydom elsewhere – would be depict as heroes . Even at the clip , fictitious capitalists with climate - change schemes were suspect ; for exercise , the shady booster of William Hawley Smith ’s 1904 SF novel , The Promoters , who speculate in land that will become valuable once they ’ve unthaw the Arctic , are villainous . So are the Boston Irish crooks who attempt to benefit from their advance noesis of a chlorophyll - kill pest about to be visited on Earth from outer space , in George Allan England ’s 1918 The Nebula of Death .
So do n’t be fooled by Cook ’s tacked - on felicitous ending , in which Martians – who heartily okay of Blake ’s climatic - change plans – appear out of nowhere to rescue Vincent and Arlie from a trap . This is n’t , in other words , a love story - of - capitalist economy fable , or a square Edisonade ( like , say , George Griffith ’s 1906 The Great Weather Syndicate , in which a robber magnate and British inventor struggle a sinister syndicate and also Kaiser Wilhelm in their airstream to control the humans ’s weather ) . alternatively , “ Tales of Twenty Hundred ” is – or so I ’d care to conceive – a comedy of the blackest sort . Fun fact : Cook crank up out 66,000 words a week , thanks to a semi - aleatory writing manner of pen whose secrets he later reveal in a gonzo fable - write manual delightfully titled Plotto .
6 ) THE PANAMA CANAL , in Louis Pope Gratacap ’s The Evacuation of England : The Twist in the Gulf Stream ( 1908 ) .
Despite geologists ’ admonition that the Panama Canal will cause the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to merge , with cataclysmic results , the Canal is finished . ( duct enthusiast Teddy Roosevelt is one of the account book ’s characters . ) for sure enough , entire countries must be evacuate because of climatical changes : “ The sheltering power of the Gulf Stream was removed from Great Britain , and the icing of the Arctic world , so long fight off , but now no longer constrict within the Arctic rophy , expanded with instant certainty , spreading the cerement of its kill coldness over the same parallel in Europe that for age had kip beneath its magical spell in America . ” The novel ’s rather schmalzy protagonist , a businessman mention Leacraft , is an eyewitness .
The Evacuation of England is n’t thrill . As E.F. Bleiler observe , “ Leacraft ’s jejune love story is entomb amid overlong didactic digressions . ” But its portrayal of a new Ice Age is eerily realistic . Fun fact : Gratacap was a naturalist connect with New York ’s American Museum of Natural History for over 40 years ; when he died in 1917 , he was head word of the museum ’s department of mineralogy and shell collecting . Other SF novels : The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars ( 1903 ) , The Mayor of New York ( 1910 ) , The New Northland ( 1915 ) , and the supernatural future narration The End – How the Great War was Stopped ( 1917 ) . He also wrote works of divinity ( for instance , The Analytics of a Belief in a Future Life ) and politics ( for example , Why the Democrats Must Go).READ IT
7 ) MARTIAN INVASION , in Austin Hall ’s “ The gentleman Who Saved the Earth ” ( serialise Dec. 13 , 1919 ) .
Opalescent globes of force come along across the world , take out large chunks of land and ocean . One such globe , in the course of instruction of lactate up enormous quantities of sea water , causes the Gulf Stream to be diverted , among other change with radical core . Charles Huyck , a maverick scientist , realizes that Martians – whose planet is dying , as proposed by Percival Lowell – are steal Earth ’s lifelike resources . Devising a long - chain of mountains solar weapon , Huyck disables the Martians ’ globe - creating apparatus . Fun fact : The Blind Spot , a novel that Hall wrote with fellow drudge Homer Eon Flint , has been called ( by Damon Knight ) “ the worst skill fabrication novel ever published . ”
- MAD SCIENTIST , in Murray Leinster ’s “ A Thousand Degrees Below Zero ” ( serialized July 15 , 1919 ) .
August , of a twelvemonth in the near future : An uttermost cold undulation strikes New York , blocking the harbor with frappe . Similar issue pass off in Gibraltar , Yokohama , elsewhere . A nefarious scientist make Wladislas Varrhus takes deferred payment for the cold weather , and threatens worse if he is not recognized as swayer of the world . Varrhus is ignored , until authority determine that he has , indeed , mastered liquid hydrogen and superconductivity . cause are made to stop him , but they fail . Finally , Varrhus ’s sinister black plane is shot down in an atmosphere battle . More PGA eco - disaster cause by mad scientists : Burnie L. Bevill ’s “ restore the Moon ” ( Sept. 1922 ) , Leinster ’s “ The tempest That Had To Be Stopped ” ( March 1 , 1930 ) , and Edmond Hamilton ’s “ The Plant Revolt ” ( April 1930 ; a herald of Day of the Triffids ) .
Fun fact : Murray Leinster ( William Fitzgerald Jenkins ) was a fecund pulp magazine writer , one of the few SF writers from the 1930s to come through in the John W. Campbell era of higher standards ; he ’s credit with the conception of parallel cosmos ( or alternate worlds ) stories , as well as some of the early descriptions of computer and the Internet . He was also an inventor , substantially known for the front - jutting process used in particular effects .
9 ) GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVALS , in S. Fowler Wright ’s Deluge : A love story ( 1927 ) .
A global turmoil turn ocean into deserts , and sinks land deal everywhere except what remains of the English midland , which are transformed into an archipelago . ( Hello , Waterworld . ) With a marked want of noble-mindedness , Wright – who also translate Dante ’s Inferno , and who uses this novel to criticize 1920s British society – tells the story of a raw Adam and Eve : Martin Webster , a lawyer who attempts to find his married woman ; and Claire Arlington , an athlete ( “ like a valkyrie ” ) and one of the few women to survive the flood tide . The two store up food , fend off feral heel , and battle sexuality - starved and flood - maddened miners , labourer , and vagrant . If it was n’t so un - cozy , you ’d have to call Wright ’s novel an early example of the cozy catastrophe – because the author is obviously thrilled that innovative civilization , with its car and bureaucrat , is run .
10 ) COSMIC DUST , in Bruno Hans Bürgel ’s “ The Cosmic Cloud ” ( German floor published circa 1921 ; serialise , in English displacement , Fall 1931 ) .
A cloud of cosmic dust pervade the solar organisation , circa 2300 , and most of Europe and the former magnetic north and south temperate zones are covered in ice . By the year 3000 life is nearly extinct , except in Africa , where a mixed - backwash civilization survives . A scientist , Johannes Baumgart , purpose a voyage to the Moon , because of his theory that intelligent life with forward-looking technology exists there . In a proto - Ballardian conclusion , the voyage is a failure . Earth is doomed ! Fun facts : Bürgel was a factory actor who learn astronomy in his supererogatory prison term , and was eventually hired as an observer at Germany ’s first public lookout . His 1908 book , From Distant Worlds ; A Popular Science of the Sky , which argued that millions of inhabit worlds may survive within the universe , was a pop success .
Joshua Glenn is atomic number 27 - editor of the websiteHilobrow.com . His most late book isThe Idler ’s Glossary . He ’s also write for io9 about Pre - fortunate Age SF’scoolest robot , tiptop - est Ubermensch , mad mentalists , best Apocalypse , andmost awing covering fire art .
https://gizmodo.com/the-coolest-robots-of-pre-golden-age-sf-5126907
https://gizmodo.com/the-super-est-supermen-of-pre-golden-age-sf-5149263
https://gizmodo.com/the-mad-mentalists-of-pre-golden-age-sf-5205546
https://gizmodo.com/the-most-amazing-book-covers-from-pre-golden-age-sf-5104015
ALSO OF INTEREST
Here ’s a more complete list of PGA eco - catastrophes . For charge , I ’ve include fib and novel in which climatic and atmospheric change , weather controller , and solar or “ green ” Department of Energy technology rate a mention . disordered about my nonconcentric SF periodization scheme?Here ’s a guide .
https://gizmodo.com/science-fictions-pre-golden-age-1904-33-an-introduct-5099771
NINETEENTH CENTURY ( 1804 - 1903 )
- Faddei Bulgarin , Plausible Fantasies of a Journey in the twenty-ninth Century ( 1824 )
Edgar Allan Poe , “ The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion ” ( Dec. 1839 )
Alexander Pitts Bettersworth , The Strange MS . By _ _ _ M.D. ( 1883 )
Richard Jefferies , After London , or Wild England ( 1885 )
A. Bleunard , Babylon Electrified 1888 French , 1890 English )
H.C.M.W. , The Decline and Fall of the British Empire ( 1890 )
Chauncey Thomas , The Crystal Button : Or , Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty - Ninth Century ( 1891 )
Robert Barr , “ The Doom of London ” ( Nov. 1892 )
Byron A. Brooks , Earth Revisited ( 1893 )
John Jacob Astor , A Journey in Other Worlds ( 1894 )
Louis Boussenard , Ten Thousand eld in a Block of Ice ( 1889 , French )
Camille Flammarion , Omega : The Last sidereal day of the World ( 1893 - 94 French , 1897 English )
Lysander Salmon Richards , Breaking Up ( 1896 )
John Mills , “ The Aerial Brickfield ” ( June 1897 )
H.G. Wells , “ The Star ” ( 1897 )
Otto Mundo , The Recovered Continent : A Tale of the Chinese Invasion ( 1898 )
Robert Barr , “ Within an Ace of the End of the globe ” ( April 1900 )
M.P. Shiel , The Purple Cloud(1901 )
George C. Wallis , “ The Last daylight of Earth ” ( 1901 )
Fred M. White , “ The Dust of Death ” ( April 1903 )
Ira S. Bunker , A Thousand Years Hence ( 1903 )
THE NINETEEN - OUGHTS ( 1904 - 13 )
William Hawley Smith , The Promoters : A Novel Without a Woman ( 1904 )
George Griffith , The capital Weather Syndicate ( 1906 )
Louis Pope Gratacap , The Evacuation of England ( 1908 )
H. Percy Blanchard , After the Cataclysm ( 1909 )
William Hope Hodgson , The Night Land(1912 )
Garrett P. Serviss , The Second Deluge ( 1912 )
William Wallace Cook , “ Tales of Twenty Hundred ” ( Dec. 1911 - May 1912 )
Arthur Conan Doyle , The Poison Belt(1913 )
THE TEENS ( 1914 - 23 )
George Allen England , Darkness and Dawn ( 1914 )
George Allen England , The Nebula of Death ( Feb.-May 1918 )
Homer Eon Flint , The King of Conserve Island ( Oct. 12 , 1918 )
Edgar Wallace , The Green Rust ( Aug. 7 - 28 , 1919 )
Murray Leinster , “ A Thousand Degrees Below Zero ” ( July 15 , 1919 )
Austin Hall , “ The Man Who Saved the world ” ( Dec. 13 , 1919 )
Murray Leinster , The Mad Planet ( June 12 , 1920 )
Burnie L. Bevill , “ Restoring the Moon ” ( Sept. 1922 )
J.J. Connington , Nordenholt ’s Million ( 1923 )
Hugo Gernsback , Ralph 124C41+(1923 )
Homer Eon Flint , Out of the Moon ( Dec. 1923 – Jan 1924 )
THE TWENTIES ( 1924 - 33 )
Clare Winger Harris , “ A Runaway World ” ( July 1926 )
S. Fowler Wright , Deluge : A love affair ( 1927 )
Charles J. Finger , The Spreading Stain ( 1927 )
Otfrid Von Hanstein , Utopia Island ( 1927 German , 1931 English )
Andre Maurois , The Next Chapter ( 1927 French ; 1928 English )
Edmond Hamilton , “ The Time - Raider ” ( Oct. 1927 - Jan. 1928 )
Edmond Hamilton , “ The Polar Doom ” ( Nov. 1928 )
Ray Cummings , A Brand New World ( Sept. 22 - Oct. 27 , 1928 )
Morrison Colladay , “ When the Moon Fell ” ( 1929 )
Leslie F. Stone , “ When the Sun locomote Out ” ( 1929 )
Ray Cummings , The Snow Girl ( Nov. 1929 )
Olaf Stapledon , Last and First Men(1930 )
John and Ruth Vassos , Ultimo ( 1930 )
Murray Leinster , “ The Storm That Had To Be Stopped ” ( March 1 , 1930 )
Edmond Hamilton , “ The Plant Revolt ” ( April 1930 )
Bruno Hans Bürgel , “ The Cosmic Cloud ” ( 1921 German , 1931 English )
Fred MacIsaac , The Hothouse World ( Feb. 21 - March 28 , 1931 )
1920s1930sBooksFictionWeather
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