28 Days Later
Disease: Rage virus
Released by: Animal rights activists
Symptoms: Zombification, flesh-eating
Any humanity left? UK is quarantined and left for dead. Rest of the world survives.



Invasion
Disease: Space fungus
Released by: It clings to the outside of the space shuttle, and when the shuttle crashes people pick up pieces of it and bring the disease into towns, where it spreads.
Symptoms: Lack of emotion, desire for world peace.
Any humanity left? Many people are infected but we're saved by an airborne antidote. We know the world has returned to normal when everybody starts going back to war again.



I Am Legend
Disease: Gene therapy delivered via virus gone wrong
Released by: Well-meaning liberal doctor trying to do good
Symptoms: Zombification, flesh-eating, fear of light.
Any humanity left? Just Will Smith, and (spoilers!) a tiny walled town in New England



Outbreak
Disease: Motaba virus (a fictional version of Ebola)
Released by: Bad guys selling illegal African monkeys to Americans
Symptoms: Barfy bloody death
Any humanity left? Sadly, almost all of humanity survives.



Rabid
Disease: Plastic surgery-induced armpit penis that drinks blood (did we mention this was directed by David Cronenberg in the 70s?)
Released by: Mad surgeon Dr. Keloid, operating on the main character (played by porn star Marilyn Chambers)
Symptoms: Growing a penis-shaped thing under your arm that drinks other people's blood, erases their memories, and turns them into zombies
Any humanity left? Disease is contained within the city.



Andromeda Strain (the miniseries)
Disease: Nano space virus thing
Released by: Fallen satellite
Symptoms: Totally disgusting bloody barfy skin covered in insta-bumps
Any humanity left? Saved by the CDC, but just barely



Doomsday
Disease: Reaper virus
Released by: Unknown, but centered in Scotland, which the UK walls off in a nation-wide quarantine
Symptoms: Death
Any humanity left? Yes, the immune. They have turned into cannibalistic punk rockers, medieval knights, and racecar drivers. Which makes the Reaper virus basically the most awesome thing to ever happen in the UK.



Doom
Disease: A 24th chromosome from Mars
Released by: Union Aerospace Corporation
Symptoms: If you are "good," you are made superhuman with mega-healing, and if you are "bad" you become a flesh-eating toothface with the ability to shoot your tongue at victims to infect them.
Any humanity left? Not on Mars.



World War Z
Disease: African rabies
Released by: Unknown - but thought to have begun in China
Symptoms: Undeath
Any humanity left? Yes, and the shattered survivors of the zombie wars are the subject of the novel, which is being made into a much-anticipated movie right now.



The Signal
Disease: Mind-altering signal sent via television and telephone in an Atlanta-like unnamed city
Released by: Unknown evil media conglomerate
Symptoms: Psychotic, murderous rage; hallucinations
Any humanity left? A few survive in the city; unknown how many more were affected in the world



Quarantine
Disease: Bioweapon
Released by: Doomsday cult
Symptoms: Foaming at the mouth, vampiric quest to bite people
Any humanity left: We see the disease spread rapidly through an apartment building, which is quarantined. There is a hint that the disease has already gotten out and cannot be stopped.

Readers, here is the long-awaited second installment in my Pre-Golden Age SF series. I can't afford first editions of PGA SF novels, but I've managed to collect images of their dustjackets and "boards" (as bookbinders call the paper- or cloth-covered stiff cardboard forming a book's covers). The following 10 SF novels boast the most thrilling and evocative cover (board or dustjacket) illustrations and design from 1904-33.

I invite your criticisms; please note, though, that this is a survey of PGA SF first editions. Later Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks don't count.

Pre-Golden Age SF's Top Ten Book Covers

1. Norman Matson's Doctor Fogg (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929). A shy and retiring Chicago scientist manages to communicate with an advanced alien civilization, whose scientific secrets he refuses to share with Earth's flawed political powers; and he accidentally "broadcasts" a gorgeous naked blonde alien with whom he falls in love. What does the fun dustjacket illustration have to do with it? Nothing! But I love the speeding meteors, which converge cozily at the center of the image; the void of space absolutely chock-full of stars and planets; the awkwardness of the gentleman at top right compared with the insouciance of the woman beneath. I also admire the crimson-orange/navy blue/silver color scheme. Making the characters' hair, the men's neckties, the woman's dress the same color as the slightly italicized title? An inspired decision. NB: The board illustration is also super-cool: it's a silver planetoid with the words "Doctor Fogg" inside.

2. Karel Čapek's Krakatit (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1925). An English translation of the Czech author's 1924 novel. A scientist discovers the most powerful explosive ever, but he refuses to share it with (see above) Earth's flawed political powers. The Art Deco jacket design captures both the excitement and terror of such a discovery. The stylish typeface says, "Not to worry, the future is awesome!" But K. Romney Towndrow's artwork - an explosion rending the very planet in half - says, "Yes, worry." Still, this is a satire, so we're not encouraged to take things too seriously; the illustration kinda reminds us of limelights in a canyon of skyscrapers. It's as though we were approaching a 1925 Hollywood movie opening, perhaps Marion Fairfax's The Lost World. Fun facts: The book was adapted as a 1947 movie (d. Otakar Vávra) and a 1960 opera (Václav Kašlík); both are supposed to be tremendous. The 1925 US edition of Krakatit has a more restrained, but still fun, jacket.

3. Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1917). I'm not impressed with the original book jacket illustrations for Burroughs's Barsoom series. Sure, they feature lone heroes confronting hordes of alien warriors, not to mention half-naked damsels menaced by multi-limbed aliens, but... Frank Frazetta's later work on the same titles demonstrates just how tame the original jacket illustrations were. They make the swords-and-sandals-in-space genre feel middlebrow and uplifting, which is precisely what we hi-lobrows do not enjoy. Peel away the Barsoomian jackets, though, and you'll often find more compelling boards underneath. A Princess of Mars was Burroughs's first published story - it was serialized in 1912, under a pseudonym - and everything great about his writing is captured here. That Arts & Crafts typeface, so pseudo-medieval and chivalrous! That red planet, so mysterious and alluring! Stop the world, Edgar, I want to get off.

4. L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz (Reilly & Britton, Chicago, 1914). Illustrated - like 39 of the 40 canonical Oz editions - by John R. Neill, Baum's picaresque concerns the efforts of the Shaggy Man (a proto-hippie who disdains all possessions except his Love Magnet) to rescue his brother from the Nome King. Tik-Tok, a copper-bodied clockwork man, first appeared in Ozma of Oz (1907), then starred in a 1913 stage musical. In this book, despite Neill's sweet, startling dustjacket illustration, Tik-Tok is (as ever) an emotionless though fiercely loyal servant. Exactly like Karel Čapek's flesh-and-blood "robots." Fun fact: Though often described as the first robot to appear in modern literature (if you don't count living-metal creatures, like the golden maidservants who attend Hephaestus in The Iliad, that is), Tik-Tok was preceded by Edward S. Ellis's Steam Man of the Prairies in 1868.

5. Rudyard Kipling, With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D. (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909). This SF novella by Kipling - best known for The Jungle Book, Kim, and the Just-So Stories - first appeared in McClure's magazine in 1905. In 2000, lighter-than-air craft traverse the globe; the plot follows a mail dirigible on its adventures. Never Kippled? This ain't the place to start. However, Kipling did get so excited by his own nerdy vision that the book's appendices include ersatz instructions to aviators, not to mention advertisements for imaginary dirigible and aeronautical products. Detailed illustrations and pictorial endpapers make this a gorgeous production, indeed. "A beautiful object, most strange and peculiarly inspiring," writes one rare bookseller, of the 1909 Night Mail. The same could be said of the gilt-and-silver zeppelin that materializes - Millennium Falcon-like - from the star-spangled indigo depths of the book's cloth-covered boards. Wow!

6. Olaf Stapledon's Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest (Methuen & Co., Ltd., London, 1935). Perhaps my favorite Argonaut Folly fiction, Odd John concerns the efforts of an international band of teenage and twentysomething "supernormals" (or "wide-awakes") to form an island colony, where they can devote themselves to "world-building" ("individualistic communism," not to mention the founding of a new mutant species) and "intelligent worship." The jacket illustration captures Stapledon's notion of the titular John: half-child and half-philosopher, ruthless but not malicious, "a creature which appeared as urchin but also as sage, as imp but also as infant deity," a fallen angel with a face that is "half monkey, half gargoyle, yet wholly urchin, with its huge cat's eyes, its flat little nose, its teasing lips." Cue David Bowie: "Look at your children/See their faces in golden rays/Don't kid yourself they belong to you/They're the start of a coming race." Homo Superior, that is.

7. E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922). More admired than read, Ouroboros is a linguistically adventurous saga recounting the infinite war between the king of Witchland and the lords of Demonland... on the planet Mercury. Call it Nietzschean SF: somewhere out there, the author would have us believe, another world is possible, one in which the self-overcoming values and worldview of Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, and Scandinavian Vikings will never be corrupted. (As Lord Juss puts it: "For better it were we should run hazard again of utter destruction, than thus live out our lives like cattle fattening for the slaughter, or like silly garden plants.") The end of Eddison's novel is also its beginning, hence the title and Keith Henderson's heavy-metal jacket illustration - a snake devouring itself tail-first. Like they so often do in medieval engravings, Celtic sculptures, Egyptian scrolls, Aztec glyphs, and on Agent Scully's lower back. Wish I could afford a 1st edition.

8. George Babcock, Yezad: A Romance of the Unknown (Bridgeport, Conn. & New York: Co-Operative Publishing Co., Inc., 1922). Almost as much as I love the Satan-vs.-Martians jacket illustration ("from painting by the author"), I love the novel's description: "Highly eccentric romance of reincarnation, which includes an account of the colonization of the Moon by near-perfect humans of Mars and the unhappy circumstances of the descent of our ancestors to Earth." Mars, it seems, was once a technologically advanced utopia. Then, 20 million years ago, it lost its atmosphere, so the Martians relocated - but, in doing so, degenerated into our beast-like ancestors. (Isn't this the plot of Jack Kirby's The Eternals? And Scientology?) As for the devil on the dustjacket, the occult point of Babcock's novel is to inform us that we are divided creatures, within whom Bonality and Malality (good and bad aspects) struggle. Moral: Don't let Malality triumph, or it might break Martian-filled eggs with its pitchfork.

9. Harold Steele Mackaye, The Panchronicon (Scribner, New York, 1904). I'm informed that The Panchronicon concerns a pair of New Hampshire spinsters who are given the opportunity to travel through time via a solar-powered airship-thing from the 27th-century. See, first you fly the Panchronicon to the North Pole; then you orbit the Earth widdershins (anti-sunwise, like Christopher Reeve does in the 1978 Superman); and presto, you're in 16th-century England, where you're able to disprove the Bacon-was-Shakespeare theory. Meanwile, your drunken shipmate, Copernicus Droop, can attempt to patent the phonograph and the bicycle. Sounds fun... but as you've perhaps intuited, I'm not convinced that the book is actually worth the effort of reading. Still, the cover board illustration is awesome. If this is what 27th-century time-travel technology looks like - part houseboat from Arthur Ransome's Big Six, part Terry Gilliam machine, part Owlship - then western civilization is inarguably headed in the best of all possible directions. Sign me up.

10. E.V. Odle, The Clockwork Man (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1923). "Of the many works of scientific romance that have fallen into utter obscurity," writes Brian Stableford, in Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950, "this is perhaps the one which most deserves rescue." Eight thousand years from now, advanced humanoids known as the Makers will implant clockwork devices into our heads, devices which permit us to move through time and space - at the cost of a certain amount of agency. If one of these devices should go awry, a "clockwork man" might appear in the 1920s, at a cricket match in a small English village, behaving strangely. Worse, like the titular character in Philip K. Dick's 1969 story "The Electric Ant," the clockwork man might tinker with his own mechanism. Bad idea! NB: This book is extremely rare; I've never seen a copy for under $500... and that's without the dustjacket. The illustration is like a Bildungsroman cover re-jiggered by Hannah Höch. Cool.

Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.

AFTERWORD

Since publishing the first post in this series, I've been inundated with suggestions about terrific-sounding novels from 1904-33 concerned with, for example, Artificial Life, Homo Superior, Mad Scientists, Outer Space, and Lost Worlds. Commenting on my Top Ten Apocalypses post, for example, io9 reader Mathmos suggested:

It doesn't fit the Apocalypse category, but I like the title: The Devolutionist and the Emancipatrix by Homer Eon Flint.

A Francophone friend of mine emailed to say:

Don't forget Gustave Le Rouge (1867-1938). Friend of Verlaine, influence on Cendrars and on the Surrealists. Best books take premises from Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs and go crazy. A war fought mostly in the air (before 1914) between rival Mormon millionaires in Utah vying for control of sub-Atlantic railroad lines! A sculptor of human flesh! The planet Mars ruled by a Great Brain and populated by vampires!

And a fellow PGA SF aficionado forwards these lines from Amazon or Wikipedia:

Leo Saint-Clair, alias the Nyctalope, was created in 1911 by Jean de La Hire, one of France's most prolific serial writers. Gifted with night vision, hypnotic powers and an artificial heart, Saint-Clair is a fearless hero who battles colorful super-villains.... In The Nyctalope on Mars (1911), Leo faces the megalomaniacal Oxus, master of the secret society of the Fifteen, who is plotting to conquer Earth from his secret base on Mars. After defeating the Fifteen, the Nyctalope must then face an ever more fearsome foe: H. G. Wells' Martians.

All of which makes me worry: What have I overlooked? How can I declare which Alien Invasion and Cosmic Perspective novels from 1904-33 are the best of their kind before I've read Gustave Le Rouge's Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars, and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist? I'm going to read these two books, among others, before New Year's Eve. I'll be back, newly confident and opinionated, next month. But keep the suggestions coming.

Happy New Year! And please stay tuned.

Hollywood adaptations of Brave New World and When Worlds Collide, based on books released at roughly the same time as Princess of Mars, are also in development. Novels of this period are re-exerting their power over the collective imaginary.

Welcome to the first episode of an irregular series of posts that will survey science fiction novels published from the beginning of the 20th century until the advent of science fiction's so-called Golden Age. Not to be confused with SF's Pulp Era (i.e., the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s), I've named the years 1904-33 its Pre-Golden Age, or PGA. For our first foray into this era, let's consider ten great novels of the apocalypse.

Hold on, though: The 20th century began in 1901, while the Golden Age is widely agreed to have kicked off in or shortly after '38, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories. So why doesn't the PGA begin in '01 and end in '37? Why 1904-33, instead? Glad you asked. I've got a whole post explaining why this era is meaningful. Click the link if you want more historical background, or just plunge right into the apocalypse below.

Many of these novels are in the public domain, and I've indicated where you can find them in full text online, as well as where you can pick up a printed copy if you like.

1. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930). In his awe-inspiring, tragicomic first novel, Stapledon, a British philosopher and progressivist, ventriloquizes the future history of humankind as related to him telepathically by one of the Last Men - alien descendants of ours who will inhabit Neptune, where they'll face extinction as the sun burns out, some two billion years hence. So what does fate hold in store for us, the First Men? Well, the post-WWI "passionate will for peace and a united world" won't last long, Stapledon's narrator informs readers. Within a century aerial bombs and poison gas will have laid waste to Europe (including Russia), leaving the Chinese and Americans to compete for global military and economic domination. Eventually, a World State will be founded, and peace and prosperity will reign... until Earth's natural energy sources get used up! At that point, civilization will collapse and the First Men will devolve into superstitious savages living in the shadow of their ancestors' skyscrapers - "though for the most part they were of course by now little more than pyramids of debris overgrown with grass and brushwood" - until, after nearly 100,000 years, they'll re-civilize themselves and discover atomic energy. Which they'll use, "after a bout of insane monkeying with the machinery," to inadvertantly annihilate all but 35 men and women, whose mutated descendants will be the Second Men. This sort of thing goes on, and on, and on, entertainingly and soberingly, for 18 generations of humankind. Multiple apocalypses, and all for the price of one novel! Read more about Last and First Men in the Homo Superior installment of this series.
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2. William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land: A Love Tale (1912). Hodgson, a British sailor, strongman, and visionary, paints a macabre, fascinating portrait of a frozen future Earth whose few remaining human inhabitants live in a vast underground space created by earthquakes, lit by the glare of lava bubbling up from below, and inhabited by dinosaurs. Worse, at some point in the distant past, overreaching scientists breached "the Barrier of Life" that separated our dimension from one populated by "monstrosities and Forces" - Watching Things, Silent Ones, Hounds, Giants, "Ab-humans," Brutes, enormous slugs and spiders - collectively known as the Slayers. (At least one of them, as far as I can tell from the 1972 Ballantine paperback cover shown here, resembles Pac-Man.) The unnamed narrator, along with apparently every other surviving human, lives trapped in the Last Redoubt, a eight-mile-high metal pyramid-city constructed by their ancestors using now-forgotten technologies. The pyramid is protected from the Slayers, who surround and observe it constantly, by mysterious Powers of Goodness, and also by a massive force-field powered by the "Earth Current" - a Tesla-esque force drawn from the planet itself. Our hero is telepathic, and one day he receives a distress signal that appears to issue from a woman living in a long-forgotten community of humans sequestered in a distant Lesser Pyramid whose power supply is running out. Arming himself with a lightsaber-meets-brushcutter gizmo called a Diskos, and eating nothing but protein pills and powdered water, he sets forth on a mission impossible - into the Night Land.
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3. M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (1901; read why I consider this a PGA novel here). When Brian Aldiss quipped, in reference to PGA SF, that "the period was a welter of variously colored plagues," this is one of the two catastrophes that he must have had in mind; Jack London wrote the other one. Not a pandemic but a deadly vapor that sweeps across the planet - perhaps as some kind of chthonic punishment (as in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening) for humanity's failure to respect Nature's mysteries - the purple cloud leaves behind only one living human, Adam Jefferson, who'd been away in the Arctic. Sporting an Englishman's idea of a Turkish pasha's get-up (complete with mustachios not shown here, for some reason, on the cover of the June '49 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries), Adam divides his ample time between roaming the world in search of other survivors, building himself a tropical-island castle that would have made Mad King Ludwig jealous, speculating on the nature of the Earth itself (is it intelligent? out to get him?), and burning cities down for fun. It's not much of a plot, but the writing is a delight, as purple as the poison cloud itself: "For oftentimes, both waking and in nightmare, I did not know on which orb I was, nor in which age, but felt my being adrift in the great gulf of space and eternity and circumstance, with no bottom for my consciousness to stand upon, the world all mirage and a strange show to me, and the frontiers of dream and waking lost." (This is how reading the best PGA SF makes you feel, in my experience.) Adam eventually discovers his Eve... but refuses to mate with her, because the human race doesn't deserve a second chance. Will he change his mind? Fun facts: Shiel was an Englishman born and raised in Barbados, an anti-Semite and racist (he coined the phrase "Yellow Peril"), and - according to some critics - a fascist. Ironically, this novel was an inspiration for the classy, anti-racist SF movie, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, in which Harry Belafonte won't mate with the world's last woman... because she's white.
FULL TEXT | BISON EDITION | FIND A COPY

4. Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large (1922 as Továrna na absolutno; in English in 1927). In the near future (i.e., the Thirties), a Czech scientist invents "perfect combustion," and an industrial concern starts manufacturing an atomic reactor that provides cheap energy - with an unexpected byproduct: God. To be precise, it's the Absolute, the spiritual essence that permeates every particle of matter... or did, anyway, until matter began to be annihilated by the super-efficient Karburetor. Instrumental rationality, and the capitalist cult of efficiency, are satirized brilliantly by Čapek, the Czech absurdist whose 1921 play R.U.R. first gave us the word "robot." As they're released from imprisoning matter by the Karburetors and Molecular Disintegration Dynamos cranked out in the thousands by Ford Motors (the novel's Czech title means "the factory of the Absolute") and other manufacturers around the world, God-particles infect humankind with wonder-working powers and ecstatic religious sentiments. What's more, the Absolute begins operating factories itself, producing far too many finished goods for anyone to consume: "It wove, spun, knitted, forged, cast, erected, sewed, planed, cut, dug, burned, printed, bleached, refined, cooked, filtered, and pressed for twenty-four to twenty-six hours a day." As a result, economies collapse, unemployment is universal, and from 1944 through 1953, fanatical sects whose -isms (including rationalism, nationalism, and sentimentalism) are religious only in the broadest sense do battle. Every single country on the planet is drawn into the Greatest War, during which everyone invades everyone else, atomic weapons are deployed, and civilization collapses. Now, that's instrumental rationality operating at peak efficiency.
FULL TEXT (CZECH) | BISON EDITION | FIND A COPY

5. Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Moon Maid (1926). Those of us who grew up reading apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic potboilers like Lucifer's Hammer or Battlefield Earth might find the preceding four titles - as fun to read as they are - a tad slow-moving. Perhaps that's because they weren't written by Americans, or serialized in American pulps? Burroughs's The Moon Maid is a multi-generational, three-books-in-one saga that literally gallops from Julian 5th's crash-landing on the moon, where he makes a daring getaway (with a moon maid in tow) from subhuman Kalkars who dwell in the asteroid's hollow interior; to the same Julian's doomed effort to defeat a Kalkar invasion of Earth; to Julian 9th's failed but inspiring rebellion against the mongrel descendants of the Moon Men, who've presided over the Earthlings' return to a medieval agrarian lifestyle; to the final triumph of Red Hawk (Julian 20th), the leader of a primitive tribe of freedom-fighters who, 400 years after the invasion, finally defeats humankind's overlords - Battlefield Earth-style - in the ruins of Los Angeles. The Julian 9th story, one hears, was originally written after the Bolshevik revolution, and was rejiggered later to fit into the Moon Maid saga: it's a red-blooded example of anticommunist SF that predates Ayn Rand's We the Living and Orwell's Animal Farm by decades. ("We would slay all the Kalkars in the world, and we would sell the land again that men might have pride of ownership and an incentive to labor hard and develop it for their children, for well we knew by long experience that no man will develop land that reverts to the government at death, or that government may take away from him at any moment.") No matter what you may think of its politics, The Moon Maid has been described as "Burroughs' masterpiece of science fiction and a too-often overlooked pioneer work of social extrapolation in science fiction" - which is true.
MOON MAID - FULL TEXT | MOON MEN - FULL TEXT | RED HAWK - FULL TEXT | BISON EDITION | FIND A COPY

6. Philip Gordon Wylie & Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide (1933). Wylie and Balmer's masterpiece is, for the most part, a pre-apocalyptic novel. The plot details the efforts of The League of the Last Days - an international band of 1,000 brilliant scientists, action heroes, and fertile women (I exaggerate, but not much; the main female character is named Eve!), who've discovered that two rogue planets are entering the sun's orbit, and that while one of these planets (Bronson Alpha) will collide with the Earth, a remnant of humankind might be able to survive on the other (Bronson Beta) - to design, construct, and outfit rocket-arks that will transport a few of their number to safety. We are treated to two terrifying apocalyptic scenes: One, when the rogue planets first pass by the Earth, triggering stupendous cataclysms; and the other, when worlds collide: "The very Earth bulged... It became plastic. It was drawn out egg-shaped. The cracks girdled the globe. A great section of the Earth itself lifted up and peeled away... The two planets struck." But it's the post-apocalyptic scenes that I enjoy most: a deserted, Ballardian Chicago whose skyscrapers are knocked out of plumb; violent, half-naked mobs battling the National Guard in Pittsburgh; an army of hate-filled Midwesterners that nearly succeeds in wrecking the rocket-ship project. Plus, I dig the quasi-Nietzschean philosophizing: "What are morals, fundamentally, Tony?" demands Eve of the novel's protagonist, her fiancé. "Morals are nothing but the code of conduct required of an individual in the best interests of the group of which he's a member. So what's 'moral' here wouldn't be moral at all on Bronson Beta." Eve is explaining, you see, why she won't be faithful to Tony even if they do survive doomsday. Sequel: After Worlds Collide (1934). Fun facts: The book influenced the strip Flash Gordon, while Siegel & Shuster lifted key ideas from both When Worlds Collide and Wylie's earlier SF novel, Gladiator when they created Superman. George Pal's 1951 movie adaptation of Worlds is a sci-fi classic (it inspired the Rocky Horror lyrics "'But When Worlds Collide,'/Said George Pal to his bride,/'I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills'"); one fears that Stephen Sommers's forthcoming adaptation won't be an improvement.
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7. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Poison Belt: Being an account of another adventure of Prof. George E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton, Prof. Summerlee, and Mr. E.D. Malone, the discoverers of "The Lost World" (1913). Doyle's first Professor Challenger tale, The Lost World, was a romp through a South American jungle crawling with prehistoric monsters and beast-men. Why, critics have wondered ever since, did he follow it with a yarn that takes place almost entirely in a locked room? (That's Challenger, et al., crowded comically together on the book's spine.) Challenger discovers that the planet is about to be engulfed in a poisonous belt of "ether" (astrophysicists now prefer the term "dark matter"). Inviting his comrades to his home outside London, where he and his wife have laid up a supply of oxygen canisters, which may or may not save their lives, Challenger tells them: "We are assisting at a tremendous and awful function. It is, in my opinion, the end of the world." Barricading themselves into his wife's boudoir, like astronauts strapping themselves into a rocket, the adventurers sit and wait, debating everything from the possibilities of the universe to the "abysses that lie upon either side of our material existence," to the "ideal scientific mind"; meanwhile, the world goes to rack and ruin. True, Poison Belt is a Wellsian exercise, i.e., not nearly as action-packed as Doyle's usual output. But unlike other apocalyptic fictions, which model proper (heroic) action in the face of certain disaster, Doyle's novella models proper behavior - think of Nevil Shute's On the Beach ('57), for example. Also, the coda, in which humankind becomes more socialist, less fanatically religious and political, and generally wiser, is sweet; and Challenger's personal qualities - his scholarly sprezzatura, overweening egotism, and nerves of steel - make him fine company, whether in the jungle or in his wife's boudoir.
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8. Jack London, The Scarlet Plague (1915). Although Mary Shelley and M.P. Shiel beat him to the punch, London's post-apocalyptic plague novel has proved more influential on subsequent SF apocalypses - from Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz ('59) to Hoban's Riddley Walker ('80), to Mike Judge's 2006 movie Idiocracy, for example - whether they're of the pandemic, atomic, or natural-disaster variety. One suspects that Scarlet Plague influenced the Moon Men section of Burroughs's Moon Maid trilogy, too, since the plot begins in 2073, 60 years after a plague has reduced the world's population to a few scattered bands of neolithic scavengers. London's vision, like Burroughs's is an anti-Marxist one: See what happens when the proletariat take over? Everything gets worse, not better! In the post-apocalyptic social order, women are degraded and beaten: Vesta Van Warden, wife of the richest man in America before the plague, we learn from the ancient James Howard Smith, became the chattel of one of her former servants, a man known only as Chauffeur. Predatory nomads - members of the Chauffeur Tribe - named Hoo-Hoo and Har-Lip roam among the ruins of San Francisco. And poor Smith, formerly a professor of literature at UC Berkeley, is reviled by his juniors for being literate: "What I want to know," Edwin continued, "is why you call crab 'toothsome delicacy'? Crab is crab, ain't it? No one I never heard calls it such funny things." Not one of London's most rollicking adventures, but fun and provocative.
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9. Edward Shanks, People of the Ruins (1920). Like London's Scarlet Plague, Shanks's pessimistic postwar novel explores a western society in steep decline. During a workers' strike in 1924 London, our protagonist - Jeremy Tuft, an "investigator in physics" - is accidentally frozen by an experimental suspended-animation ray (as demonstrated on the cover of the June 1947 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries); he wakes up in a medieval-style idiocracy, 150 years hence. Not only have his fellow Englishmen forgotten most of what they used to know, before a worldwide workers' revolution and famine led to civilization's collapse, but they don't particularly care to re-learn any of it. People of the Ruins is, I'd say, an early Sleeper- or Idiocracy-like satire on Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward or Wells's The Sleeper Wakes, novels in which a Rip Van Winkle figure finds himself in a wonderful techno-utopia. However, though he is at first disconcerted by the failure of his era's doctrine of Progress ("He had held the comfortable belief that mankind was advancing in conveniences and the amenities of life by regular and inevitable degrees"), Tuft soon decides that post-civilized life is simpler, more peaceful, safer ("We used to feel that we were living on the edge of a precipice - every man by himself, and all men together, lived in anxiety"). In this sense, People of the Ruins is an early example of the "cozy catastrophe." Either way, it's worth reading - but doesn't get exciting until the brutish northern English tribes join forces with the Welsh and invade London!
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10. H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914). "It is full of lively ingredients; it has no organic life," writes Aldiss of this book. "Wells the One-Man Think-Tank has burst into view. His books are no longer novels but gospels." Yeah, I probably wouldn't include this book in this Top Ten list if I'd managed to acquire and read J.D. Beresford's Goslings (a plague kills every male in London), or Cicely Hamilton's Theodore Savage (a post-apocalyptic novel by a noted feminist), or John Collier's Tom's A-Cold (I like the title). But I haven't - they're very rare. Also, The World Set Free is the best of Wells's four(!) PGA apocalyptic novels, so its lively ingredients are worth a look. Building on the recent discovery that "the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final and - lifeless - lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy," Wells conjures a 1950s England in which clean, efficient atomic engines have transformed life for the better. Alas, government and education, not to mention social justice, have not kept pace with advances in science and technology, and in the late '50s a world war breaks out. Atomic bombs that never stop exploding wipe out the world's great cities. Worldwide civilization is on the brink of collapse - "the community as a whole was aimless, untrained, and unorganized to the pitch of imbecility"; "there were rumors of cannibalism and hysterical fanaticisms in the valleys of the Semoy and the forest region of the eastern Ardennes" - when, miraculously, a New World Order is formed. But more about that another time. Fun fact: Hungarian-German-American astrophysicist Leó Szilárd, who worked on the Manhattan Project, claimed that The World Set Free helped him conceive of the nuclear chain reaction.
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Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based freelance journalist and independent scholar, who writes frequently about science fiction. His most recent book is The Idler's Glossary.

ALSO OF INTEREST

THE NINETEEN-OUGHTS (1904-13):
* Gabriel Tarde, Underground Man (1904 as Fragment d'histoire future; 1905 in English)
* George Long, Valhalla: A Novel (1906)
* Van Tassel Sutphen, The Doomsman (1906)
* H.G. Wells, In the Days of the Comet (1906)
* H.G. Wells, The War in the Air (1908)
* James Elroy Flecker, The Last Generation: A Story of the Future (1908)
* George Barr McCutcheon, Her Weight in Gold (1911; novella: The Wrath of the Dead)
* Garrett P. Serviss, The Second Deluge (1912)
* J.D. Beresford, Goslings (1913, pub. in US as A World of Women)

THE TEENS (1914-23):
* George Allan England, Darkness and Dawn (1914)
* Herbert Gubbins, The Elixir of Life, or 2905 A.D.: A Novel of the Far Future (1914)
* Maurice LeBlanc, The Tremendous Event (1920 as Le Formidable Evenement; 1922 in English)
* Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage (1922)
* Ella Scrysmour, The Perfect World: A Romance of Strange People and Strange Places (1922)
* C.F. Ramuz, The Triumph of Death (1922 as Presence de la Mort; in English, 1946; pub. in US as The End of All Men)
* J.J. Connington, Nordenholt's Million (1923)
* P. Anderson Graham, The Collapse of Homo Sapiens (1923)

THE TWENTIES (1924-33):
* H.M. Egbert, Draught of Eternity (1924)
* Martin Hussingtree, Konyetz (1924)
* V.T. Murray, The Rule of the Beasts (1925)
* Edgar Wallace, The Day of Uniting (1926)
* Shaw Desmond, Ragnarok: The Armageddon of the Gods (1926)
* C.E. Jacomb, And A New Earth: A Romance (1926)
* S. Fowler Wright, Deluge: A Romance (1927)
* Charles J. Finger, The Spreading Stain: A Tale for Boys and Men with Boys' Hearts (1927)
* Pierrepont B. Noyes, The Pallid Giant: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow (1927)
* Philip Francis Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (August 1928, novella in Amazing Stories)
* J.W. Chancellor, Through the Visograph (1928)
* Paul Creswick, The Turning Wheel (1928)
* S. Fowler Wright, Dawn (1929)
* Lionel Britton, Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (1930)
* F. Wright Moxley, Red Snow (1930)
* Thomas Alva Stubbins, The Story of the Tomb of Gold (1932)
* John Collier, Tom's A-Cold (1933, pub. in US as Full Circle)
* Helen Simpson, The Woman on the Beast: Viewed from Three Angles (1933)
* Neil Bell, The Lord of Life (1933)
* H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (1933)

PLUS:
* Karel Čapek, War with the Newts (1936)

The Descent and Doomsday both focus on women venturing into perilous situations. Do you think it's important that the heroes in your films are women? Do you write women characters differently, or are they just heroes who happen to be women?

It's certainly not some kind of career plan to have my heroes be women, it's just turned out that way. I actually wrote the story for Doomsday several years before I made The Descent. It was one of 3 scripts I tried to get made in the wake of The Descent and it was the one that Rogue Pictures chose to back, so it's really just a coincidence that my new hero is also a woman and I saw no reason to change the character into a man just because of what I'd done previously.

I try to write women as authentically as possible. Above all things, no matter how tough and rugged I make the characters, they should never lose their femininity.

The thing that seems most intriguing to me about Doomsday is that it seems to straddle genre lines, including horror, scifi, medical thriller, etc. Do you think this is true? Are you consciously trying to blend genres?

I love to blend genres. Taking the best elements from different inspirations and throwing them all into the mix is what makes it fun. Besides, I think the lines between genres have often been blurred at best, and that's no bad thing.

Most post-apocalyptic movies nowadays feature monsters (28 days, I Am Legend, etc. ) Are you consciously trying to reclaim post-apocalyptic movies from the monster-movie genre?

Absolutely! It's like there's an unspoken rule in movies now that virus = zombies! Well that's not what post-apocalyptic movies are about for me. It should be about human survival, because the day the next big global pandemic arrives, there won't be any zombies running around, I can promise you that. This is real, terrifying stuff, just as real as nuclear war was when the last great post apocalyptic movies (like The Road Warrior) came out. And that's the kind of gritty, savage world I'm trying to revisit with this movie.

Commenter OMG-Ponies proclaimed the other day that the only true zombies come from "voodoo or Jesus," not science. But as champions of a rational, scientific view, we disagree, of course. And here's the list to prove it:

Reanimator. A mad scientist, Herbert, invents a "re-agent" serum that brings the dead back to life in this H.P. Lovecraft adaptation. It starts with cats and devolves into zombie heads and rampaging corpses. Here's a gross and possibly disturbing zombie head scene:

World War Z by Max Brooks. A plague causes a zombie outbreak, which starts in China and spreads around the world. At first people think it's a type of rabies, but they soon realize it's an unstoppable pandemic that resurrects the newly dead.

Fido. This 2007 movie never really explains how the zombie plague happened, but it's definitely science fiction. The last survivors of humanity live in fenced-in bubbles of normality and turn zombies into their slaves using electrical collars. The collars neutralize the zombies' aggression and turn them docile and obedient. It's this weird paternalistic 1950s pastiche where your newly dead loved-ones become your mindless servants. There may be some social commentary buried in there.

28 Days Later and I Am Legend. Two movies with slightly different takes on the same premise: well-meaning scientists create a plague that turns people into monsters. They're not technically undead, but they growl, eat human flesh and rampage just like zombies. In 28 Days Later, their bite turns you into one of them, which is much more zombie-like. In both cases, it starts in the laboratory and ends with pale mutants biting you.

Night of the Living Dead. This one's a bit iffy. At one point, a scientist suggests that radiation from a returning Venus probe may be responsible for the zombie outbreaks. But director George Romero later disavowed this explanation.

Planet Terror. The better half of Grindhouse (sorry, Quentin) features a toxic gas called DC-2, aka Project Terror. A bioweapon deal gone wrong releases some of the fumes onto a sleepy town in Texas, and soon everybody is turning into horrendous zombies. A few people are immune, and you can delay the effects of the process by exposing yourself to the gas again.

Zombie Prom. A lovestruck teenager throws himself into a nuclear cooling tower, only to return as the Atomic Zombie. Reunited with his sweetheart, he wants to attend the high school prom, but principal Delilah Strict (RuPaul!) harbors anti-zombie prejudices. This musical short film is yet another 1950s pastiche, possibly harboring more social commentary. Here's the trailer:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The monster is a collection of dead body parts, and Victor Frankenstein zaps him to unlife using a modern science, including electricity and chemistry, mixed with old-school alchemy. Okay, so the monster doesn't go around turning others into zombies, and he's conscious and intelligent in the book. But he acts quite zombie-like in most of the movies, except Kenneth Branagh's. Call him a zombie outlier.

Resident Evil. In the movies, at least, the evil Umbrella Corp. creates viruses to use as biological weapons. The deadly T-virus is later turned into a cosmetic cream to restore your dead skin cells, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning tons of people into contagious zombies. And cosmetics company Olay recently started marketing a rejuvenating product that looks just like it.

Quarantined is a remake of a Spanish horror film, Rec, which doesn't even come out until Nov. 23. It stars Jay Hernandez (Hostel) and Jennifer Carpenter (Dexter). Director and co-writer John Erick Dowdle also directed the forthcoming Poughkeepsie Tapes, about a serial killer who videotapes his gruesome tortures. Could the writer's strike be helping to rush a total schlock-fest into production? Or will this be a searing look into the future of bioterror and superbugs? The answer, alas, is probably both of the above.

Screen Gems Locks In 3 For Quarantined [Hollywood Reporter]