Learn To Make Fire.

In a post-apocalyptic scenario, you have to account for both short and long-term survival. Fire will be absolutely necessary in the short term. Have you ever watched one of those seasons of Survivor where one of the tribes can't figure out how to build a fire, and they don't win the flint for days and days? They can't cook their food or boil their water, and they fade fast, growing weak and ineffective until the producers take pity and slip them a Zippo when no one's looking. If you can't build a fire, you'll die. Learn to build fires in a variety of conditions, with a wide range of materials. Can you build one without dried grass? Can you build one when you're freezing cold and your hands won't stop shaking? Learn how, and practice it regularly. Of course, it never hurts to hedge your bets, and keep a supply of waterproof matches handy.

Build a Team.

I know you like to envision yourself as this awesome lone wolf bad-ass making your way through the wastelands with no one to depend on but your trusty shotgun, but the fact is you'll need friends after the apocalypse. It could be as simple as someone to stand guard so you aren't mugged or eaten by starving feral dogs while you sleep. You're going to need help, and you're going to want people you trust. You need to assemble your team long before the apocalypse happens. Make a list of friends and family who live nearby, then decide who you want with you. People with useful skills go to the top of the list (nunchuk skills don't count, but bow-hunting does). People with lots of children go to the bottom. Then make a plan and get your team in on it – if things go down suddenly, you won't all be in the same place, and there will likely be no way to communicate. Your plan should be simple, like: Step 1, get somewhere safe and wait out the worst of it; Step 2. Meet at the statue of Thomas Jefferson in Jefferson Square downtown, or better yet, your Uncle Jim's ranch 40 miles outside of town. Don't underestimate the benefits of having a plan – aside from its actual effectiveness, it gives you a goal to focus on, and that's been shown to be a factor is disaster survival.

Get a Gun. Learn to Use It.

I'm not a big fan of guns myself, but the reality is, any apocalypse is either going to caused by, or inevitably lead to resource shortages. Whether it's water, gasoline, food, or plague vaccines, there will be haves and have-nots. Some percentage of the have-nots are going to try to get what they need by force, and if you can't defend yourself, you're going to lose what you have (you're doing all this planning so you'll be a have, remember). There's another vital use for guns in a post-apocalyptic world, of course – hunting. We're all going to revert to hunter/gatherers for a little while at least. For this reason, a hunting rifle is a good idea. That's not a good weapon for close-quarters urban protection, however. For that, a shotgun is often the weapon of choice. Good thing you have a team.

Stockpile.

FEMA recommends one gallon of water per person per day, plus food. How many days can you possibly plan for? It really depends on your space and your plans. Do you have a shelter at your team's meeting place with a larger stockpile? Then a few weeks of water should be enough to get you through. You can never store enough drinking water, but obviously if you live in a 12th floor apartment, there's a limit. Don't forget a set of sturdy clothes and boots, a can opener, hand crank radios and flashlights, batteries, gasoline, and a fire extinguisher. Disaster survival experts offer a few other suggestions you might not expect: beer and cigarettes (they'll be the primary currency post-apocalypse), 3 mil. plastic bags (also known as contractor bags), duct tape (combine with contractor bags for water-resistant shelter or rain-water conduits), plus a few books and card games (you and your fellow survivors will eventually drive each other crazy without distractions).

Learn a Marketable Skill.

Once you've made it through the first few weeks, you'll eventually want to connect with other survivors, whether you're with your team or not. Any group trying to survive with limited resources is not going to accept new members unless they offer a net gain of some kind. No one's going to be impressed by your level 70 character in World of Warcraft, your discerning taste in wine or your extensive knowledge of 60s British Invasion bands (or your magnificent blogging skills, for that matter). Here are some suggested avocations to learn so you have something to offer the nascent post-apocalyptic society: small engine repair; emergency medical training; agriculture (emphasis on durable, high-yield crops); hunting/fishing; construction/carpentry; rigging/sailing (not so good in Kansas, but could be clutch in San Diego or Chicago). If all else fails, work out – no one's likely to turn down a strong back or a durable pair of legs.

Are You Ready? An In-Depth Guide to Citizen Preparedness. [FEMA]

"Not Your Ordinary Survival Checklist." Popular Mechanics, Oct. 2009.

What was the pop culture moment when you said "no more" to the End Times?

French filmmaker Paul Doucet shot this short with a RED ONE digital camera, which is the new hotness - Peter Jackson loves the RED, and District 9 was shot using one too. The RED brings a burnished quality to the look of this film, which perfectly suits the retro-futurist environment inside the bunker.

This short is a little bit Sarah Connor, a little bit Twilight Zone, and a whole lot of post-apocalyptic grimness. Perfect for your morning coffee break.

Over at RobotViking, io9 pal Ed Grabianowski freaks out with glee:

MechWarrior will return to PCs and show up on the Xbox 360 someday soon, and BattleTech co-creator Jordan Weisman is at the helm once again. Are we ready for an intense tactical mech war game in destructible urban environments, with three of your friends joining your assault lance? Yes. Yes we are. . . . To summarize what we know at this point: the game is a reboot, not a sequel. It takes place at the beginning of the Fourth Succession War. Multi-player is a major priority, and they really want to have a four-player co-op mode so you can team up with your friends and form a full lance. Better video game technology will make the game more tactically rich, and improve the feel of "piloting a giant war machine" rather than "being a giant robot." Players will have to use different types of mechs to accomplish various battlefield goals - tactical information will be crucial, so scout mechs will have a vital role even at higher levels of gameplay. No more "lock on, fire and forget." You'll have to actively acquire and maintain targets, and the dense urban environments (which appear to blow up nicely) make for great hit and run tactics.

via Robot Viking

So all this time I thought 9 would be only young-adult-novel scary, but damn if that isn't a body strewn across the first still. Methinks 9 is going to be a lot more brutal than the rest of the upcoming CG animated films, which makes sense, since Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov are both producing. So which ragdoll is going to get his (or her) stuffing ripped out?

UPDATE: OK so they only have two legs I still think they look a bit more WOTW that AT-AT but...I see what you're all saying.

9 opens on 9/9/09

Fray, the comic book shown here, is a classic of the post-apocalyptic future vampire genre. Created by Joss Whedon, the short series chronicles the life of a future vampire slayer named Fray. She works in a city divided between the healthy rich and the mutant poor, aiding her mutant buddies by using her slayer powers to be a super-criminal. Complicating her life is the fact that her (evil) twin brother has inherited part of her slayer powers too, and later Buffy time-travels into her world and messes everything up. Also, her watcher is a giant demon with enormous horns; and her boss is an amphibian criminal mastermind. Do not miss this series.

While Fray is a story of future vamps, one of the classics of the space vampire genre is the movie Lifeforce, based on a book by Colin Wilson called (yes) The Space Vampires. A naked lady from space arrives on a human space vessel, immediately seducing a member of the crew with her naked spaciness. Then she sucks the life from him, leaving a dried-up husk! Panic ensues, while more people are sucked and nudity runs rampant and glowy special effects shoot out of people's groins.

Written in roughly the same era as The Space Vampires, Tanith Lee's Martian vampire novel Sabella should probably have been made into a movie with glowing groins too. Sabella lives alone on Mars, trying to discover the mysteries of her past and figure out why men are constantly throwing themselves at her in a haze of lust. This cult classic is definitely off the beaten track for vampire fans, but manages to make Mars into a plausibly gothic landscape.


And then there's the aptly-named Queen of Blood (1966), featuring a lady who is a cross between a vampire and a green sexpot from Star Trek. You know it must be good because it stars Dennis Hopper.


Teenage Space Vampires (1999) is a rare cult classic about what happens when space vampires invade the tiny town of Knowlwood. And a few nerds have to fight them. Includes some great one-liners, as well as a running gag related to a dimensional portal, lawn gnomes, and the vampires' hidden weakness. Really it's just about the lawn gnomes. And throwing them.


Mario Bava's 1965 flick Planet of the Vampires is also one for the ages. I love how in this English trailer for the (badly) dubbed version, the narrator intones, "In a 40 G gravity atmosphere, strange things happen." Indeed: Things like people in really high, black collars and vampire-esque aliens who take over the human crew's body so (of course) their "race can survive." I'm not sure these creatures are strictly undead, but they do occupy the bodies of dead people and look really sinister. Plus, they inhabit a world where people wear a lot of shiny black outfits for no reason. So let's go with the vampire thing. Apparently some critics have claimed that this film influenced Alien.


In 12,090 AD, Vampire Hunter D roams a post-apocalyptic landscape seething with Lovecraftian monsters and vampires. This stunning and truly awesome manga / anime series is stylish, dark and addictive. D is a half-human, half-vamp creature who hunts vamps with the help of a mutant creature who lives in his hand and a cyber-horse for a steed.


In America, we have our own D, known to comics and movie fans as Blade. He's a half-human, half-vamp hunter of vampires, aided by a mutant-looking Kris Kristofferson (in the movie) and a bunch of cyber-cycles. Though the first Blade flick wasn't very futuristic, director Guillermo Del Toro fancied-up Blade II and turned it into a near-future scifi flick about vampires doing genetic engineering on themselves to create a race of super-vamps. Check out a video of the vampire mad science lab here - definitely worth a look.

Then there's the sultry Sivil, from Macross 7. She's a vampiric creature who makes an appearance in what is otherwise pure space opera.

Several novels try to create biologically plausible vampires in space. Most notably, Peter Watts' Blindsight takes place 80 years in Earth's future, when a gang of outcasts (including one vampire) are sent to deal with a spaceship filled with alien creatures that they're totally unprepared to deal with. Tobias Buckell's Sly Mongoose deals with a virus that turns people into zombie-vampires who live to infect others and generate a vast, collective consciousness that can potentially take over a huge volume of space. And in the Vampire Earth series by EE Knight, vampires from space have invaded the planet and altered its climate so they can live here comfortably while they EAT YOUR SOUL. Yes, you can now blame climate change on vamps.

Many scifi TV series had vampire episodes, but none were so literally-named as the Buck Rogers episode "Space Vampires." (above) If you live in the States (or learn how to use proxies), you can watch this piece of televisual brilliance on Hulu. What's the plot? Ummm, scary space vamps with epic eyebrows on a space station. Buck in tight white pants. Colonel Dearing in tight, orange, silky jumper. Some poor victim in what appears to be a macrame outfit. Biting, fighting, feathered hair. The end.


There may be many vampires in Doctor Who, but for us there is only one: the plasmavore from "Smith and Jones." First of all, the name plasmavore is awesome. I wish the vamps in True Blood would insist that we all use that term as the preferred PC name for blood-suckers.


And for Trek fans, there are always the salt vampires, from the aptly-named "The Man Trap." Ex-girlfriends can get ugly.


Why do vampires always want to lure you in with sex? Sexy Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood knows the answer in "Day One." Also, this episode teaches a valuable lesson. Sex in bathrooms always results in dust orgasms. You know what I mean.


And if you want to game, you can play Lunar Knights, a Nintendo DS game with a few vampy moments. Or check out the post-apocalyptic vamp MMO game Blood Wars. Best of all, of course, is cyber-vamp RPG BloodNet.

But if none of this does anything for you, surely Horror of the Blood Monsters will get your heart pumping. Yes, these scary creatures live on another planet. As this awesome trailer promises, "You'll see human beings hideously transformed . . . gruesome mutations!" Also, it's in "weird color." Which is truly a mark of quality in a space vamp flick.

Additional reporting by Stephen Goldmeier.

Above you can see concept art from The Matrix Revolutions, when the Machines attack the free human city Zion.

Note: the proper link for the artist who did the "Walking Tree" image is at Urus28.

Here you can see what's happened to Las Vegas and Los Angeles in the wake of this unnamed upheaval. These images were created by concept artist Adam Paquette, who has done work on films and videogames. I like the way his depictions of Vegas and LA seem almost familiar, because both cities are already verging on apocalyptic. But San Francisco and the Grand Canyon have undergone cultural shifts that make them less recognizable, though in ways that one might expect given the history of both regions.

You can see more of Paquette's brilliant concept art on his website.

We've written before about the amazing concept designs going into Wynter Dark, which also includes giant, dire polar bears. I was intrigued by the filmmakers' description of the Nomen, whom they think of as fantasy monsters placed in a hard scifi context:

Wynter Dark is not a fantasy film - it's a post apocolyptic adventure film that looks like a fanatsy film - without the fluff and bluster that useally accompanies that genre.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Lord of the Rings and... and... actually, that's pretty much it.

That fact that WD isn't a fantasy film doesn't mean that it's short of fantastic characters, take these early designs for the Nomen. Nomen are deformed giants whose genetics got scrambled due to being too close to a nuclear reactor that melted down. Several hundred years later the mutations have been passed down and further twisted by in-breeding.

Have we mentioned yet that we cannot wait to see this damn movie? Holy crap hurry up and finish it so we can get a new source of monstery goodness other than Outlander.

Check out more concept art at the Wynter Dark production blog, Unstable Marzipan!

via Quiet Earth and Avery Guerra!

These drawings came out of last week's "character of the week" thread topic in the Concept Art forums, and it made my eyes bleed with happiness. Go check out the whole thread.
Image credits and links to the artists' galleries are at the bottom of this post.

Images from top to bottom by:
Matthew James Riley
Peter Böhme
Yohann Schepacz
Chate Noire
James Cory Webster

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.
FULL TEXT | FIND A COPY

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.
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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.
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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.
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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)

It's been about ten years since Fallout 2 came out, and many PC gamers still fondly remember the game's blend of pop-culture references, rich gameplay, off-color sense of humor and weird retro-futuristic aesthetic. How could a game meet such high expectations, especially coming off such a long wait? By being just about perfect.

Fallout 3's gameplay is immersive and offers the player many options. The game is built on the same engine used for Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but it's been immensely improved. The developers managed to take many of the classic elements from the original Fallout games and incorporate them into a modern 3D video game. You can play it as a straight action shooter, or activate the VATS system and play out combat using action points that let you plan out your moves, then watch them in slow-mo cinematic fashion. There's a lot going on with your character at any given time: health, ammo, weapon condition, weight and encumberance, radiation levels, whether or not any of your limbs are crippled, drug addiction, karma - it can be overwhelming at times. For the most part, you're usually focused on a few things at a time, so you get used to it fairly quickly.

What does Fallout 3 offer for sci-fi fans? It gives you the feeling that you're a character in your own post-apocalyptic movie, making your own decisions and discovering the blasted, war-torn world one mutant at a time. That old Fallout charm is still there, including the black humor (one mission that causes you to become irradiated leaves you with a mutation that regrows crippled limbs) and high-tech retro style (all the wrecked cars are nuclear powered but look like '57 Chevies). In first-person mode, there is a genuine sense of tension mixed with wonder as you pick your way through the rubble. Especially early in the game, you are fairly fragile, with a crappy gun a handful of bullets. The game doesn't hold your hand as you explore, so you can blunder into enemies far too powerful for you if you aren't careful. This can be frustrating, but it really elevates the suspense and makes the world feel more realistic. The weirdness of the freaky mutant creatures contrasts sharply with the semi-familiar setting - Fallout 3 is set in and around Washington D.C., and the ever-present shattered shell of the U.S. Capitol dome in the distance is a constant reminder that this world was once like our own.

It's also a world filled with interesting moral choices. You will meet many people, and you can befriend them, steal from them, or just kill them if you want to. Of course, there are consequences to any course of action, but you can decide if you want to be a bad-ass Snake Plissken, a Neo-esque uber-hacker, or a post-apocalyptic ninja sulking in the shadows. Early in the game, you'll find the town of Megaton, which has an undetonated atom bomb at its center. The mayor wants you to disarm it, but then you'll meet a man offering a bunch of money to blow it up, along with all the residents of Megaton. This may not seem like a moral dilemma (blow it up and see what happens!) until you've met and worked with those residents: Moira, the quirky general store owner/researcher; the reformed raider and his adopted daughter; the befuddled old man and his exasperated wife; the chain smoking whore; the drug-addled teenager.

Speaking of whores, this is not a kids' game. There are curse words aplenty, including frequent f-bombs, not to mention various "working girls" who are actually available for the right price. Although in this game, "sleeping with someone" literally means closing your eyes and catching some snores in the same bed. There's a good deal of gore, too. Those cinematic action scenes feature sprays of realistic blood, severed limbs and even bursting heads. It can be pretty awesome, but definitely for mature audiences only.

You can leave your mark on the world of Fallout 3 with the smoking barrel of your 10mm sub-machine gun, or you can carve out a slice of civilization in this desperate place. It's as if you're the director, author and lead actor all at once, and you do your own stunts. All in all, it's a very satisfying sci-fi gaming experience. Image by: Bethesda.

The answer is a bit dismal: not much. All our technology, culture, and art would be reduced to a thin smear of sediment. Our grandest edifices would amount to a few millimeters in a core sample. Analysis might reveal the pollutants we deposited so vigorously during our brief tenure. A debate might erupt in the journals of the day: did the peculiarly rapid climate change coincide with our era coincidentally, or did we cause it ourselves?

Oddly (for a geologist), Zalasiewicz seems very concerned with the opinions of the distant future, vexing over the fact that they might call us the "amazingly clever and utterly foolish two-legged ape." He's even published a book on the subject, The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave In The Rocks?

Image by: mobilestreetlife.

The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave In The Rocks? [Science Daily]

Agentorange writes:

If this is the script that gets filmed, then The Road will not only be the most important post-apocalyptic film ever made but it will profoundly affect the cinema going world. But I can't help but wonder; is the world ready for a film this dark? . . . That's not to say there aren't some changes and surprises along the way. However, I'd say most if not all the changes are for the better. In some cases, scenes have been extended to create even more tension. If you've read the book you'll know what I'm talking about when I mention "the house" scene. It is one of the tensest scenes in the screenplay and it has been extended to the point that it is almost unbearably suspenseful.

Agentorange says viewers will be immediately drawn into character studies so bleak they seem like they would have to end up on the cutting-room floor. Page 8 treats us to a scene where the father and son find a family of suicides strung up in a barn, and stand next to them debating whether they might have left any food behind. After they leave without food, the father shows his son how to kill himself "properly," with a gun in his mouth. This is definitely a father-son relationship of the post-apocalypse.

Apparently little is added to the script that wasn't in the book, save for a few short scenes giving the father's backstory and a few moments where his wife behaves in a way that doesn't quite make sense given her character.

Given that they got their hands on the whole script, however, I really wish they'd given us a bit more detail about what to expect. When I clamored for more, Don Neumann (Mr. Quiet Earth himself) assured me by email, "Suffice to say with our post apocalyptic expertise, we give it a ringing endorsement." But he added that if enough people clamor for more, he might be willing to post a few more details of the script.

So check out what Quiet Earth has, and email them asking for MORE.

THE ROAD Script Review [Quiet Earth]

No game play footage has been released, though the official site has a cool teaser trailer. Developer Bethesda has revealed that "America's First Choice in Post Nuclear Simulation" will take place in first or third-person POV and features a huge explorable world along with the series' trademark character creation and advancement system. When you leave your home vault to find your missing father, you'll face moral choices in addition to the pausable real-time combat system. Should you negotiate with those raiders, or just shoot them? Should you pimp your wife out for cash, or earn it yourself? Tough call.

I chatted with Roush over email, who said he's definitely interested in moving over to traditional television, but that he wouldn't dismiss just staying Web. Why did he pick the gun-toting, Xena-esque heroine, played by Brynne Worley?

Alien had a huge effect on me when I was a kid because of seeing a strong woman stand up to incredible odds. I originally called the story Gentleman Wasteland but figured there were so many lead characters in post-apocalyptic films who were men, that a strong leading woman may be more compelling for our audience. I have always enjoyed seeing lead female characters in action/adventure movies and simply put... I find them quite often to be equally if not more bad-ass then most leading men.

More realistic than Lost, the show tries to grapple with what would really happen if a small town essentially became the whole world. It turns out that after nuclear wipeouts, life goes on. People have love affairs, teenagers pick on each other, and everybody gets drunk at the local bar. The strange combination of small-town drama and big-picture freakout obviously made the show some fans for life. But it also drove away the big audiences CBS was looking for. It was just a little too weird, and a little too dark.

The question is, will Jericho capture that audience now that most scripted dramas are victims of the strike? Absolutely. The strike is the best thing that ever happened to Jericho. This show's an acquired taste, and now that nothing but Beauty and the Geek is on people are likely to stick with it longer. Plus, we're coming in during a tense but exciting time on the show, when Jericho is going to war with another town that wants to take over. War, romance, and nukes — what could go wrong?

The creators say:

This is the adventure of Lady Wasteland. A story rooted in the misfortune of individuals left to scour a vast wasteland in search of their own private destiny. Each character: a fragment, a survivor, a wanderer. In a god-forsaken landscape after the collapse of civilized society, we find a generation left for dead, fueled by revenge, apathy, absurdity, and the need to find a piece of food.

Check it out.

Lady Wasteland [official site]