Robie Macauley: A Secret History of Time to Come

     Another post-apocalypse novel here, a depressing though very good one. It’s set in the USA, initially in the late 1980s, when a race war erupts which ends in both the genocide of black Americans and the total collapse of civilisation in that country; after a brief account of the war and mayhem, we are then projected an unspecified number of years into the future, in which various small bands and settlements attempt, with varying degrees of success, to sustain themselves.

What works effectively is the total disconnect the writer creates: we are as disoriented as his characters as they engage with the remains of the world, and the leftover traces of the past ‘civilisation’; the survivors are all white, and there are only myths and legends about a vanished race, and a war. Everything has been forgotten.

The real power of the book – and it is surprisingly powerful – comes from its structure. The hero Kincaid is on a quest, moving westwards towards what seems to be the city of Chicago, and the Great Lakes, aided by the remains of a tattered roadmap of what he calls the country of Esso. Something drives him, perhaps a voice from the past of our times. And he encounters various people and places as he goes. Nowhere will he stay and put down roots, though he is asked. And there are stories of others, vaguely connected, as he travels; sometimes they interlock, and after a fashion the various strands come together in an extremely vague and open ending.

The narrative reflects the disconnected times: we are familiar with the present USA, and project our knowledge onto a story which strives to make this as difficult as possible; there is an alienation which is forced and almost Brechtian. And the vastness of an almost empty continent, filled with the incomprehensible ruins and detritus of our times is scary, as is the brutishness and the brutality of the survivors in their different ways. One particularly shocking episode only gradually reveals itself as a raid to capture slaves who are then auctioned in a public market: the writer says nothing about the slaves’ race or colour; we have to deduce his point for ourselves.

There is no hope at all that anything better will come after the calamity; this seems to have been a trope of such post-apocalyptic novels in the post-war era generally, and I was reminded of Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, perhaps the archetype of the genre, in which history comes to repeat itself, and George Stewart’s Earth Abides, which does offer a sliver of optimism by the end. Such novels are a serious warning: to my mind, this is one of the strengths of science fiction. Progress – what ever we mean by that word – and civilisation (likewise) are fragile and hard-won concepts and may not be recoverable once we have let them slip through our fingers; in our times, that is a thought worth holding.