The Silent Voice: by Christopher Hodder-Williams

Four astronauts returning from a mission to Mars are diverted from their landing at Cape Kennedy to the coast of England. Here they find there has not been a nuclear war - but the entire population believes there has been one, as if suffering some form of mass delusion. The country is under martial law; ARP wardens enforce rough justice; and columns of refugees straggle between intact cities, chewing hungrily on their stiff upper lips. The astronauts soon find it is the same across the globe. But what has gone wrong? They suspect the computers which diverted them have staged an electronic coup and that the early-stage artificial intelligence recently introduced into NASA's systems has allowed the computers to co-ordinate a sort of brain wave which maintains the delusion of war. This delusion also has the effect of wearing out brain cells, leading to extinction. After donning tin foil hats, which they wear for the duration, the astronauts confront the computers in a nuclear silo disguised as an oil rig; and the plot degenerates into a version of Fail Safe in which the computers are ultimately talked down. The narrative consists of tape recordings made by the various astronauts as they struggle through a series of mostly old-fashioned and underwhelming plot points.

Hodder-Williams started out writing aviation thrillers during the 1950's, before progressing through two apocalypse thrillers - Panic O'Clock and Chain Reaction - both in the manner of John Christopher rather than John Wyndham. These allowed him to develop a minor talent for cruelty, which he put to good use through-out the rest of his career and which marks him as an authentic fantasist in the revenge mode. He is at his most effective in realising that human emotions can withstand any catastrophe, though often in a form abbreviated by radiation or botulism or voices in the head. It is the abbreviation which concerns him; the moment of the kill. In fact, the only female character in The Silent Voice is killed twice; once so that she might have a metal plate inserted into her head, and twice so that the plate can be used to eviscerate any love interest which might interest the reader.

The Silent Voice is not a bad novel. It's quite satirical in places, such as in the use of human frailty to enforce delusion; and there is much in the climax that cannot be summarised. The computers, whose only presence is that of pain, remain discretely bundled in the ether, and the real villain of the novel is that of self-fulfilling prophecy as a form of open-source software. In this repect, Hodder-Williams really was onto something, tin foil hat or no.

The Fittest: by J.T. McIntosh

J.T. McIntosh's novel of societal collapse and inter-species conflict is misunderstood as a story of super-intelligent animals waging a war of attrition on mankind - in fact these animals are not super-intelligent; rather their creator Paget has given them only a limited facility of memory, so that they do not need to be taught or shown something more than once or twice to be able to understand it. That slight change is enough. The animals retain their often brutal natures, but with the advantage of memory, which permits them to organise and coordinate their attacks on human beings and human infrastructure. Even more striking is the fact that with memory comes self-regard - these animals are not rabidly suicidal; they are aware enough to be so self-serving that they can be diagnosed as psychopathic. And once they have destroyed power and communication cables to render mankind helpless, they find themselves on an equal footing for the fight - because a human society without its intrinsic advantage of civilisation is reduced to nothing more than a collection of individuals whose memories are those of automation rather than adaptation.

As ever with apocalypse novels the question of division of spoils leads to charges of sexism as women are treated in much the same manner as tinned goods. It is not that one doubts that women would become commodities in such a scenario - really it is their acquiescence which leaves the author's presumptions open to question. This problem isn't unique to McIntosh; it's evident in Wyndham and Christopher and the rest. In fact The Fittest, by virtue of its title alone, confronts the problem head-on - the scramble to re-order relationships in light of societal collapse takes on a most depressing and predictable aspect, as men examine hip girth in women, and women appraise shoulders in men. Such considerations take up a good deal of the text, a sort of fumble in the jungle which is almost as tiresome as it is inevitable. Which leads us to the notion of "cosy catastrophe" as defined by Brian Aldiss. The Fittest ticks all the boxes, but its disharmony is not that of a formula; really you need to go back to Arthur Machen's The Terror to find a similar concept so effectively handled. In Machen's novel it was, ultimately, man's inhumanity to man which led to the animal world's uprising; in The Fittest McIntosh extends this idea - once humanity is gone between us it is gone from us, and we revert fully to the Darwinian, survival of...  However, this is not all. There is the process of stripping down a human being. In a way the risen animals only make mortal the wounding process of mortification begun by other human beings - the animals show remarkable solidarity in the face of their human enemy; human beings, conversely, display a complete lack of solidarity and turn on each other with the exact and rabid nature expected of wild animals. In this manner McIntosh notes that human progress is depressingly material and that human beings have used their smarts only to reduce the species to atomised individuals united by concepts such as wealth and status. Ironically these concepts are better suited to survive than the individuals who aspire to them.

The Fittest is not McIntosh's best novel - he is perhaps one of those authors without a best novel; rather his books gather around a fixed point in his bibliography, and The Fittest is sturdy enough to qualify as an entry point for readers. Later McIntosh exhibited some extraordinary imaginative turns - in Time For a Change (Snow White & the Giants) a group of warring superbeings from the future carry their inexplicable fight through a fireswept English village; in Transmigration the narrator dies accidentally and finds himself inhabiting the minds of his friends and colleagues, most of whom can't wait to get rid of him; One in Three Hundred is another apocalypse tale, in which Earth must be abandoned - but, of course, the selection process is highly suspect, leading to guilt and unrest. I retain only one vivid recollection of Norman Conquest 2066 - that of a 1960s Morris Minor trapped on a motorway that is ended by time rather than space. I suspect the memory is entirely false, but it is typical of how this author works - his books erupt into consciousness by placing a hand grenade under the pillow; you are allowed to dream that it's there, but waking is a pain in the head.

The Darkest of Nights: by Charles Eric Maine

Although now sadly forgotten, Charles Eric Maine was one of the most successful British sf novelists of his time. Several of his books were filmed, most famously The Mind of Mr Soames in 1970, an attempt perhaps to cash in on the success of Charly. Unfortunately, Soames stars the insufferably 60s Terence Stamp, so I doubt I will ever get around to watching it.

Between 1958 and 1962 Maine turned out two major apocalypse novels - The Tide Went Out and The Darkest of Nights. The former is a rather quaint disaster novel in which nuclear tests cause the earth's oceans to drain away into Atlantic and Pacific fissures, leading to ecological disaster and societal collapse. It is a book that retains many excellent pulp credentials despite, or perhaps because of, its premise. The Darkest of Nights is an outstanding apocalypse novel and, to my mind, the definitive plague novel. While it shares many characteristics with the apocalypse works of John Wyndham and John Christopher - it is more artful than The Day of the Triffids, and more cruel than The Death of Grass - it is a true original in the sense that its characters act out the functions of pathogens, rather than simply being victims or not, as the case may be.

The Hueste virus, a possible side-effect of nuclear testing, begins work in China, killing millions of people. The outside world looks on, not entirely aghast as China is remote and the casualties there make splendid statistics with which to sell newspapers. The plague soon spreads to Japan where Pauline Brant, attached to the International Virus Research Institute, deals with the first of the casualties. She returns quickly to Britain to deliver samples and also meet with her estranged husband, Clive, Foreign Editor of the Daily Monitor, who solicits information on the plague and also a divorce. As the plague spreads across the Far East, the Brants part, Pauline to a virus research group, Clive to his newspaper and a frustrating round of new secrecy laws - why are massive incinerators being built in public parks? why are underground bunkers under construction in all major cities? The answer is, of course, obvious, but now routine censorship means that the population cannot really conceive of the scale of the Hueste virus - fully half the world's population will die, and the British establishment is keen to keep this a secret until it can secure the means for its own survival. Clive resigns his newspaper post and takes a job with an American television company. As the full force of the virus hits Britain, Clive and his American crew film much of the ensuing chaos and disorder for posterity, as it becomes open rebellion and then revolution. However, there is little for the population to rebel against as, in a piece of plotting later borrowed by Peter Van Greenaway for his novel Graffiti, the heads of government, business, industry and finance, and their extended families, are safely placed in the newly-built bunkers, complete with air filters, medical supplies and staff, while the rest of the nation is left to take its chances with the virus. As in Graffiti, these bunkers are set upon by an insurrectionist army, led more by outrage than by the prospect of imminent death, and the ensuing civil war is repeated across the globe. Pauline is detailed to serve in a bunker in Liverpool which manages to resist attack; Clive fares less well - his film crew is killed and he is captured by the rebel army. By now the situation is chaotic - there are not only revolutions and counter-revolutions, but medical advances mean there is virus and anti-virus; sadly, perhaps deliberately, the anti-virus is as lethal as the original virus, so those who survived Hueste are vulnerable to its cure; these too die in their millions, until victory for either side becomes a simple matter of attrition. Eventually, Clive and Pauline are reunited, but only so that one might cancel out the other.

In the end The Darkest of Nights resorts to Clive as a measure of civilised behaviour - somehow his character, presented as vain, scheming and ambitious at the beginning of the novel, is redeemed, not by a personal change in the man, but by the deterioration of his fellows. Clive becomes a civilised outpost, resorting only to outrages which have some semblance of moral continuity - some sensible looting; a revenge killing or two - and this continuity helps him revert to the status quo when it comes to a final choice as to whether to side with the insurrectionists or the government, no doubt taking many a reader with him. Maine's strength as a writer is that he makes us aware of this choice. Maine also has a happily informative prose style - he is able to impart huge amounts of information in just a few lines. This is not info-dumping on his part; rather he is interested in how things work, and he makes them interesting for the reader by infusing them with every detail of craft.

Maine's work was published in hardcover by Hodder & Stoughton throughout most of his career, and these 1st editions are well worth picking up, especially The Darkest of Nights with its fantastic petrie dish cover illustration by John Woodcock. My copy has the added attraction of an internal stamp reading RAF Leconfield.

The Birds: by Daphne Du Maurier

So what do you get if you remove Rod Taylor's dark amber, Tippi Hedren's time of the month, and some very bad back-projection from Hitchcock's film The Birds? You get Daphne Du Maurier's sad, forlorn little story, of course.

Coming in at just over 40 pages, The Birds barely qualifies as a novella. Nat Hocken works the land and keeps his family safe and well in a small house near the sea. A change in the seasons from Autumn to Winter appears to bring more than a change in the weather, as gigantic flocks of birds gather in cloud-like formations off the coast, and begin a systematic attack on human habitats. Hocken retreats to his home with his family, where they remain barricaded inside for the duration of the siege. But according to the radio, this is no mere siege; human organisation has succumbed to avian mobilisation. As the radio broadcasts cease forever, Hocken smokes his last cigarette, realising there will likely never be another.

The only real character in The Birds is the birds; whether wheeling or floating or murderous, they carry the story in talons and beaks and claws to where they want to take it; and Du Maurier lets them take it all the way into disaster territory. Like a piece of psychological profiling, Du Maurier turns the story on what you see when you look at something a certain way; in this case, it's what you see when you look up; Hocken has scratched his living from the land, so we trust him when he looks up and sees death in the sky, and he communicates the emergency to us in workmanlike manner as he gathers his family about him for the end. This is the story's gift to apocalypse literature - the instincts of craftsmen, artisans and farmers, as opposed to the literary scientists and curious aristocrats of Wells and M.P. Shiel.

What the birds do is not unexpected; like all disasters, as soon as it happens we knew it would happen all along. It also begs the question: What do you see when you look up?

Moonlight Red: by Dighton Morel

Dighton Morel's rather obscure apocalypse novel Moonlight Red, published in 1960, sits easily at the tail end of a decade of such novels, from John Christopher's The Death of Grass to Nevil Shute's On the Beach; it also sits uneasily ahead of the New Wave of the 1960s. Moonlight Red is peopled with the types so prevalent of apocalypse novels written during a more stable era - so we have the stuffy Colonel, the concerned schoolmaster, the dedicated doctor. Yet Morel breaks down all these 1950s types with an extraordinary cruelty which can only be described as ahead of its time. Not far ahead of its time admittedly - for Morel's characters apocalypse will always be only a few years away, in the mid-60s, perhaps, at the hands of a likely Norman Spinrad.

The novel begins blandly enough - a pandemic of flu affects most of the population; slowly it is brought under control. But an outbreak of secondary flu almost invariably results in patients developing encephalitis, which leads to permanent and incurable madness. The authorities, aware that everyone who contracted flu will also contract encephalitis, give up the ghost almost immediately. The action of the novel focuses very specifically on the English town of Westhaven, with almost no reference to what happens outside; and, by inference, what happens in Westhaven is what happens everywhere - after an initial attempt to quarantine victims of acute mania, the authorities are quickly overwhelmed and the now-mad populace is allowed to kill itself off at will. At this point the survivors, Whites (those who have never had flu), and Blues (those who have had flu but have not yet developed mania), withdraw to a redoubt which is, ironically enough, the asylum camp built to house the very first victims. Here they hold fort for a time. Straggling Whites are taken in; Blues who develop the mania are expelled. And it is this which finally undoes the fledgling community - because among those they take in is a gang, made up according to the best traditions of middle class fears about the problem of youth. We have the gang-leader, his moll, the guitar-playing sidekick, etc.

It is at this point that the novel develops encephalitis of its own. Morel seems determined to act out a confrontation between youth and authority in a sparse community where neither youth nor authority exist in any shape or form where they might pose a threat to one another. The ensuing confrontation is a strange one - casualties are high and, of course, no-one wins. No-one can win. In the absence of both authority and youth to worship, the survivors turn to a quasi-religious figure to lead them, a guru fully qualified for leadership by dint of his previous occupation - wearing a sandwich board which reads 'the end is nigh.' The 60s have finally arrived.

An interesting novel, full of absurdities and fallacies, but very much in the tradition of English disasters; Morel humiliates his characters, sparing no-one - all their worst fears, and fates, come true. It is interesting to compare Moonlight Red with Edmund Cooper's All Fools' Day, in which solar radiation kills off the sane and spares the mentally ill. Cooper's book is much better, but it is 'cosy catastrophe' as defined by Aldiss;  Morel's book is not, for reasons that remain inexplicable.