M. R. Carey - The Girl With All The Gifts (2014)

"She also knows that not all the evils that struck this land had the same cause and origin. The infection was bad. So were the things that the important-decision people did to control the infection. And so is catching little children and cutting them into pieces, even if you're doing it to try to make medicine that stops people being hungries."

'The Girl With All The Gifts' is a competent and thoroughly readable post-apocalyptic thriller, a good example of the kind of consistency that can be achieved late in a genre's run simply by cannily assembling or recombining the best ideas and tropes a subgenre has to offer. It has solid main characters that it develops thoughtfully along the way, a reasonably original concept for the lead and a powerful and even moving ending. Unfortunately, the novel fails to rise above its influences. For all that it plays with the tropes and ideas it evokes, it never quite manages to synthesise anything new or particularly striking from these component parts. Perhaps more problematic is the way the lack of balance and nuance between the characters means that the book ultimately falls short of doing justice to its big themes. Be warned, there will be spoilers from here on out.
   It's impossible to talk about 'The Girl With All The Gifts' without giving away the Big Twist, which is that Melanie is a zombie, and the book is a zombie book. Melanie, the protagonist, is a ten year old girl who has spent all her living memory in an underground base, restrained to a wheelchair and locked in a cell when she's not in class. She and a bunch of other children are educated by teachers and minded by soldiers, while outside the world is overrun with hungries (what we're calling zombies this time round, not one of my favourite terms for them). The book keeps Melanie's ontological statues a secret from the reader and from Melanie herself for the initial portion of the book. This is an interesting idea, used to immediately humanise Melanie and her classmates and so to start the discussion about what it really means to be human, which is the major theme of the book. I have to say I liked this portion of the book the best by far, with Carey very effectively subverting the trope of the creepy child. Melanie is instantly likable, and the treatment she and her classmates receive from the adults tips the reader off immediately that something is very wrong. That something of course is ultimately the dehumanising treatment the zombie children are receiving at the hands of the adults at the facility who fail to see them as human. Now, none of this is particularly original. The set up and its execution echoes Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go', which unfortunately for Carey is a much better written exploration of similar ground. Science fiction in general has a long history of engaging with the Other to explore how people dehumanise those they deem less than human, and frequently does so very effectively via children, as John Wyndham does in 'The Chrysalids' and 'The Midwich Cuckoos', books whose influence is felt very strongly here. Perhaps some of the problem is Carey's lack of subtlety. The Big Twist is so heavily foreshadowed that, if you're familiar with the kind of games that genre fiction likes to play, you're unlikely to be surprised when the reveal comes. I also suspect he misses a trick by slipping out of Melanie's viewpoint into that of the teachers and the soldiers. It's possible to imagine a shorter, more intense book set entirely in the underground bunker, making the most out of Melanie's unusual perspective to create a work of Wolfean ambiguity.
   However, Carey soon moves us away from the bunker. Melanie is chosen by Dr. Caldwell for vivisection - the entire point of the base is to study these sentient zombie children in the hopes of developing a cure - and avoids having her brain removed by a fortuitously timed attack on the base, which leaves Melanie, Dr. Caldwell, her favourite teacher Miss Justineau, and Sergeant Parks and Private Gallagher from the military detail guarding the base, stranded outside. The book quickly changes into a post-apocalypse survival thriller, as the mismatched group of civilians and military men must make its way through zombie-infested terrain to Beacon, where the last remnants of humanity is holed up. From here on out the book takes a disappointing nose-dive into utter predictability. Carey takes us through all the stations of the crash, running through a virtual checklist of post-apocalyptic tropes. Does the stolen car break down almost immediately? Check. Does Sergeant Park get frustrated at the civilians for not following his orders, but the civilians ultimately come to realise that under his gruff exterior he genuinely has their best interests at heart? Check. Did the government try to contain the spread of the zombie infection by using increasingly unpleasant and heavy-handed methods against its panicking population? And so on. Carey faces the problem that anyone writing a post-apocalyptic zombie thriller in the year 2014 faces, which is that this is ground that has been very well trod on. Yet one does not need to be heavily versed in the genre to be familiar with everything he wheels out here. Anyone who's read 'The Death Of Grass' by John Christopher and seen the Romero zombie films is going to recognise nearly every scene and scenario that plays out. 'The Girl With All The Gifts' doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from these predecessors. By the end of the story, the largest shadow cast over the book is Richard Matheson's 'I Am Legend', which plays exactly the same trick with humans assuming that the monsters they are fighting are, well, monsters, instead of sentient living beings who will replace them, and indeed the endings of the two books converge, to the extent that the not inconsiderable emotional impact of Carey's ending is attenuated by how similar it is.
   This is a shame because there is a lot of stuff that Carey does well. Sergeant Parks' character arc may be familiar, but it is done very well here, with Parks developing into a genuinely likable and sympathetic character from his early portrayal as a vicious meathead. Both Miss Justineau and Dr. Caldwell are female characters with agency, strength and some depth. And Carey's explanation of the zombie apocalypse is very well thought out. Carey's zombies are caused by infection with a variant of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungus that manipulates the brains of ants, as popularised in the David Attenborourgh documentary 'Planet Earth' and various zombie-themed Cracked articles. While post-Max Brooks and '28 Days Later' the infection model for zombies is nothing new, Carey thinks it out and its relationship to its human host, and how this allows for the zombie children like Melanie to retain control of their higher brain function unlike the first generation of zombies, in convincing biological detail. However I wonder if this isn't part of the book's problem. 'The Girl With All The Gifts' commits the very SFnal sin of explaining everything in incredible and often unnecessary detail. One of the advantages of operating in such a well-worn corner of genre is that you can actually assume that the vast majority of your readership will be familiar with at least the general shape of the story you are trying to tell; so you can show the reader the charred fields between the towns without having to explicitly point out that this was caused by the government raising the villages to try to stop the infection, say. Suggestion and insinuation, followed by leaving it to the reader's imagination, can be a more powerful technique than exposition.
   However I felt the book's biggest problem is the treatment of Dr. Caldwell, and to a lesser extent Miss Justineau. Dr. Caldwell represents science untethered from its moral and ethical responsibilities. Whereas Melanie is a person who happens to look like a monster, Dr. Caldwell is a person who happens to be a monster. She is the kind of person who is totally happy to remove a child's brain without anesthetic. Dr. Caldwell's brutal experiments recall the worst technological horrors of the 20th century. For the book to succeed, it's vital that she works as a character. However she is easily the least convincing character in the book. Carey tries to set up Caldwell in opposition to Justineau, with Caldwell claiming that her research will save lives, whereas Justineau's kindness to the children won't help anyone in the long run. However not even Caldwell believes this; her characterisation is ultimately that of a sociopath. She is not remotely interested in saving people, she is only interested in solving the intellectual puzzle that the zombies pose for her. You suspect she'd happily vivisect her own mother if it brought her closer to the truth. This renders her argument and any counterbalance she's narratively meant to be against Justineau entirely moot. The thing is, history has taught us that there are people who would do such unethical experiments, and whilst a good many of them may well have been shrieking psychopaths, a good many of them probably weren't. 'The Girl With All The Gifts' misses a chance to explore the banality of evil; the SS officer who goes home and has dinner with his family. Additionally, Dr. Caldwell's failure as a narrative counterbalance to Miss Justineau winds up having a negative impact on Miss Justineau's characterisation. Without a well-developed opposite to bounce off, in order to stop her from coming off as too perfect Carey decides to give her a back-story in which she accidentally ran over a kid and never reported it, getting away with it because society collapsed straight afterwards. It's a tin-eared decision that would probably have been avoided if Dr. Caldwell was a deep enough character to be able to make Miss Justineau reflect on her own complicity in Dr. Caldwell's programme.

J. G. Ballard - The Drowned World (1962)

"'It suits you, Kerans, you look like the man from inner space.' The rictus of a laugh twisted his face. 'But don't try to reach the Unconscious, Kerans; remember it isn't equipped to go down that far!'"

Ballard's 'The Drowned World' is revolutionary because it takes what has always been the underlying theme in British post-war apocalyptic fiction - that the apocalypse comes from within us as a reaction to outside events, rather than being forced upon us by the events themselves - and vividly foregrounds it. This theme had been present in the 'cosy catastrophes' of John Wyndham, where the down to earth, practical British protagonists calmly take stock of their new situations and immediately adapt, through to the more brutal scenario in John Christopher's 'The Death Of Grass', in which the protagonist is forced incrementally to adopt a violent new morality to protect his wife and children, culminating in the murder of his brother. 'The Drowned World' certainly derives from this fictional traditional, and its vivid descriptive passages and crisp prose consciously echo these books. But what 'The Drowned World' does differently is to explicitly connect the post-apocalyptic landscape to its protagonist's psyche, the outer world the characters walk through reflecting their inner mind state. 

Ballard's early apocalyptic fiction is thus as much an exercise in exploring different extremities of human mentality as much as coming up with imaginative ways of destroying the world. In 'The Drowned World', the rising sea levels have left the cities submerged, creating a warm, swampy world reminiscent of the early Triassic. Correspondingly, the characters experience a series of regressions, whether down the spinal lumbar to an earlier, lizard evolutionary intelligence, as reflected in the tops of buildings sticking out of the water like a back bone, or a regression into the womb, as experienced by Kerans when he goes diving in London's old planetarium. As Kerans sinks further into a fugue, the modern part of his brain becomes submerged, like the old cities beneath the swamps. In this way, Ballard uses the world the book is set in to map and amplify the internal mental state of the characters.
   Later in his fiction, by the time of 'Crash' and 'High Rise', Ballard would focus on characters whose mentality allows them to live perfectly happily in their dystopian settings. It's interesting to note that this idea was present almost from the beginning in his work. 'The Drowned World', like any post-apocalypse novel, has a frightening setting, but Kerans' character arc is to shed any last remaining vestiges of previous civilisation, to submit to the calling of the dreams that plague everyone in the lagoon, and to make his way to the uninhabitable south, happy and at home in this hostile environment. Colonel Riggs, with his desire to continue a life of meaning, order and productivity, and even the pirate Strangman, who drains the lagoon to loot the ancient city underneath, are ultimately making the incorrect response to this environment by trying to force their respective visions over the top of it rather than just accepting it.
 

Ballard's writing is spare and precise, yet tremendously evocative. The thick, oppressive heat and humidity permeates the book's atmosphere, and his description of London submerged under a tropical marsh is almost psychedelic in its intensity. This is appropriate enough considering the book's fascination with the subconscious and dreams. Kerans' journey back through evolutionary time is reflected again in his journey from consciousness down to subconsciousness. Events unfold feverishly, with the narrative getting more bizarre as the book progresses, adding a touch of haze and unreality to the proceedings, as we are left to unpick what happens inside and out of Kerans' own head. As the book continues Kerans becomes more and more under the control of his own instincts as much as anything else; Colonel Riggs and Strangman are men full of agency who get things done, both would have made fine protagonists of an earlier strain of British apocalyptic fiction, whereas Kerans is happy to sit back and let others take charge, his own agency only kicking into action with the strong, primal urge he has to return to the equator. Really his objection to Colonel Riggs' and Strangman's two very different aims is the same; they both get in the way of him making this journey.
   The business of SF writers is not to predict the future; it is to write about the future in a way that reflects something resonant within their present. Ballard was certainly aware with this. As the extent of the damage caused by climate change becomes increasingly apparent, the vistas of sunken cities in 'The Drowned World' becomes more and more eerily prescient. Yet in the book itself, Ballard could not be concerned less with the actual causes behind his apocalypse. The thing that interests him is the psychology of people and how they fare under extreme conditions and mindsets. Ballard's great theme, that technology or the apocalypse don't aggravate anything that isn't already within us, proves more salient with each passing day. It is Ballard's understanding of the human mind under strain as much as his prophetic vision that makes 'The Drowned World' so resonant all these years on. 

Christopher Priest - Fugue For A Darkening Island (1972)

"Everywhere they caused social upheaval; but in Britain, where a neo-racist government had come to power on an economic-reform ticket, they did much more."

   'Fugue For A Darkening Island' is Christopher Priest's damning indictment of Britain's innate conservatism and xenophobia that rings disturbingly true some forty years after it was published. It is also about the dangers of not standing up to evil. In some ways it can be seen as a riposte to the 'cozy catastrophes' of John Wyndham, in which middle class English folk respond to the apocalypse with their typical stiff upper lip and good sense and so maintain order and decency in the face of chaos. Here Priest wields a similarly dry, paternalistic tone to great ironic effect as he undermines the very notion of English decency.
   In 'Fugue For A Darkening Island', the incident that precipitates the catastrophe isn't an alien invasion or a plague. Africa is rendered uninhabitable by nuclear weapons, causing a massive exodus of refugees. Whereas in the rest of the world they simply cause the standard problems one would expect from an influx of a large population in need of food and shelter, in UK, where a racist far right government has come into power, they are met with suspicion, hostility and violence, eventually leading to a civil war with the African immigrants and their supporters on one side and the fascist government and the military on the other. The story centres on Alan Whitman, a British everyman who has never taken a moral or political stance his entire life. He and his wife and daughter are forced to leave their home by the conflict, and join up with a gang of refugees, where he is separated from his family.    
      In addition to its uncompromising subject matter, 'Fugue' is also ambitiously constructed, the structure designed to mimic that of a fugue, with three interweaving plot strands that echo each other as they progress. Episodes from the protagonist's early life are intertwined with the narrative explaining how the political situation collapsed and a third strand follows the protagonist through a socially disrupted England as he tries to find his wife and daughter. What could have been an unnecessary complication turns out to be an effective storytelling device. The disrupted narrative echoes the fractured state of mind of the protagonist, and the contrast of his state of mind and his behaviour throughout different points in the crisis allow us to see just how much he has been damaged by the experience. Additionally it lets us know more about Alan Whitman the person. The frank descriptions of his sexual awakenings may not initially seem to have much to do with the plot at hand, but as the narrative progresses and we get more and more information about his character, it casts some of his later decisions and behaviour in a different light. Whitman is a selfish and self-absorbed man, with that stereotypical British desire to avoid confrontation at all costs. Thus, he finds himself trapped in  a loveless marriage, constantly cheating on his wife and oblivious to the feelings of his young daughter, lacking the courage or conviction to either commit to his marriage or admit it isn't working and move on. This same fear of committing oneself is echoed in Whitman's response to the political situation developing around him. He initially joins a pro-immigrants rights group at his work, but doesn't actually do anything apart from go on a single protest march, and pulls out when the government starts cracking down on dissident activity. He even acknowledges the public's worrying political apathy in the face of political extremism, but fails to notice this characteristic in himself. There is an absolutely cringe-worthy scene in which he finds himself at a pub laughing nervously as an acquaintance makes racist jokes about the immigrants.
   This reluctance to commit haunts Whitman and drives his every action, even as he is forced out of his home by a situation created by his brutal fascist government. It is only as he searches for his wife and child, who have been kidnapped and sent to a makeshift brothel by the militant African forces, that he starts to make the first steps towards action. He shoots down a helicopter with an African pilot out of revenge, but when he goes to investigate the wreckage and finds the pilot still alive but mortally wounded he still cannot make himself either kill the man out of revenge or to put him out of his misery.
   As the story progresses, Whitman becomes more and more of an unreliable narrator. His natural inward focus is intensified by the crisis, and while he still shares his thoughts and experiences in his clipped, detached manner, it becomes clear that his sense of perspective towards outside events is becoming more and more warped as his decisions become less and less rational. The way Priest uses a dry and understated voice to ironically underscore just how twisted his protagonist's perception is brings to mind Anna Kavan's similarly apocalyptic 'Ice'. There is a scene towards the end when the rest of the UK has collapsed into anarchy where Whitman comes across a sleepy middle class village which is blissfully unaware of the situation outside its walls, which is reminiscent of the middle class family in Samuel R. Delany's 'Dhalgren' who still behave exactly the same as always and ignore the complete breakdown of social order going on outside. Priest similarly mines this situation for all the dark humour possible.
   The version of Whitman narrating one of the chronologically earlier narrative strands tells us that the government and military exercised a policy of genocide against the Africans, and he knows that the morally right thing to do is to side with them, however he keeps shying away from actually doing so. By the end of the book he discovers that his wife and daughter have been killed by the African military for not submitting to the brothel clientele's demands, which is finally enough to force his hand in the other direction. He goes on to kill an African boy and runs off into the countryside to seek revenge. By this stage, Whitman is too damaged to see that the Africans themselves are not to blame for the situation; the white nationalistic forces have brothels staffed by female African prisoners of war whom they treat exactly the same, which Whitman himself visits earlier in the story. Both armies have committed horrific atrocities against civilians on both sides, but this is a situation that has come about because the government responded to an influx of immigrants by putting them in concentration camps and trying to exterminate them. If Whitman or the rest of the UK population had the courage to stand up for what was right, rather than deferring to the last moment, this could have been avoided. Towards the end, Whitman's view is so distorted by grief and insanity that he can only see the Africans as enemies, however the only Africans who directly appear in the text, (apart from Lateef, the leader of the refugee group Whitman joins, whose origin remains ambiguous), are all victims rather than villains - the starving refugees arriving on the boats, the prisoners of war in the brothels, the dying helicopter pilot. This is my main gripe with the book, really, that all the Africans and women who appear in the text have no agency. I get that it's a conscious decision on the author's part to emphasise the limited perspective of the viewpoint character, but it's still frustrating.
   'Fugue' is an uncomfortable and uncompromising read. In a world where the UK's government is the farthest to the right it's been in years, and a substantial proportion of British voters are proving that they don't think that government is right wing or xenophobic enough, we would all do well to remember Christopher Priest's warning.