ABSTRACT
Doomsday Clock Narratives, as I poetically call works of fiction set in doomed worlds that have already experienced some anthropogenic calamity and now are counting down the remaining moments before the ultimate disaster, depict the last days of human civilisation. Most often they are focused on the minds of characters who await their own destruction—as in the case of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach—but sometimes the storyline itself reflects the inevitability of the approaching disaster. The latter effect— achieved, for example, by Walter M. Miller in A Canticle for Leibowitz— is only possible in a full-fledged narrative with a complex, often episodic structure that introduces numerous characters and a vast perspective. In both cases the characters are deprived of the free will living in a world where the first catastrophe has already happened, and the second—final— one is inevitable. Their situation is all the more tragic as nothing can be done. The temporal mode is a countdown—the brief period of human civilisation is contrasted with deep time, and the perspective is shifted from individuals and their immediate surroundings to planetary issues. The residue of the catastrophe that has already happened and the certainty of the disaster to come create the effect of the uncanny as the material world is simultaneously seen as intact and ruined: we recognise what has been destroyed in the petrified waste and see what has not yet been destroyed from a future, postapocalyptic perspective. Moreover, these two novels, published respectively in 1957 and 1959, reflect the anxieties of the postHiroshima period of modern history when Western intellectuals pondered the political, moral, and social consequences of having invented weapons of mass destruction. As early as the 1950s, the psychological impact of the bomb had been noticed and was being studied. Thus, the books by Shute and Miller are placed not only in the context of nuclear holocaust fiction but also in the historical accounts of the “psychological fallout” of the bomb.
