Themes in British Science Fiction

Catastrophe in British Science Fiction

It's the end of the world as we know it, and we don't feel particularly fine. What does British Science Fiction's fondness for the catastrophe tale tell us about ourselves?

Steve O'Hagan explores 'end of the world' science fiction, as examined in the BBC Four series 'The Martians and Us'.

As the 19th century melted into the next, the British Empire straddled the world in a seemingly unassailable position. But the writers of the fledgling genre of science fiction even then peered forward through the mists and sensed the catastrophe to come. Because from the angle of the better-off classes, that was what the 20th century represented to this unparalleled world power: complete disaster. From being the wealthiest, most advanced and most powerful nation on the planet, Britain had become practically a colony of its old colonial dominion, the USA.

Unlike the classic American disaster movie - where the emphasis is on the spectacle of the cataclysm itself and how human ingenuity can overcome it - the British catastrophe story is all about what happens next, after civilization falls. It asks how small groups of bewildered survivors will cope with their transformed circumstances. For British writers it is the chance to wipe the slate clean and start over.

The British catastrophe often arrives disguised in cosy, comfortable form. The sea, once the conveyor of a proud navy and protective moat against invasion, has risen countless times to either inundate the nation, as in Sidney Fowler Wright's The Deluge (1927), or to dispatch some fearsome invader, as in John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953). Britain’s island status, so often its saviour, becomes its downfall.

When fictional disasters strike, all those things Brits treasure most are twisted and warped. Country hedgerows rise up and become vicious Triffids. The proud capital, London, as if in recompense for the North / South divide, is constantly obliterated, the survivors scuttling off to eke out an existence in the countryside.
What joy British writers have found in levelling industrial society and returning to some kind of pastoral, paradisiacal idyll, a rejection of the smog-spewing industrial revolution, a yearning for the English country garden. And under it all labours the British national character, the stiff upper lip put to stern test. The Blitz spirit played out again and again.

As Britain began to adjust to its post-imperial status, the catastrophe story began to adopt new themes. Under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, John Wyndham ruminated on what kind of society was fit to survive in a world dominated by the twin poles of American capitalism and Soviet communism.

For JG Ballard, the catastrophe story was a way of pinpointing deep-rooted psychological impulses: Freudian desires for not only sex, but for self-destruction. Why else would his heroes choose to gravitate towards the epicentre of disaster rather than to flee it?

In the last few decades, the theme of catastrophe has fallen from vogue, save in a few notable exceptions: Danny Boyle’s sprinting zombie flick, 28 Days Later (2002), and Will Self’s flooded London satire, The Book of Dave (2006), among them. Why this great British tradition should be losing its lustre is something of a mystery. Perhaps the daily factual reports of an impending global climatic catastrophe have put fictional threats into perspective.