The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Early SF Genre Post-Apocalypse Story The situation of Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955) is not unlike that in other post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki post-apocalypse sf novels: eighty years before the present of the novel a nuclear war called the Destruction wiped out cities and their populations, technology, infrastructures, and supply and demand systems (Brackett doesn’t concern herself or her people with fallout or radioactive zones, etc.). What Bracket does that’s original is envision fringe religious groups like the Amish who had never fully adopted modern technology and its convenient devices as having been in the best position to survive in the post-apocalypse world. The knowledge that science and technology lay behind the atomic warfare and the belief that high population density in cities led to self-destruction has combined with religion to produce a culture that outlaws anything beyond steam-engine and oil-lamp technology and strictly limits population growth in communities. The Thirtieth Amendment to the US Constitution forbids more than a thousand residents in one community or more than two hundred buildings per square mile. Although children learn basic mathematics, all their other education is Bible-based, and they are severely punished for showing any signs of intellectual curiosity about the world or science and technology and are encouraged to be content with their rural farm lives. (One does wonder if other countries in the world are similarly limiting their population growth and technological advancement). In that context, 14-year-old Len Coulter, the protagonist, lives on his family farm in the laid-back, small New Mennonite community of Piper’s Run in the Ohio area. As the novel begins, Len’s 15-year old cousin Esau convinces him to accompany him to an illicit preaching event in which non-Mennonites are said to entertainingly roll around on the ground in their extreme religious fervor. Instead of being entertained by impassioned preaching and extravagant contortions, however, the young boys are traumatized by the stoning of a young, friendly traveling trader because he was accused of being from the legendary and wicked Bartorstown, a place rumored to be full of Satanic forbidden knowledge. Another friendly trader named Ed Hostetter takes the boys home, where Len’s father counsels him to become content with his life on the farm. This is difficult because Len’s grandmother was a girl when the Destruction hit, so she remembers the colorful clothes and the big cities and many people and is wont to tell Len about them, and because cousin Esau is attracted to forbidden technology, stealing a radio hidden among the stoned trader’s possessions and then three books about physics and radios etc. from Piper’s Run’s teacher’s library. What will come of the boys’ quest for verboten scientific and technological things? Will they be able to find a place to live freely according to their naturally inquisitive spirits? Will they ever find Bartorstown? Will they be accepted by the secretive enclave if they do find it? Are we doomed to repeat our cycle of technological advancement and destruction? Brackett’s novel poses good questions about technology and science and religion, about the degree to which our innate curiosity may be stifled by conservative authoritarian traditions, and about the way in which we may live with nuclear power and atomic weapons if abandoning them is not an option. Her account of Len’s painful awakening in his pious culture, conflicted by guilt and resentment and rebellion and love and curiosity and longing, is compelling. Her depiction of fanatics like the New Ishmaelites (who wander the wilderness in rags to purge their flesh of pleasures) is scary, and the possibility that Bartorstown people are just as fanatical is neat. Audiobook reader Ben Rameka is OK. Despite being written by a woman, like most post-apocalypse fiction Bracket’s novel is quite the boy or young man’s story. The few female characters are not appealingly or deeply developed, and even Len’s love interest Joan Wepplo weakens by the end. Furthermore, works like Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964), and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980) explore similar themes and situations to Brackett’s, but are better written. However, Brackett wrote her novel before theirs, and she should be given credit for that—and for the hard questions she asks. Although the ending is abrupt, the lack of radioactive residue in America is suspect, and Len lacks charisma as a protagonist, the novel is kindly compact as genre novels once were, and I did enjoy reading it. Completists of early sf genre post-nuclear holocaust fiction should read it. View all my reviews
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