Pre-Apocalyptic Fiction: Staving Off Catastrophe


Stories set in a world that has been ruined by some overwhelming catastrophe are commonly categorized as "post-apocalyptic fiction," a sub-genre of speculative fiction -- for the time being at least, because the world isn't ruined yet. Not altogether, anyway.

But what about stories that concern themselves with ruin that might happen, but hasn't yet? With Apocalypse Brewing, so to speak.


Most importantly, the pre-apocalyptic category is a form of moral fiction. The heroes in these tales are women and men who are doing what they can to turn the apocalyptic tide. If there's no hope of staving off apocalypse, or if a story's drama turns on the discovery that apocalypse is inevitable, we're talking cusp-of-apocalypse fiction ... which (in my taxonomy, at least) is a different animal.

Here's a short list of novels I categorize as pre-apocalyptic:


The Jaguar's Children by Jack Vaillant

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air by Darragh McKeon
In 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant burns in the northern Ukraine, as the Soviet Union stumbles toward collapse. A surgeon named Grigory does Sisyphean battle ministering to an endless stream of radiation-sickened victims, in the face of indifference or worse as bloodless bureaucrats attend to controlling information and deflecting blame away from the Soviet state. Meanwhile, in Moscow, Grigory's estranged wife Maria is drawn into a workers' plot to weaken the crumbling empire. The apocalypse in this novel is "local" only in the sense that a global cascade of nuclear plant failures -- Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukishima -- has just begun, and the industry that runs the reactors shows little sign of shutting them down. The heroes in McKeon's novel battle inertia and self-interest that form the poisoned soil in which disaster germinates.


All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki
A tribe of neo-hippie activists roam the rural U.S. in a biodiesel powered RV, then team up with a messianic Christian, seed-banking farmer to resist the incursion of genetically engineered potatoes into Idaho's farmscape -- and the debt peonage such patented seed crops impose on once-independent growers.

The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon
Radical, Vietnam-era fugitives once associated with an organization not unlike The Weather Underground recount a tangled tale of outrage, despair, responsibility, love, and unlikely loyalties that led antiwar activists to plant bombs, rob banks, abandon children, and spend decades continuing to fight for justice under assumed identities. Gordon's novel delves deep into the character, motivation, and human flaws of pre-apocalyptic heroes.


The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
In this classic of pre-apocalyptic fiction, four riotously eccentric characters commit acts of ecological sabotage to stymie destructive "development" of wilderness in the southwestern U.S. Their high-spirited acts of environmentalist defense walked out of Abbey's pages to inspire EarthFirst! and allied bands of loosely-organized monkey wrenchers, who continue to wage asymmetric warfare on behalf of forests, deserts, rivers, exploited animals, oceans, and biodiversity.

So what do readers get from pre-apocalyptic fiction that isn't on offer from stories set in a future, fully-broken world?




Steve Masover is the author of Consequence, a pre-apocalyptic novel set in San Francisco, the Pacific Northwest, and the monocultured plains of Nebraska.