Stephen King’s Cell and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids are both post-apocalyptical novels that describe an apocalyptic event and how humanity tries to rebuild itself afterwards. The first recognised work of modern apocalyptic fiction is said to be Mary Shelley’s The Last Man which details the account of the last man living in a world in which humanity has been wiped out by a plague. Whilst it received harsh criticisms and reviews at the time, The Last Man has led the way for novels like H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds to become successful. The two novels are both set in the time of their writing: The Day of the Triffids being set in the 1950s and Cell being set in the 21st Century. Therefore the apocalyptic events described by Wyndham and King are relevant to their times: Cell is about a virus that infests humanity via their mobile phones and The Day of the Triffids is about the population being attacked by alien plants after the majority of the human race is blinded. If a reader were to perceive these apocalyptic events as being ‘unrealistic’ then this would only be because that they feel they are anachronistic and therefore the reader does not fully engage with the novels. The reader’s interpretation, the novels’ contexts of reception, as well as their contexts of production are vitally important when judging whether or not the events described by Wyndham and King are ‘unrealistic’.
Brian Aldiss, in Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, commented on The Day of the Triffids by saying that:
The Day of the Triffids was totally devoid of ideas but read smoothly, and thus reached a maximum audience, which enjoyed cosy disasters or rather a ‘cosy catastrophe’.
The term ‘cosy catastrophe’ is a term given to ...
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...s didn’t manage to achieve in the same way that King has in Cell.
In conclusion, when determining whether or not the events described in Cell and The Day of the Triffids are unrealistic, one has to take into account the varying attitudes of readers: some may see them as being completely implausible whereas others may find them to be a possibility. One has to look at the events themselves, the portrayal of the characters, as well as the contexts of the novels’ production in order to determine how Wyndham and King intended for their described events to be received.
Works Cited
Cell : Stephen King (Hodder, 2007)
The Day of the Triffids : John Wyndham (Penguin Books, 1981)
Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction : Brian Aldiss (House of Stratus, 2001)
"Wyndham, John" : John Clute in The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction : Peter Nicholds (ed.) (1979)
The Book of Revelation and the movie WALL-E serve as distinct forms of apocalyptic literature to expose the reality of the human condition beneath the surface. Even though there are blatant disconnects between the two, they both share common ground as criticisms of society and to warn humanity of its coming judgement. The Book of Revelation and WALL-E offer a frightening yet rectifiable future for humanity by remaining loyal to its “core values”.
Ray Bradbury, from small town America (Waukegan, Illinois), wrote two very distinctly different novels in the early Cold War era. The first was The Martian Chronicles (1950) know for its “collection” of short stories that, by name, implies a broad historical rather than a primarily individual account and Fahrenheit 451 (1953), which centers on Guy Montag. The thematic similarities of Mars coupled with the state of the American mindset during the Cold War era entwine the two novels on the surface. Moreover, Bradbury was “preventing futures” as he stated in an interview with David Mogen in 1980. A dystopian society was a main theme in both books, but done in a compelling manner that makes the reader aware of Bradbury’s optimism in the stories. A society completely frightened by a nuclear bomb for example will inevitably become civil to one another. Bradbury used his life to formulate his writing, from his views of people, to the books he read, to his deep suspicion of the machines. . The final nuclear bombs that decimate the earth transform the land. The reader is left with the autonomous house and its final moments as, it, is taken over by fire and consumed by the nature it resisted. Bradbury used science fantasy to analyze humans themselves and the “frontiersman attitude” of destroying the very beauty they find by civilizing it.
It could be said that tragedies serve as Humanity’s catalysts of thought. When we line up literary eras with wars, the shifts in eras are always marked by some war- especially in America. The Romantic period was broken by the dawn of the civil war, and took a little magic from the world of writing. Writing shifted to realism, which was the polar opposite of romantic thought. When the First World War broke out, the modernist movement overshadowed realism. Similarly, the Second World War produced postmodernism. Should there be another horrible tragedy, the view will shift similarly. Whatever the implications may be, tragedies seem to change how us humans think and act. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, he tells the story of a group of schoolboys
Novelist Cormac McCarthy believes his dark books reflect the harsh events of human nature. McCarthy had a vision of life that was plain and simple in his mind making it harder for some readers to accept. In an interview Oprah asks McCarthy where the apocalyptic dream came from and he replied “I went and stood at a window, and I could hear the trains coming through, a very lonesome sound. I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and I thought a lot about my little boy” (New York Times
...ourneys, these men go in as an average man of the time, face a challenge that the Church thought a man of the day might experience, and come out purified and learned, as a man of those periods should behave. These stories are examples of how a life should be lived and the challenges that one may encounter. While the frames of these narratives change from fictitious to realistic according to the flow of Christianity-based, Northeastern literature, they each are pictures of the mentality of their times. As time progressed, so did the mentalities, which were heavily influenced by Christianity. This is evident in the slow removal of pagan beliefs in the supernatural monsters like dragons and giants into the more realistic literary frames. While all have their differences due to changing times, the hero's journey as a model for the everyday man is clear in these poems.
Murphy, B. & Shirley J. The Literary Encyclopedia. [nl], August 31, 2004. Available at: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2326. Access on: 22 Aug 2010.
How would you respond to an apocalyptic situation where the structure and order of society has ceased to exist? In the novel The Day of the Triffids, Bill Masen, a patient at St Merryn’s Hospital in London, lacking the necessity of vision from a facial ‘Triffid’ sting, awakens to a world absent of normality. The majority of humanity has been permanently blinded by celestial comet debris and the Triffids have been liberated from their tethers, ambushing the vulnerable blind. A Triffid is a genetically modified plant with carnivorous eating habits and the ability to move. This novel was written by John Wyndham, which depicts a theme of conflict between necessity and morality which is important to the story in numerous ways. Necessity versus morality is the conflict that motivates the action, with events in the plot and the steadily increasing sense of narrative tension throughout the book all being defined by the tension between the striving to maintain a degree of human morality and the necessity to cast aside that morality in order to survive.
In There Will Come Soft Rains, Bradbury discusses about an exceptionally high technology, virtual house that maintains to perform its each day routine even though its occupants are dead and gone. The account clearly tells of the technological revolution, as well as the atomic warfare, and its outcome on society. The irony of this story bases on the fact that the human beings have been victims of destruction rather than beneficiaries of their own technological inventions. The atomic bombings that occurred in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in Japan are some of the recent memories in 1951. Many readers and critics consider Bradbury’s images of the desolate planet to be haunting and cautionary. The story mentions that machinery has prevailed over humans and in one way or another, it provides an overview that the humankind might have fallen under the authoritative nuclear bomb (Hedin 53). The story proves that Bradbury was a man that was well ahead of...
[Verne is acknowledged as one of the world's first and most imaginative modern science fiction writers. His works reflect nineteenth-century concerns with contemporary scientific innovation and its potential for human benefit or destruction. In the following excerpt from an interview with Gordon Jones, he commends the imaginative creativity with which Wells constructs his scientific fantasies and stresses the difference between Wells's style and his own.]
Glaspell, Susan. “Trifles.” Literature: A World of Writing. Ed. David L. Pike and Ana M.
Kornbluth, C. M. "The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel As Social Criticism." The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism. (1969): 64-101.
Laurence Sternes’ “Tristam Shandy”, specifically volume 1 ch: 12, holds patronage to sentimentality through a compilation of juxtaposing emotions that are exchanged between the two characters Yorick, and Eugenius. This exchange moving towards the climatic moment in the chapter where Parson Yorick’s is murdered by the ambiguous debtors who desired revenge for his sallies. However, the chapter in entirety is expressed in a particular manner. Since the time-span of the chapter itself is short, and spontaneous. In effect, I will analyze volume 1, chapter 12 of “Tristam Shandy”, put emphasis to the literary innuendoes and (half-)ironic moments expressed through the exchange of dialogue. For chapter 12 sets Yorick and Eugenius as binaries (or foils)
Abrams, M.H. and Greenblatt, Stephen eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Seventh Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001.
The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century. Ed. Orson Scott Card. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2001. 212-217.
Ford, Boris, ed, The Pelican Guide to English Literature volume seven: The Modern Age, third edition, Penguin Books, Great Britain, 1973