 in which the mother’s suicide is open to interpretation either as self-sacrifice or as a betrayal of the duty of endurance for the sake of one’s species, father and son, each ‘the other’s world entire,’ try to keep faith and survive, while aware that, in a radically altered environment, suicide may after all be their only option. In due course the father dies, but after a symbolic three days awaiting almost certain death, the boy encounters not the feared stranger-danger but a family of four including one son and one daughter. They live in a relatively undamaged environment and invite the boy to join them, thus setting up the beginnings of a community at least as promising (or even more so) than that of the first family in Genesis. In this instance, and circumventing the unanswered Biblical quandary as to whom, other than their own siblings, were the mates available to the children of Adam and Eve, the boy in The Road will at least be able to reproduce with a girl who is not his blood relative. Life goes on.
And the trees will be no less green than last Spring.
Reality does not need me.
I would die happy, because it would be here the day after tomorrow.
If that is the right time for it, when else would it come, other than at the right time?
And I like it because it would be so even if I didn’t like it.
They can pray in Latin over my coffin, if they like.
If they like they can dance and sing around it.
I have no preferences regarding a time when I will no longer be able to have preferences.
52All is as it should be, then, as long as something still is. The unforgiving way in which a world portrayed as empty of almost everything is depicted in McCarthy’s tour de force may get as close as any narrative has come to imagining the impossible, and to preserving an unresolved dialectic between probable defeat and vestigial hope. Something also expressed with no need for further words by the Germanic nineteenth-century Romantic imagination in search of new worlds of Caspar David Friedrich.
53Sometimes, even with the benefit of advance warning (H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, [1895] 1982; John Wyndham’s ‛Consider Her Ways,’ [1956] 1983), disaster cannot be avoided. In The Time Machine the protagonist, a scientist identified simply as the Time Traveller, sets off on a journey into the future. His experience of time travel and the spectacle he witnesses of the evolution of the planet are told in the first-person in a narrative within a narrative. During his time-travel adventures, the first-person narrator tells of how he observed the sun and the moon traversing the sky and the changes to buildings and landscape around him as he travels through time to the year AD 802,701, when most of the story takes place, and briefly even further in time. In AD 802,701 he finds an apparently peaceful, pastoral community of humans who call themselves the Eloi. Like Margaret Atwood’s Crakers (Atwood, 2003), the Eloi, who are small, delicate and seemingly happy, appear to be unintelligent and child-like. The surface perfection of their playful, carefree existence is however shadowed by an inexplicable fear of the night-time hours of darkness. This, it is revealed, is caused by regular nocturnal attacks by the Morlocks, dwellers in underground caves, who occasionally turn against their masters and literally devour them. As he explores this landscape, the Time Traveller comments on the factors that have resulted in the Eloi’s physical condition and social arrangements. He supposes that their lack of intelligence and vitality are the logical result of humankind’s past struggle to transform and subjugate nature through technology, politics, art and creativity. The eventual achievement of this goal had led to a state of stagnation characterized by unimaginative and incurious contentment. With no work to do, humans also become physically weak and small in stature and intellectually disabled.
54After many adventures among the Eloi and Morlocks, the Traveller returns to his machine and travels into the far future, thirty million years from his own time, where he witnesses the final moments of a dying Earth whose very rotation has ceased under the dimming light of a fading sun. As the world begins to grow dark, life on Earth comes to an end.
55Traumatized by the knowledge he has gained, he puts the machine into reverse, arriving back in his laboratory just three hours after he had left. He recounts his experiences to his disbelieving friends, one of whom returns the following day to find that the Time Traveller had left again, this time taking a camera, presumably with the intention of collecting evidence for his claims. Having witnessed the end of the Earth on his first trip but having omitted to check on the date of his own death, however, he does not return from his second foray into time.
56Even with the advantage of both foresight and hindsight, the Time Traveller is faced with the classic philosophical impasse of all time travel fiction, namely that the future, even if knowable, is always unchangeable. This quandary forms the basis of one of the philosophical underpinnings of Western culture: from the Ancient Greeks’formulation of the unavoidability of fate to some of the most accomplished science fiction to date. Important examples of the latter are Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book (Willis, 1993) and ‛Firewatch’ (Willis, 2005), as well as John Wyndham’s thought-provoking ‘Consider Her Ways,’ to be discussed.
57In The Doomsday Book (Willis, 1993) Kivrin Engle, a young historian specializing in medieval history in 2054 Oxford, uses available time-travel technology to carry out field work in her research period, fourteenth-century England. An equipment malfunction results in her arrival twenty years later than planned. As twenty-first century Oxford succumbs to a deadly influenza epidemic, Kivrin finds herself in 1348 England, the year of the arrival of the Black Death. While in the twenty-first century medical resources are eventually able to gain control over the flu bacterium, back in the fourteenth century Kivrin is powerless to do anything other than watch as an entire community succumbs to a disease which she knows in the future will be curable.
58In Wyndham’s ‛Consider Her Ways,’ a novella narrated in the first person, Dr. Jane Waterleigh wakes up in what appears to be a hospital, trapped in a gigantic body she knows is not her own, but with no memory of her past. As her memory gradually returns she recalls taking part in a scientific experiment using a drug thought to trigger alternative states of consciousness. As she gathers more information, she realizes that she has been propelled into the future, to a society consisting entirely of women, most of whom have never heard of men. In due course she meets a historian who gives her enough information to allow her to deduce that she is now living approximately one and a half centuries after her own time. She learns that shortly after the time of the experiment that led her to where she is now, a scientist, Dr. Perrigan, unintentionally created a virus that killed all the men in the world, leaving only women. After a period of chaos, famine and widespread social breakdown, the small number of women who at that point had attained an advanced level of education (found mainly in the medical profession), had assumed control.
59In Wyndham’s novella, a forerunner of Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet (Anderson, 1959) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood, 1985), and with theological allusions which also echo the ones in The Terminator, to be discussed, the task of social reconstruction in the aftermath of the cataclysmic event follows a blueprint conceived according to a Biblical model: ‛Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider her ways’ (Proverbs 6: 6). Global social reconstruction leads to the formation of a Christian, four-tiered caste-based society: doctors, mothers, servitors and workers. Within this model, based on the hierarchical arrangement of an ants’nest, each class has a specified function. The mothers’role is that of a factory-style production line in childbearing, reproduction without men being now possible thanks to emergency research undertaken following the catastrophe. Upon returning to her own time the narrator seeks out Dr. Perrigan, just then embarking on the experimental work that in the future will lead to the accidental creation of the virus. Failing to persuade him of the disastrous consequences that his research will have in the future, she resorts to murder and burns his research papers. The story concludes with a conversation between two of her colleagues who having succeeded as expert witnesses at her trial in sparing her a charge of murder, saw her placed in a psychiatric hospital on a lesser charge of diminished responsibility. While lamenting the insanity triggered by the experimental drug and commenting in wonder at the intensity of the hallucinations it induced, one of them ponders as an afterthought that Dr. Waterleigh had never discovered that Dr. Perrigan had left a son, also a biologist (and also called Dr. Perrigan), at that point engaged in completing his father’s unfinished work.
61In 1959, three years after the first release of ‛Consider Her Ways,’ Poul Anderson took up the same preoccupations from a different angle, in the novel Virgin Planet (Anderson, 1959), whose title also carries Biblical associations. The same preoccupation with human extinction originating either in the disappearance or in the infertility of either sex, is also revived