bet for an choice to the horrific scenario of 2012 and The Road ? Try the “ cosy calamity ” genre , the Guardian suggest : Stories like Clarence Shepard Day Jr. Of The Triffids and The World In Winter feature a less violent version of the end .
In the “ cosy calamity ” genre , the end of civilization happens more lightly , or is passed over altogether , and there ’s often some promise for the rebuilding of the world . The Guardian explains :
The phrase is attributed to the British author Brian Aldiss , who mentions it in his absorbing history of skill fable , Billion Year Spree , while talking about the author of Day of the Triffids , John Wyndham . While Triffids , with its blind public and sinister , stalking plants , could scarce be described as “ cozy ” , it is an instance of a mostly non - tearing , non - destructive doom . Wyndham also wrote The Kraken Wakes , in which an alien invasion gradually destroys culture by room of melt the ice cap rather than with demise rays and war machines . The book chronicles the rebuilding of a massively de - populated mankind once the noncitizen have been despatch .
John Christopher is another British author who embraced the idea of a cosy calamity . While his novel , The Death of Grass – which so worry Sam Jordison when he was youthful – does boast an ecological tragedy that causes often violent social crack-up , Christopher ( real name Sam You d ) also wrote The World in Winter , a very much more British version of Emmerich ’s picture show The Day After Tomorrow , in which increasingly abrasive winters push back the population of western Europe towards the of a sudden more moderate African regions . And then there ’s JG Ballard , who employed ecological apocalypse in his first appearance novel The Wind from Nowhere , as well as in his more famous study The Drowned World , The Burning World , and many of his short stories .
Of naturally , there may be a scrap of compliments - fulfilment on the part of these source , as the Guardian quotes authorJo Waltonsuggesting . The survivors of these disaster are often very middle class , and they get to meander around a suddenly depopulated world , with the working socio-economic class wiped out in a guilty conscience - free mode . And then they get to reconstruct the world along more civilised tune .
But leaving away the classist undertones of the genre , who ’s to say that a collapse of civilization would n’t be slow and comparatively non - violent ? And that we would n’t pull together to rebuild afterwards ?
screening of Day Of The Triffids by Mark Salwowski . [ Guardian ]
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