Jerry Määttä, Ph.D., works as a teacher and researcher at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University. His doctoral dissertation from 2006, Raketsommar: Science fiction i Sverige 1950?1968 (Rocket Summer: Science Fiction in Sweden 1950?1968) was one of the first large-scale studies of science fiction in Sweden, and dealt with the marketing, reception and fan cultures of science fiction literature in Sweden. He has since written on audio books, literary prizes and awards, the major novels of John Wyndham, and is currently working on a study on British and American disaster stories in film and literature since ca. 1950.
Abstract
Monuments to Our Ruined Age: The Rhetoric of Ruins in Post-Apocalyptic Narratives
Science fiction has an uncanny ability to stress the fact that our fluid present is incessantly and inevitably congealing into the history of the future. Nowhere, perhaps, is this as evident as in its depictions of ruined buildings and cityscapes, where both ordinary buildings and famous monuments, once full of life, have been abandoned and left to their own fates.
Scenes of overgrown ruins have, of course, been popular long before science fiction emerged as a genre of its own (in the first decades of the 20th century), and were especially admired during the Romantic period, where they not only functioned as social markers of a family’s rich and long heritage (and were cherished to the point that many families chose to erect new ruins in their gardens!), but also acted as reminders of the passing time and the ultimate futility of all human endeavours.
In post-apocalyptic science fiction, however, ruined buildings often serve a slightly different purpose, one which has much to do with the context in which these stories are produced, distributed and consumed. Now, depictions of buildings that have fallen into disrepair – be it due to abandonment, fire, floods, the onset of nature or even nuclear warfare – have long been a staple of post-apocalyptic narratives, and are perhaps also one of the most concrete manifestations imaginable of the interplay between time and space in speculative fiction. These recurring scenes, often taking place in (once) important cities, usually rely on a paradoxical lure, oscillating between melancholy meditations on the transience of all things and taking a relish in the slow decay and deterioration of the last traces of contemporary human civilisation. At the same time they often serve as warnings, either against future wars – and especially the use of nuclear weapons – or by reminding us of the importance of establishing equilibrium between the demands of our modern civilisation and the ecology of our planet.
The aim of this paper is to discuss the particular rhetoric and use of ruins in a handful of modern British and American post-apocalyptic disaster narratives (in film and literature), ranging from John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and its adaptation (from 2009). From questions such as what function they serve in these narratives to how they are described, this paper delves into the ruins of the future in order to examine their purpose in our recent past. Are these imaginary ruins just used for illustrating, and perhaps even indulging in, the inevitable decay of everything we usually take for granted, or are there in fact major variations in the functions and depictions of our ruined futures, depending on, for instance, the contemporary context and plots of the various stories in which they figure? What features of the ruins are usually focussed on in their descriptions, and are they really only a means for melancholy contemplation – or might there be examples where ruins are used to highlight the possibilities of the future?
Time and Space in Speculative Fiction