California

By Edan Lepucki

Writers — some smart, some not so — have preyed on the anxieties of people that fear the fragmentation of societal norms. British writer JG Ballard, in particular, was adept at this, fashioning throughout the 1960s acclaimed novels (including ’62s The Drowned World, ’64s The Burning World and ’66s The Crystal World) that were initially viewed as being part of the New Wave of science fiction, and which, subsequently, were regarded as fine examples of predictive narratives.

Such works gave rise to the influx of post-apocalyptic fiction — books that blended a dystopian contemporary society and a dismal terrain with the psychological effects of technological and/or environmental developments. The most recent (and much admired) instance of this was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which told the unremittingly despairing story of a journey of a father and son travelling across a landscape withered by an unspecified disaster that has destroyed most of civilisation.