...And I Feel Fine

The end of the world -- and its aftermath -- is a fertile field for growing stories. Whether it ends via natural disaster or human-caused calamity, the tales of those who survive feature challenges, heroism, ingenuity as well as the darker impulses spurred by the will to survive at the expense of others. Here are three visions of How It All Ends and What Comes After.

Sci-fi authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle made a big splash with their 1974 alien first-contact novel The Mote in God's Eye. The collaboration was enjoyable enough that they turned their hands to a disaster novel in between their respective solo work. The result, 1977's Lucifer's Hammer, is not really a science fiction novel even though that's where you're likely to find it shelved. Instead we watch several people in the months preceding a comet smashing into the Earth, what happens to them and others on that day, and their struggle to survive and rebuild their society in the months afterwards.

Both authors have the science backgrounds to flesh out the technical aspects of smashing the Earth with a giant comet, and they set most of their novel in and around Southern California, an area they lived in and knew. It may seem as though the first section of the novel, setting up the characters and their own specific situations, drags a little, but Niven and Pournelle are taking pains to show what kind of life the comet, nicknamed "The Hammer," will destroy. The section outlining how each of our main characters either does or doesn't escape the effects of the comet strike is harrowing and realistic.

The post-strike section, centering on the battle between a roving anti-technological cannibal army and an enclave working to survive and rebuild, feels a little less focused, but that may stem from the strength of the section on the day of the impact. Niven and Pournelle comment on what they believe are the keys to humanity's survival by showing which kinds of responses to disaster succeed and which fail. Those choices are not entirely organic, and could use some more supporting evidence to make them seem less arbitrary. The characterizations are largely solid, although only two of the female leads are very well drawn. Hammer could probably benefit from some tightening and maybe cast slimming but it's still a great end-of-the-world yarn that is less outdated than its 40-year-old pedigree might suggest.

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Walter M. Miller spent most of his active writing career working in short stories. The only novel he published during his lifetime was the 1960 post-apocalyptic triptych A Canticle for Leibowitz, about life at different periods following a nuclear World War III.

Canticle's action begins several hundred years after the war, in a monastery in the Desert Southwest. Civilization has only begun to recover, as in the aftermath of the war technology and advanced knowledge were blamed, rooted out and destroyed wherever they could be found. The monastery is the home of the "Albertian Order of Leibowitz," monks who carry on the work of Isaac Liebowitz, a Jewish engineer who spent the tumultuous postwar years collecting, hiding and preserving books and knowledge. The first section concerns the canonization of the Blessed Leibowitz as St. Leibowitz. In the second, set 600 years after the first, secular leaders want to try to control the knowledge contained at the abbey and political struggles with the church lead to schism. The third section, set 600 years later, sees humanity with advanced technology and colonies in other solar systems. The Order now works to preserve all knowledge, particularly important as two major powers seem set on again fighting each other with nuclear weapons.

The action isn't the focal point of Canticle, as Miller uses his characters and narrative to explore topics like the role of religious faith as a transmitter of knowledge and whether secular and ecclesiastical power structures can really co-exist. Starting with the wry irony of the title -- an order of Roman Catholic monks named for a Jewish electrical engineer -- Miller aims to tell the truth as he sees it but to do so following Emily Dickenson's admonition to tell it slant. The post-apocalyptic world of Canticle serves mostly as a way for Miller to skew things enough to bring that slant to bear and make readers think in order to uncover the ideas at the core of his work.

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The post-apocalyptic setting of Robert Adams multi-volume Horseclans series is also important mainly as a backdrop, but in a much different way. The plains and eastern U.S. after a devastating nuclear war functions like Robert E. Howard's Hyborean Age -- as a backdrop for some down-and-dirty sword-slinging, hacking and slashing action.

In the series' first novel, 1975's The Coming of the Horseclans, we meet Milo Morai, a man who has lived for centuries, saw the nuclear holocaust of 1980 and helped its survivors develop a nomadic culture modeled on different plains Indian tribes. Milo is one of the Undying, a group of immortals who can be killed only by suffocation, decapitation or drowning. He had sought others of his kind but not found them, so when the novel begins he is returning to the Horseclan people he founded. They have flourished, communicating telepathically with their mounts and with genetically engineered saber-toothed cats developed before the war. The bulk of the novel recounts how the Horseclans invade the decadent kingdom of the Ehlens (Hellenes), Kenooryos Ehlas. These Greek-speaking people had invaded the U.S. after the war and established themselves on the Eastern seaboard.

Throughout the novel -- and the whole series -- Adams stops now and again to lecture about politics, religion and the corrupting effects of civilization. These exposition asides frequently stall the narrative and have the additional effect of making the author appear like a jerk if you happen to hold one of those opinions on the downside of his literary nose.

Features such as that lessen the fun of what should be a big ol' sword-and-sorcery romp across the remnants of the old world, and Adams is simply not enough of a stylist like Howard and other earlier writers to overlook the digressions. The tale-spinner's inability to know when to shut up and spin leaves Coming and the rest of the Horseclans series at a solid C+ instead of the B or B+ its elements give it the potential to be.