Reading: The WItches of Worm

Moving: Walked 3.6 miles

24 April 2000: John Christopher

I rode my bike to work for the first time this season on Friday. I remembered everything. A work outfit, including shoes and earrings. Glove linings and a lightweight fleece for the morning half, both to be shed as unnecessary in the near future. Not my checkbook, so I can't send the used bookstore a check for my newest find (Barbara Wallace, Claudia) until tomorrow. Everything but one thing, a clean towel. I didn't realize this until I was in the shower. I knew I had a towel in the shower room, but did I want to use it? It had hung in there, festering, since last fall. I don't think I rode to work after I fell last September. Well, I needed a towel. It wasn't moldy, because this is Denver, but drying off certainly left me with that "not so fresh" feeling.

I didn't bring it home with me Friday because there's only so much that fits in my panniers, and if I didn't want to dry my body with it, I could still lie on it on the grass in the Plaza to read. And I did. One reason The Missing Persons League appeared at the forefront of my conscience is that last week I borrowed John Christopher's Empty World from the library, and I reread it at lunch today.

After HPV introduced me to the Tripods trilogy (is that why he wrote only three?), I looked for other John Christopher to read. The White Mountains, etc. fell by Empty World's wayside. I've always had this thing for apocalyptic fiction, and this must have been the first such I read. No, Z for Zachariah would have preceded it. But it was the first one set in the future instead of the past--the O'Brien scientists "maybe even having television" marked it as ancient.

Of course, I liked any book with the kid going off and living on her on: Z for Zachariah, The Island of Blue Dolphins, Julie of the Wolves, My Side of the Mountain. Empty World was the perfect title, too: not a bunch of gussaks to escape, not a mountain to explore, not a planet destroyed by war. Just all the people gone. If Ann in Z for Zachariah had had to struggle through the fallout instead of having an idyllic valley, I probably wouldn't've loved it so.

And yes, I loved The Stand and reskim it every few years.

Since reading (listening to, really) Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice a couple of years ago, and hating its clumsy framing narrative and didactic capitalism and feeling betrayed that the story of human survival promised in the blurb was not that rigorous anyway and occupied less than a quarter of the whole book, I've wondered why this book is so popular. So when I found out Shute wrote an post-armageddon book, On the Beach, I thought I should read it, to see whether Alice was Shute's fault or mine.

But then I read George Stewart's Earth Abides, which features Earth practically faltering off her axis because humans aren't around to husband her anymore. I figure if the capitalism in Town and Abides set my teeth on edge, I'd only be groveling for more punishment reading On the Beach.

I figure I will though.

In the meantime, Empty World. I've thought for a long time that Christopher took the easy way out twice, once major, once minor.

The major laziness was to kill Neil's entire immediate family off in a regular way (car crash) before the Plague. In this way, with Neil still numb about that, Christopher could avoid describing the horror and shock his protagonist would suffer watching the rest of the human race peter out. After reading The Stand not very long after and at the height of my misguided love of Stephen King, I couldn't understand how Christopher could justify evading that whole aspect of the end of the world. But it makes sense for what Christopher wants to accomplish. If he hadn't killed off Neil's family yet Neil still didn't experience any shock, he'd've been an inhuman and thus unsympathetic protagonist. The earlier deaths served as a firebreak, so Christopher could skip straight to action.

The minor slack I still think is slack: Neil "thought of some excuse" to separate Tommy and Susie. Why not articulate it? Because Christopher couldn't think of a credible excuse either. If Christopher can't render his characters thoroughly, then the credibility of the book as a whole falters. But it's a tiny little wee incident.

I noticed a spelling mistake: one n in "millennium." I still don't get why there are two; "millionaire" has only one and it gets along fine. Oh! Of course: "millennium" is the older word (1628) and "millionaire" the newer (1826), but "millionaire" has much more common in our culture than "millennium" so I thought of "millionaire" would have the way of it. "Millennium" only began to be tossed around the past--what, three?--years or so. Empty World was published in 1977, when no one was thinking of millennia, and it appears with one n and no copy-editor spotted it.