Conference noted::sf

    just finished _Dawn_ too - it was interesting.
    Yes, I think _Wild Seed_ was hers as well - at any rate
    I read that too, and would recommend it.
    
    ..........steve
    

    Foolish mortal, you expect the cover artist to read the book or
    even (gasp) talk to the author or someone who has read the book
    before creating the artwork?
    
    	:+)
    
    Willie

    re:.0
    
    I would imagine that Butler is especially ticked, considering
    that she's black herself.
    
    --- jerry

    I agree about "Wild Seed" (which did come out in paperback).
    Was there a sequel to that one?  I seem to remember seeing a 
    more futuristic story of hers that featured the same female
    character (maybe not as the main protagonist -- I forget).
    
      Scott L.

    Ah, WILD SEED is the prequel to the Patternist Series. The
    protagonist, Doro, also appears in MIND OF MY MIND.
    
    As far as I know, all of her books have had paperback editions.
    
    --- jerry

    Well, you (plural) have said all her books are out in paperback,
    but though I have looked, I have never seen them.  Maybe they are
    out of print?  If not, do you have any more specific information,
    like who the publisher is, where I might find copies, etc.?
    
    Diana
      !
    

    re:.6
    
    Most likely, they're all (or mostly) out of print. The first
    paperback editions (which I have) of PATTERNMASTER, MIND OF
    MY MIND, WILD SEED, SURVIVOR, and KINDRED are all from the
    late 70's/early 80's.
    
    A well-stocked used bookstore is your best bet. Try checking
    the various Annie's Book Swaps in the area.
    
    Or a library, as all of her novels have had hardcover editions
    as well.
    
    --- jerry

    ...a sequel to DAWN, called (if memory serves) ADULTHOOD RITES,
    has just been released in hardcover.
    
    --- jerry

    I just finished Adulthood Rites, the sequel to Dawn.  It xcellent,
    just as good as Dawn.  I am now anxiously awaiting the third and
    final (I think) in the series, Imago, due in MaY.
    

    I have not read her stuff but had a chance to meet and talk with
    her last weekend and she seems to be a very interesting person
    with stong views on genetic engineering etc. I'm going to have
    to pick up the series. She said she's working on the beginnings
    of what may be a new series.
    
    					Dick

    I've read Clay's Ark which I enjoyed quite a bit and am currently
    reading Wild Seed which the liner notes refer to as a prequel to
    the Patternmaster series.  Can anyone give a chronological listing
    of the Patternmaster books?  
    
    				Thanks,
    
    				John

    The two Patternmaster books that I know of are -
    
    Mind of My Mind (in which Doro and the woman in Wild Seed reappear)
    and
    Patternmaster
    
    I don't think either of them are still available in the stores.
    
    Bonnie

   Re: .12 Thanks Bonnie.  I think my library has both in hardcover.
    
    					- John

    
    I've heard a rumor that she has something new out. I read Kindred
    earlier in the year and loved it, but it's about 1-2 years old.
    
    Anyone else heard of a new one?
    
    To my knowledge, this is what she's written so far.
    
    	Clay's Ark (Out of Print)
    
    	Patternmaster Series
    	 Mind of My Mind (Out of Print)
    	 Wild Seed
    
    	Xenogenesis Series
    	 Dawn
    	 Adulthood Rites
    	 Imago
    
    	Kindred

Article: 426
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews PS#22: Octavia E. Butler
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 11 Nov 93 00:27:36 GMT
 
		Belated Reviews PS#22:  Octavia E. Butler
 
Octavia Butler has been writing science fiction novels for a couple of
decades now. What characterizes them, to my mind, is that her characters,
though often possessed of great powers, don't exist in a social vacuum.
They have families, they have responsibilities, they have other -- often
more powerful -- people restraining them, they *need* other people.  (The
genre, particularly in its pulpier manifestations, has a number of
archetypes for powerful characters with few social constraints -- heroes,
mavericks, etc.  When such characters *do* appear in Butler's novels, they 
tend to fall into more plausible categories -- psychopaths and predators.)
Most of Butler's novels fall into two groups, her Patternist novels, from
the seventies and early eighties, and her Xenogenesis trilogy, from the
late eighties.
 
"Wild Seed" (****-):  Anyanwu is three hundred years old.  She can take
other shapes, human or animal, and can heal herself of any wounds,
including those dealt by time.  She's watched generations of descendents age
and die.  She's unique.  Doro is four thousand years old.  That is, it's 
been four thousand years since he first died, and took over another body.  
Since then he's lived in thousands of bodies.  When one is hurt -- or he 
tires of it -- he leaves it for another.  After a number of centuries, he 
began to realize that people with special powers *tasted* better, and (for 
that reason and others) he began to breed them.  (There is no way to fight
him.  His current 'stock' is descended from people who survived learning 
that.)  Doro discovers Anyanwu -- a wild seed, a supernormal talent who is 
not a product of his breeding programs -- by accident, and recruits her.  
In the decades that follow, she discovers that she's made a very one-sided
devil's bargain:  Doro is a predator, pure and simple, and there isn't a 
thing she -- or anyone else -- can do about it. 
 
"Wild Seed" is the first Patternist novel, chronologically.  (The trilogy
-- not conceived as such -- was written in reverse chronological order,
but I'd read it starting with "Wild Seed".)  It begins in Africa, where
Anyanwu and Doro were born, but most of it -- and all of the sequels --
take place across the Atlantic.
 
"Mind of My Mind" (***+) covers a short but critical period in the
twentieth century.  Doro's breeding program has culminated in a group of
extremely powerful telepaths who are able to mind-control ordinary humans.
They're not very stable, however, and have a tendency to kill each other.
When he introduces Mary, his latest experiment, to another telepath, she
becomes the focus of a mental...pattern...which gives her some control of
other telepaths -- but also compensates for their instabilities.  For the
first time, a telepathic culture -- albeit one which casually and
inconspicuously enslaves non-telepaths -- begins to form, and grow.  Until
Doro decides that it's grown enough.
 
"Patternmaster" (**) is set millenia in the future.  The old civilization
collapsed when the first starship brought back a plague.  Now there are
Patternists -- a society of telepaths, united by a telepathic network
centered on, and controlled by, the Patternmaster.  There are mutes --
non-telepathic slaves.  And, on the periphery, there are Clayarks --
mutated descendents of the plague victims.  The Patternist society is
essentially feudal, with the strongest telepaths defending and controlling
domains -- and weaker telepaths.  (In theory, there are laws and customs
protecting the weak from the strong.  In practice, those are as effective
as whoever cares to enforce them.)  Teray is a young telepath, but promises
to be a powerful one, in time.  Unfortunately, Coransee -- his older,
established brother -- sees him as a potential rival, and has no intention
of giving him time.   
 
"Patternmaster" is an early work, less imaginatively and less skillfully
structured than the other two.  It shouldn't be thought of as the end of
the trilogy in the sense of being the planned culmination of the story
begun in the other two novels.  Another book, "Clay's Ark" (*+), is
loosely set in the same universe, and fills in the story of the coming of
the plague.  
 
"Dawn" (***+) is the first novel in Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy.  It
begins with the suicide of the human race.  When the Oankali arrive,
little is left of the biosphere, and only a few humans still live.  The
Oankali intervene to save those humans, but their purpose is not
altruistic:  The Oankali have a biological imperative which pushes them to
interbreed with other species, to expand their genetic base.  The human
survivors do not, needless to say, share this imperative, but the Oankali
have no intention of giving them a choice:  Human children of the next
generation will have five parents -- and tentacles. 
 
It sounds like Sunday tabloid material, but Butler pulls off the double
coup of making it technically plausible -- and of not dwelling on the
technicalities.  "Dawn" focuses upon the human survivors who must come to
terms with the Oankali plan, and particularly upon Lilith Iyapo, the first
human revived from suspended animation.  She is made the initial liason
between the Oankali and the other humans.  (The Oankali, who do not
understand humans as well as they'd like, may not have realized that for
those survivors who choose to view the situation in us-vs-them terms, this
makes Lilith a 'them'.)  "Dawn" ends with the first mixed children on the way,
and Lilith (and others) not very happy about the situation, but not in a
position to resist.
 
(It shouldn't be thought that the Oankali are blind to the ethical
dimension of their actions, but they believe humans to be intrinsically
self-destructive.  That is, their ability to perceive genomes allows them
to *see* that humans are intrinsically self-destructive, and will only
commit mass suicide again if left alone.  So we're assured.  How much
coercion is it right to apply to someone who won't believe he's about to
walk off a precipice?)
 
"Adulthood Rites" (***) and "Imago" (***) focus upon subsequent
generations, and the working out of the genetic merger of the two species.
Both novels dramatize the process through the interactions of Lilith's
Human/Oankali children and 'resisters' -- humans who have refused to
participate and have run off to live independently of the Oankali.
(Nobody's forcing them -- but all surviving humans have been modified to
be sterile in the absence of Oankali mediation.  Mind, one might ask how
the resisters' determination to keep humanity fully human differs, in
principle, from some people's determination to maintain racial purity.)
"Imago" is the weaker of the two, in part because it revolves around a
problem whose resolution requires an implausible plot device.
 
The Xenogenesis trilogy is an ambitious one:  The human race is forced to
undergo a change which it finds repugnant -- which the reader may find
repugnant -- and yet the reader is brought to empathize with the humans
who participate in the change, with the humans who refuse to participate,
with the hybrids, and even with the Oankali.  A little too much of the
plot revolves around desperate people behaving irrationally and irrational
people behaving desperately for my taste -- but I don't suppose the
portrayal is unrealistic.
 
As you may have gathered, I liked "Wild Seed" best of Butler's novels.  If
you haven't read her work before, it provides a good basis for deciding
whether to seek out her other books.  If you can't find it, you might try
"Dawn". 
 
%A  Butler, Ocatavia E.
%S  Patternist Series
%T  Wild Seed
%T  Mind of My Mind
%T  Patternmaster
%T  Clay's Ark
%O  "Clay's Ark" is only loosely connected to the others
 
%S  Xenogenesis
%T  Dawn
%T  Adulthood Rites
%T  Imago
 
=============================================================================
 
The postscripts to Belated Reviews cover authors of earlier decades who
didn't fit into the original format -- whether because the author seemed
an inappropriate subject, or because I was unfamiliar with too much of the
author's work, or whatever -- or sometimes just isolated works of such
authors.  The emphasis will continue to be on guiding newer readers
towards books or authors worth trying out, rather than on discussing them
comprehensively or in depth.  I'll retain the rating scheme of ****
(recommended), *** (an old favorite that hasn't aged well), ** (a solid
lesser work), and * (nothing special). 
 
-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com
 
Roses red and violets blew
  and all the sweetest flowres that in the forrest grew -- Edmund Spenser

Article: 427
From: C_Douglas_BAKER@umail.umd.edu (cb52)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: KINDRED by Octavia E. Butler  Book Review by C. Douglas Baker
Date: 11 Nov 93 02:26:27 GMT
 
                  KINDRED by Octavia E. Butler
                 Book Review by C. Douglas Baker
                            [Spoiler]
 
     KINDRED is one of those rare novels that grabs you by the
throat and doesn't let you go till the very end.  From the first
sentence, Butler's simple, straightforward prose moves the story
quickly making it nearly impossible for the reader to put down.
 
     Dana, a black woman living in Los Angeles in 1976, is
inexplicably transported to 1815 to save the life of a small,
red-haired boy on Maryland's Eastern Shore.  It turns out this
small boy, Rufus, is one of her slaveowning white ancestors, who
she knows very little about.  Dana continues to be called to save
Rufus, and frequently stays long periods of time in the
slaveowning South.  The only way she can get back to 1976 is to
be in a life threatening situation.  During her stays in the past
she is forced to assume the role of a slave to survive.  She is
whipped.  She is beaten.  She is nearly raped, twice.  She is
forced to watch whippings and families being broken up.  She
learns to enjoy hard work as an escape from the other horrors of
slave life.  And she watches as a fairly unassuming small son of
a plantation owner grows up to a be a cruel, capricious, hot-
tempered slave owner in his own right.  And to be her great-
grandfather many generations removed.
 
     KINDRED is about slavery and the scars it has inflicted on
American society.  There are really three key factors Butler
focuses on that reveal the ability of the South to
institutionalize slavery.  First there is the physical abuse. 
The constant work, especially the physically exhausting work of a
field hand, kept slaves too tired to run or become insolent. 
Being ever on the verge of a lash or two for minor offenses kept
slaves working to avoid punishment.  Being beaten nearly to death
after escape attempts made a slave reluctant to try again;
especially if this is coupled with the abuse of the slave's
family.  Then there is the psychological abuse.  The continual
threat of being beaten or watching others be beaten broke the
spirits of those in bondage.  The worst punishment was sometimes
having to watch a family member abused for your transgression.
Encouraging slaves to marry and have children also deadened their
desire to escape.  Families made the slave settle down, gave him
or her something to protect and care for.  The selling off of a
few family members had a damping effect on a slave's spirit.  A
most poignant example is the slave Sarah, the primary house
slave; "Weylin had sold only three of her children--left her one
to live for and protect".  She rarely questioned slavery, thought
little of freedom, because "she had lost all she could stand to
lose".  The risk of losing the one daughter she had left was too
great.  Slaves that escaped had to be willing to risk not only
their own life but possibly the lives of their family.  
 
     The physical and psychological abuse imposed on the slave
made it so much easier to accept one's lot in life and avoid the
unpleasantries that recalcitrance entailed.  The ease with which
Dana falls into the routines of everyday life as a slave shocks
her.  Work is a refuge from the other toils of slave life and the
patterns become the norm.  There is even an ambiguous feeling
toward the slaveowner.  The slaveowner is hated for the physical
and psychological abuse imposed on the slave.  But at the same
time the slave loved the owner in a familial sense, even though
the slaveowner was seldom worthy of this.  Thus slavery became
for many the accepted norm of life, even if this acceptance was a
tenuous and unhappy one at best.  This acceptance was
generational.  Dana at one point espies children playing at
selling each other on the auction block and haggling over price. 
 
     Many times throughout history sheer terror has been used to
subdue a population and sap it of its strength.  One only has to
look at the Tsar's of Russia like Ivan the Terrible, Peter the
Great, and Stalin to realize the extent to which terror can be
used to subjugate a people.  The Southern aristocracy of the
United States practiced a similar terror till 1864 and beyond.
   
     There is much historical evidence for the Butler's depiction
of slavery and its effects.  KINDRED is patterned after the slave
narratives becoming more widely read today.  These include
Frederick Douglass' NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
AN AMERICAN SLAVE and Harriet A. Jacobs INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF
A SLAVE GIRL.  Butler could have depicted the beatings and
physical abuse in more graphic detail to have a greater impact on
the reader.  
  
     Slavery even has its effects in 1976.  The scars Dana brings
back to 1976 are symbolic of the scars slavery has left on
contemporary society.  Some will heal with time.  Some can never
heal.  Others will scab over and be just below the surface.  But
they are all there.  But in another sense healing has taken
place.  Dana is married to a white man, Kevin, who is transported
to 1815 with her once.  While there they both fall easily into
the pattern or act of slaveowner and slave concubine, roles they
must assume to survive.  The ease with which they fall into these
roles brings about a greater consciousness of their ethnicity. 
But through this relationship Butler leaves the reader with hope.
Dana's love for Kevin is what really pulls her through the most
harrowing terrors she faces and in the end gives her the strength
to survive this horrible test.
 
     KINDRED is written at the young adult level and moves along
at a brisk pace.  I highly recommend it for teenagers and adults.
 
%T Kindred
%A Octavia E. Butler
%C Boston
%D 1979
%I Beacon Press
%G ISBN 0-8070-8305-4 (pbk)
%P 264
 
C. DOUGLAS BAKER
Email: cb52@umail.umd.edu

    
    Octavia Butler's newest book, "The Parable of the Sower" is now
    available in hard cover.
    
    It is set in 2025, in California. The main character is an 18 year old
    woman named (would you beleive) Lauren whose community enclave has been
    destroyed by a roving band of "Painters", people who get high on a
    synthetic drug which causes them to vandalize, rape, kill and destroy.
    Lauren is a "sower", a highly sensitive telempath. And the story tells
    of her journey across the land, and towards a new home.
    
    Should be good!

Article: 527
From: dg-rtp!umail.umd.edu!C_Douglas_BAKER (cb52)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E. Butler
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 1994 20:38:52 GMT
Organization: not specified
 
            PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E. Butler
                 Book Review by C. Douglas Baker
 
     Robert A. Heinlein once stated that in writing speculative
fiction the author takes a current cultural or societal trend and
follows that trend to its logical, if sometimes extreme, conclusion. 
Butler has taken the anomie of today's central cities in the United
States, with the attendant violence, drug abuse, and general disregard
for community and painted a frightening and stark world in PARABLE OF
THE SOWER.  Butler introduces us to an America thirty years hence
where to survive communities must be armed, walled, and prepared to
take human life to defend themselves; an America where drug abuse has
taken a radically violent turn in which a new drug "Pyro" induces the
user to burn items, be they animate or inanimate, for a sexual high;
an America where life expectancy is short; an America where violence
is the norm instead of the exception. 
 
     In this stark, surreal world is Lauren Oya Olamina, an eighteen
year old girl with a vision.  Olamina lives in a walled community that
has protected itself by keeping quiet, inconspicuous, well armed, and
prepared to defend itself.  This all changes when Lauren's brother,
Keith, enters the nefarious world beyond the walls and implicitly
brings attention to this previously secluded community.  Lauren finds
she and her community must confront the ugly world outside the walls. 
 
     Most of Butler's works have a strong, empathetic female character
that seem to carry and unfair burden in life.  Lauren Olamina is no
exception.  Lauren has a condition called "hyperempathy" meaning that
she feels the physical pain of others (including animals).  Yet, she
is willing to kill to defend herself and her family, despite the
psychological costs to herself.  She remarks that if everyone had her
disability, violence would greatly diminish.  Unfortunately for
Lauren, the world she lives in is not only full of violence but
inherently forces a person to eventually commit acts of violence in
self-defense.  Lauren also has a gradual and evolving "philosophy"
called "Earthseed" that takes on quasi-religious status as the novel
unfolds.  This "Earthseed" is the thread that binds the narrative and
makes the conclusion innovative and hopeful. 
 
     Butler's work is intricate and impressive in its description of a
future America.  There are many sophisticated parallels between the
ugly future Butler paints and today's society.  I really cannot do her
work justice by a simple and brief description. I highly recommend
PARABLE OF THE SOWER. 
 
%T Parable of the Sower
%A Octavia E. Butler
%C New York
%D 1993
%I Four Walls Eight Windows $19.95 (hbk)
%G ISBN 0-941423-99-9 (hbk)
%P 299

Article: 5210
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books,alt.books.reviews
From: ecl@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper) 
Subject: PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia Butler
Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch)
Organization: The Internet
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 1994 00:00:06 GMT
 
               PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia E. Butler
Four Walls Eight Windows, ISBN 0-941423-99-9, October 1993, 299pp, $19.95
                   A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		    Copyright 1994 Evelyn C. Leeper
 
     Post-holocaust stories have been with us for quite a while.  Even
eliminating such classics as Noah and the Flood or Lot and his
daughters, the category dates back at least to Mary Shelley's LAST MAN
(1826), Richard Jeffries's AFTER LONDON (1885), Jack London's SCARLET
PLAGUE (1915), and S. Fowler Wright's DELUGE (1928), to name some of
the better-known works.  In the 1950s the theme met up with the atom
bomb and, spurred perhaps by the recent success of Edwin Balmer and
Philip Wylie's WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1933) and George Stewart's EARTH
ABIDES (1949), really took off.  The most enduring of this period's
work is undoubtedly Walter M. Miller's CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1956).
 
     But in general post-holocaust, or post-apocalyptic, stories needed
an apocalypse--almost always one of the classic four: fire (in the form
of atomic radiation), flood, plague, or war.  After all, with the war
behind us, the only way to go was up.  Things were getting better--
everyone was moving up in the world.  So the only thing that could
produce a primitive set of conditions would be some sort of natural
disaster or, of course, the Bomb.  But now it's the 1990s.  Things don't
look as rosy.  Our cities are becoming more run-down, less safe.  And
so it's not surprising that we are starting to see more stories in
which there are post-holocaust conditions without an actual holocaust.
 
     Which brings us to PARABLE OF THE SOWER.  There hasn't been a
plague, a flood, or a war, but by 2025 people are living in fenced 
and guarded enclaves.  A new street drug has turned people into
pyromaniacs, and those driven from their burned-out homes have little
choice but to go into slavery in the new border factories.  At the
beginning of the story, Lauren Olamina is fifteen years old and living
in a small neighborhood, relatively safe (though everyone is getting
weapons training, and no one goes "outside" unless they must).  Her
father is a minister, but Olamina finds herself drawn away from his
religion to a new religion/philosophy called Earthseed which she is
formulating based on her view of the world.  

     Earthseed seems to have two aspects:  Life is change and
humanity's destiny is the stars.  Or to quote from the various verses
preceding each chapter, "All that you touch/You Change./All that you
Change/Changes you./The only lasting truth is Change./God/Is Change,"
and, "We are all Godseed, but no more or less so than any other aspect
of the Universe.  Godseed is all there is--all that Changes. 
Earthseed is all that spreads Earthlife to other earths.  The Universe
is Godseed.  Only we are Earthseed.  And the Destiny of Earthseed is to
take root among the stars."  One character describes Earthseed as a
"combination of Buddhism, existentialism, Sufism, and I don't know
what else." 
 
     But--not surprisingly--Olamina's neighborhood is destroyed and she
decides to head north in the hopes of starting a new community--an
Earthseed community.  So we have a post-holocaust, coming-of-age, new-
religion, mutated-human novel.  (Oh, yes, Olamina also has "hyper-
empathy," or the ability to feel other's pain.  This is apparently the
result of a drug her mother took when she was pregnant with Olamina.)
This is a lot of stuff to put in a three-hundred-page novel, but Butler
manages to do it by avoiding the padding that so many authors put in
their novels these days.  She writes in a very direct style which lets
her cover more ground and cover it well.
 
     This is better than at least two of the Hugo nominees for its year
(in my opinion), but didn't make the ballot or receive much notice.  I
suspect it's because it was published by a small press, and wonder if
Butler purposely chose this route.  I can't imagine any of the major
publishers rejecting it, but I suppose in publishing anything is
possible.  (On the other hand, the level of typos is much higher here
than would be usual for a major publisher, especially in the use of
opening or closing quotation marks.  The result is that you may think
you're reading narration and suddenly hit a close quotation mark that
had no opener, or conversely.)
 
     I *highly* recommend PARABLE OF THE SOWER and I'm going to go on
a quest for Butler's other nine novels.  (I've read some of them and
thought they were good also.)  If your bookstore doesn't have PARABLE
OF THE SOWER, you can order it from Four Walls Eight Windows, 39 West
14th St. #503, New York NY 10011.
 
%A      Butler, Octavia E. 
%T      Parable of the Sower
%I      Four Walls Eight Windows
%C      New York
%D      October 1993
%G      ISBN 0-941423-99-9
%P      299pp
%O      hardcover, $19.95
 
--
Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | Evelyn.Leeper@att.com

"The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love
of justice, and the desire for personal independence--these are the
features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I
belong to it."  --Albert Einstein 
 

re .19
    
>But now it's the 1990s.  Things don't look as rosy.  Our cities are becoming
>more run-down, less safe.  And so it's not surprising that we are starting to
>see more stories in which there are post-holocaust conditions without an
>actual holocaust.
    
    "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper."

>But now it's the 1990s.  Things don't look as rosy.  Our cities are becoming
>more run-down, less safe.  And so it's not surprising that we are starting to
>see more stories in which there are post-holocaust conditions without an
>actual holocaust.

Come on, we've seen these stories for years, decades, even millenia.
What about all the '70s and '80s cyberpunk?
What were "Brave New World" and "1984" about?
Even "Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde!"

Very parochial view.....

- tom]

re .21
    
>What about all the '70s and '80s cyberpunk?
    
    Not that I've read much but, yes, cyberpunk seems like what the reviewer
    refers to.
    
>What were "Brave New World" and "1984" about?
    
    I would class these as dystopias but not necessarily post-holocaust.
    These societies are very ordered, very controlled. Of course this could
    be seen as the backlash against a preceeding period of holocaust like
    societal collapse. It's been too long since I read either to recall whether
    they give clues as to how society evolved to its then state. My feeling
    is that these books are primarily about loss of individual freedom caused
    by a creeping transfer of power from the individual to the state and no
    specific collapse is invoked, but I stand to be corrected.
    
>Even "Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde!"
    
    Hmmm. I interpretted this as more of a comment on human psychology than
    anything on a wider scale.
    
    
    Notwithstanding debate about whether specific books are examples of the
    holocaust you have when you're not having a holocaust (aka a Clayton's
    holocaust) I think the reviewer is attempting to highlight a trend away
    from specific event induced societal collapse. There can always be books
    that are ahead of their time but they do not disprove the trend. That
    trend feels real to me, albeit it may be less recent than the reviewer
    implies.
    
    Can anyone put a date to my quote in .-2? I *think* it's from the poem
    "The Waste Land" by T.S.Eliot but I may have taken too many alpha hits
    to be reliable on that.

re: .22

> I *think* it's from the poem "The Waste Land" by T.S.Eliot

Right author, wrong poem.  It's from "The Hollow Men".  Don't know the date
offhand, but my guess would be late '20s or early '30s.

- paul

    "Post-holocaust" settings without the holocaust most definitely
    pre-date the 1990's -- as has already been mentioned, the cyberpunk
    milieu, most developed in the 80's, is one.  I'm sure I could find
    lots of other examples if I thought about it...
    
    How about Dhalgren?  

   >    "Post-holocaust" settings without the holocaust....

As others have suggested, examples are numerous.

One obvious one: _A_Clockwork_Orange_ (early 60's (Yeah it was a book
long before it was a movie)).

Or a lot of stuff written by Harlan Ellison during the 1960's?
Ellison wrote cyperpunk before the marketing people thought up the label.

	-doug

>>Even "Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde!"
>    
>    Hmmm. I interpretted this as more of a comment on human psychology than
>    anything on a wider scale.

Most of the 19th century examples of SF I could think of were utopian
or at  least neutral with respect to social futures.
This was one SF example I could think of where the social  aspects
were somewhat Dickensian, noting the lot of the poor and the decrepit
that Mr. Hyde (as opposed to Dr. Jeckyl) was drawn to.
They didn't get that way from holocaust, they just were that way.

- tom]