This is an extract from “Inner Space Odyssey: Suburban Spacemen and the Cults of Catastrophe” that I wrote for Bloomsbury’s Decades series and which appears in full in the book Decades: The 1960s, published in 2018. Stripped of its context, something will inevitably be lost here—my work for the book also includes a discussion of Oscar Wilde and his indispensable The Decay of Lying (1891)—but perhaps the essence will transmit. Here’s the extract:
Annihilating All That’s Made: Chaos and Countryside
As the sun’s output of radiation increased towards that day, no longer so far distant when it would turn nova, so the growth of vegetation had increased to undisputed supremacy, overwhelming all other kinds of life, driving them either to extinction or to the twilight zone. The traversers, great spider-like monsters of vegetable origin that sometimes grew to a mile in length, were the culmination of the might of the kingdom of plants. Hard radiation had become a necessity for them. The first vegetable astronauts of the hothouse world, they travelled between Earth and Moon long after man had rolled up his noisy affairs and retired to the trees from whence he came. –Brian Aldiss, Hothouse (257)1
In After London: or, Wild England, Richard Jefferies’ catastrophe novel of 1885, the pastoral author and solitary walker depicts the uncanny return and ascendency of Nature and barbarism over the English countryside. The ‘countryside’ is paradoxically unnatural, a rationalization of Nature. This cultivation, the cultural use of the landscape was, in part, defined in the cultural imagination by artists like John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. Much as later Romanticism gave primacy to a gothic sublime, early-modernist Joseph Conrad’s Marlow suggested of his Turner-esque vision of London and the Thames in Heart of Darkness: ‘And this also […] has been one of the dark places of the earth’ (7)2. The ordering of the land, industrialization, an interior colonization and organization, together repress darkness, wildness. There is a perversity to allotments, country gardens, estates, at least insofar as the riot and return of stewardless, husbandless, wilderness is deployed. The countryside is a neurotic construct to be overthrown. In Jefferies’ post-apocalyptic narrative, domesticated and cultivated animals and plants are wiped out by their exposure to the encroaching wilderness. Man returns to medievalism.3 With the image of Wells’ Martian red weed in The War of the Worlds (1897) and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), this wilderness catastrophe is an important precursor of both Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, both published in 1962.
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