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| Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave, The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr | Audiobook reviews Nineteen Eighty-FourGeorge Orwell. Read by Philip GlenisterCSA Word £16.16 6hrsThe year of Orwell's dystopia is now long past, but it's frightening to realise just how much of it has come true. The novel, with those dreadful child spies busy reporting their parents to the Thought Police, and Big Brother's telescreens, is given fresh life through this vigorous narration.The Death of Bunny MunroWritten and read by Nick Cave Canongate £30 7hrs 30mins + DVD, download from audible and iTunesCave's first novel for 20 years on audio is a "transportive 3D experience" which makes headphone listening part film soundtrack, part hallucination. The music is integral to salesman Bunny's search for a soul, but given his priapic, alcohol-sodden life, it's a struggle.The Making of Modern BritainWritten and read Andrew Marr Macmillan £16.63 7hrs Marr analyses the development of Britain, from Queen Victoria to VE Day, in fine style. He is always interesting, both with the big ideas and in the details – such as the force-fed suffragette having her oesophagus ruptured or the role of Marie Stopes in the beginning of the sexual revolution.George OrwellNick CaveAndrew MarrAudiobooksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The discreet charms of 'cosy catastrophe' fiction Speculative fiction that doesn't invoke fire and thunder is often sneered at, but maybe dystopia and apocalypse aren't the only possible futuresThe release this month of Roland Emmerich's latest apocalypse-porn big-screen spectacular, 2012, is the latest evidence that Hollywood in particular and America in general believes we will end our often troubled relationship with Mother Earth with a wham and a bam, if not a thankyou, ma'am.Taking as his jumping-off point the "Mayan predictions" that the curtain will fall on the planet on December 21 2012, Emmerich – who has previously brought civilisation to its knees in Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow – rehearses his usual jaw-dropping set-pieces of familiar landmarks and cities collapsing, exploding, burning up and generally having a bad day.But will it all really end with a bang, rather than a whimper? A sub-genre of apocalyptic fiction that has largely been practised by British writers over the past half-century has suggested not – and has earned, as a result, the tag "cosy catastrophe".The phrase is attributed to the British author Brian Aldiss, who mentions it in his fascinating history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, while talking about the author of Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham. While Triffids, with its blinded populace and sinister, stalking plants, could hardly be described as "cosy", it is an example of a largely non-violent, non-destructive doom. Wyndham also wrote The Kraken Wakes, in which an alien invasion gradually destroys civilisation by way of melting the ice caps rather than with death rays and war machines. The book chronicles the rebuilding of a massively de-populated world once the aliens have been despatched.John Christopher is another British author who embraced the idea of a cosy catastrophe. While his novel, The Death of Grass – which so worried Sam Jordison when he was younger – does feature an ecological disaster that causes often violent social breakdown, Christopher (real name Sam Youd) also wrote The World in Winter, a very much more British version of Emmerich's movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which increasingly harsh winters drive the population of western Europe towards the suddenly more temperate African regions. And then there's JG Ballard, who employed ecological apocalypse in his debut novel The Wind from Nowhere, as well as in his more famous works The Drowned World, The Burning World, and many of his short stories.Seeing a common thread between these writers? Although cosy catastrophe is undoubtedly science fiction, the sub-genre's most famous exponents are all writers with a much wider reach. But what is it about a gradual, unexplosive end to the world that appeals to these writers and their readers?In an essay written for the SF magazine Foundation in 2001, the Canadian author Jo Walton pointed to a British middle-class fantasy forged in the years after the second world war: couldn't all the horrid people just go away, leaving space, and tea and ginger cake, for those who are left?Revisiting the subject on her publisher's website recently, Walton wrote: "In the classic cosy catastrophe, the catastrophe doesn't take long and isn't lingered over, the people who survive are always middle class, and have rarely lost anyone significant to them. The working classes are wiped out in a way that removes guilt. The survivors wander around an empty city, usually London, regretting the lost world of restaurants and symphony orchestras. There's an elegiac tone: so much that was so good has passed away. Nobody ever regrets football matches or carnivals. Then they begin to rebuild civilisation along better, more scientific lines. Cosy catastrophes are very formulaic - unlike the vast majority of science fiction. You could quite easily write a program for generating one."Is the idea of cosy catastrophe really so outmoded? Perhaps. Or maybe we've just become so used to the idea of a violent end to our precarious civilisation over the past couple of decades that we now think the only future to follow our current model must involve a descent into barbarity. Yes, you get the proto-Mad Max bands of roaming bandits in cosy catastrophe, especially The Death of Grass. But the over-arching idea of the cosy catastrophe is that civilisation of a sort can be rebuilt. And if it can't … maybe what comes next won't be worse, just different. The comic writer Grant Morrison also employed the 2012 device to close his magnum opus, the graphic novel series The Invisibles. It all gets very postmodern at the end, but the apocalypse means that we say goodbye to one stage of our lives and move on. And there's one hell of a party.Brian Aldiss might have been being dismissive when he coined the term cosy catastrophe, or maybe he was simply recognising that decency might just win out over the bleak, horrific future described by Hollywood or the likes of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.Science fiction, fantasy and horrorDavid Barnettguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
J.J. Abrams Wants to 'Let the Great World Spin' J.J. Abrams said he was close to signing a deal with Colum McCann to option the film rights to "Let Great World Spin," winner of the National Book Award for fiction. feeds.nytimes.com |
Essay: The Naked and the Conflicted We denounce the Great Male Novelists of the last century for their sexism. But something has been lost now that innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex. feeds.nytimes.com |
Time to revive Sir Jeremy Greenstock's blocked Iraq war memoirs As the Chilcot inquiry begins to expose more and more forgotten skeletons from the shameful past, I wonder where Sir Jeremy Greenstock's memoirs, The Costs of War, have got to. Once our man at the UN, and the UK's highest official in Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority, Sir Jeremy completed his insider's account of the run-up to hostilities as long ago as 2005, having made a contract with Public Affairs, USA, a division of Perseus Books, which described it at the time as "remarkably candid". Too candid, certainly, for Jack Straw's Foreign Office which effectively scotched the book. Sir Jeremy, who now runs the Ditchley Foundation, took the manuscript back, vowing to make the text more acceptable to the censor. Since when: silence. Perhaps in the spirit of full disclosure, and regime change at the FO, he can be persuaded to lift the text from the bottom drawer.Iraq war inquiryJack StrawPolitics and IraqRobert McCrumguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |