Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Somebody put the fur back on that dog!” George shouted.
     
    It is not sentimentality to be moved profoundly by these images of carnage and horror. Nor is it ghoulish to laugh with Morrow at the black, bleak post-holocaust progress of George Paxton, his good-hearted Candide. Twenty-five years on, long after the collapse of one wing of this appalling calculus of global death, the twenty-first century might not be the worst of times. But neither is it yet the best of times, for international terrorism, the forces underpinning its threat, and massive military responses to it, ensure that George’s world might yet ignite around us. Morrow’s splendid novel, only in unimportant ways superannuated by political shifts, lives on.
    Morrow’s conceit in this grimly satirical novel is that those complicit in the suicide of the human race might be held accountable in war trials conducted in Antarctica by the Unadmitted—those immense multitudes who are doomed to non-existence by this universal, self-inflicted cataclysm. It is a hazardous device for a moralist like Morrow, because it seems to open out into all kinds of other metaphysical trials, not least of all those involved in the use of contraception to limit family size, or of abortion. The distinction, though, is that Morrow’s apocalypse destroys existing persons—adults and children—as well as “potential” human beings.
    In this Tribunal of the Unadmitted, representatives of the final holocaust stand accused. They are politicians, arms merchants, apologists for war, a hypocrite meant to implement arms control “who never in his entire career denied the Pentagon a system it really wanted.” Among these patently guilty stands sweet-natured George Paxton, Morrow’s Everyman: “citizen, perhaps the most guilty of all. Every night, this man went to bed knowing that the human race was pointing nuclear weapons at itself. Every morning, he woke up knowing that the weapons were still there. And yet he never took a single step to relieve the threat.”
    Can George truly be found guilty, in this Swiftian drama? Isn’t the horrendous violence of the novel, foreseen with darkly comic irony by Morrow’s version of Nostradamus, just a side-effect of our evolutionary past? Thomas Aquinas, for the prosecution, will not allow this plea to go unchallenged:
     
“Are we innately aggressive?” asked Aquinas. “Was the nuclear predicament symptomatic of a more profound depravity? Nobody knows. But if this is so—and I suspect that it is—then the responsibility for what we are pleased to call our inhumanity still rests squarely in our blood-soaked hands… And then, one cold Christmas season, death came to an admirable species—a species that wrote symphonies and sired Leonardo da Vinci and would have gone to the stars. It did not have to be this way. Three virtues only were needed—creative diplomacy, technical ingenuity, and moral outrage. But the greatest of these is moral outrage.”
     
    Morrow’s own moral outrage is evident, and powerfully expressed. Not all readers will agree. They are given their spokesmen: “Self-righteous slop, you needed that too,” replied one of the accused. But Morrow does not leave the verdict open. George, unlike the rest, avoids the counts of Crimes Against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes Against Humanity. But the court finds him unequivocally guilty of Crimes Against the Future, and sentenced him to be hanged.
    What makes this novel more than a one-sided pamphlet by a pacifist is its nuance, its attention to the detail of real life in the midst of its phantasmagorical, almost Lewis Carrollian trading of accusation and defense. Escaping, fleeing across ice on a giant prehistoric vulture, he meets his beloved daughter:
     
“Honey, there’s something I want to ask.”
     
“What?’
     
“Do you know what’s happened to you?”
     
“Yes, I know.”
     
“What’s happened to you?”
     
“I don’t want to tell