The Long Tomorrow
Written: Mar 23 '03 (Updated Nov 25 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good tale, well written, balanced treatment
Cons: No major faults, this is a good read!
The Bottom Line: Read this book for a post-apocalyptic tale of fundamentalism versus the search for knowledge! A fun read!
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| snpmurray's Full Review: The Long Tomorrow |
Len and Esau Colter live in a village of less than two hundred persons. There are just enough people, when they all work together, to raise and gather crops, keep houses in repair, and provide a basic level of care and education to the youths of the community. Lifestyle is dictated by the cycle of the seasons, and all worship in the Christian faith. Len and his people are New Mennonites. Their community, and indeed all communities remaining the United States in this book, have only the most basic of technologies at their disposal. In this post-apocalyptic world, the vast majority of communities and all cities were lost in chaos, as the people could not survive in the absence of their thousands of automata and the juice of electricity. The Amish and the Mennonites, however thrived, their lifestyle being completely unaltered by what had been taken away. Hence, their culture spread to encompass all of North America, and much of the world.
So it goes, of course. There is always one style of living which is more likely to aid survival than another, only the prevailing circumstances decide which.
And life has continued in this fashion for many years now. Most people are basically content with their lot, but, human nature being what it is, there are always some people who are going to want more answers than they can find in their immediate locale, people who think that the mind and the culture should not be suppressed by the law. In "The Long Tomorrow" Leigh Brackett tells us the story of the Len and Esau, and their personal journey of discovery.
This fascinating novel runs really to three separate books. In the first, we are introduced to Len and Esau when they are children, living under the fundamentalist decrees of their village of Pipers Run. The elders tell a tale to frighten the children, of the horrors of technology, and the history of the scorched Earth. The pastor tells of the evil Bartorstown, a location hidden somewhere in North America in which technology and its evil ways persist to this day. When Esau Colter stumbles across an old radio, it is only a matter of time before the two boys are knee-deep in a secret conspiracy to discover the truth about Bartorstown for themselves. Exposed at this young age to the frightening spectacle of a man being stoned to death for the very suspicion that he could be from Bartorstown, the boys realize that the very possession of the radio is enough to see them killed. They work together to try to escape from Pipers Run, and go in search of the forbidden knowledge, and run the risk of all the dangers inherent in this task.
In the second book, we catch up with the Colter boys as they enter young manhood. They are now living in a community whose size has reached the upper limit permitted by the law. The thirtieth amendment to the US constitution reads:
"No city, no town, no community of more than one thousand people or two hundred buildings to the square mile shall be built or permitted to exist anywhere in the United States of America"
Here they fall into the employ of Dulinsky, an ambitious and successful trader. Dulinsky in eager to build a new warehouse, his fifth, and is frustrated by the local judges interdictions. Sensing that perhaps eloquence and deliberation can overcome the warnings of the judge, Dulinsky and the Colter boys proceed to build the warehouse and take on the law of the land. Half the community secretly wishes them success, the other half righteous desecration of their project. Through private politics and public persuasions we observe a community on the brink of civil war, as initiative and ambition square up against religious interdiction. All the time, the Colters are becoming aware that a mysterious someone seems to be moving in the background of their lives, never seen, but evidently watching their behavior, and helping things go their way when possible. The future of the project, and the future of the Colters lives may be decided by where they choose to draw the line between their thirst for knowledge of expansion, and their fear of community standards.
Without wishing to reveal how it occurs, we are spirited away to Bartorstown itself, for the final book of this novel. Here the Colters are introduced to the reality of life when one must live in secret, hiding the brightest of all lights in the darkest of all places. The Bartorstown life is miserable and hard, and not at all a parade of TV and electric heating, and labor saving devices as the boys had imagined. The men and women of Bartorstown preserve the very secrets of atomic power itself, while seeking a way to control it, and the Colter boys are forced to confront the fears built into them by a life time of religious conditioning, and weigh for themselves the price of technology, and its endangered preservation. Shocked by what they discover, the boys are faced with the harsh reality that they may never leave this place if they are to serve it. The folk of Bartorstown do not know if what they seek to achieve can be accomplished. Will the boys leave and betray the great secret, or should they stay, and live through the long tomorrow?
So much for the plot. Good material!
I loved this story, on all levels. The Colter boys themselves are different as chalk and cheese. Len presents us with a highly emotional viewpoint, and his reactions to events are fired by his heart. Esau on the other hand is intellectual and cool, able to switch off his feelings in deference to his own best interests. This permits Leigh Bracket to present us with depth upon depth of feeling and thinking in the characters, whose lives we feel we know very intimately by the end of the book.
As previously mentioned, this is essentially three novelettes. A novel about religion clashing with forbidden knowledge, the division into three books allows us to watch this clash on the level of the individual, the community, and the society in turn. Each is equally balanced, and I was pleased to discover at the end of the novel that it seeks not to proselytize one position or another, but merely seeks to illustrate the tension between the two. The characters of course have their own positions on matters, and even here the balance is well maintained, so that we see both sides of the coin equally.
For me, perhaps the most interesting character was Hostetter, a trader who moves in and out of the lives of the boys at many points. Hostetter moves between both the worlds of Bartorstown and the outside world. Hostetter perhaps is the closest representative in the novel of a member of our own society, able to simultaneously look on both sides of the argument, and live on both sides of the fence. In Hostetter we find a tired resignation, born of his awareness that both the technology and the religion carry their own burdens and restrictions, equally incapacitating, though in different ways. This makes good sense, especially in this setting. Who could ever believe that post apocalyptic society would be exactly cheery?
This being fifties science fiction, we find here, as in many other examples, the aftermath of a nuclear war is wholly underestimated. Some eighty years from the war, the plains are fully rejuvenated, and the fallout is ancient history. I love fifties Science fiction, for the fact that it portrays a darkness, and yet possesses a wry innocence.
A nice little book this, if you like the subject matter. Nothing too controversial, merely an interesting piece, a well-written future history. I'll no doubt read it again!
Some of my other science fiction book reviews:
Rama Revealed
Prelude to Space
Stand on Zanzibar
The Demolished Man
The Stars my Destination
Cat's Cradle
The Gods Themselves
Watchmen
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The Hammer of God
The Left Hand of Darkness
Flowers for Algernon
Lord of Light
Rendevous with Rama
The Tombs of Atuan
The Dispossessed
I am Legend
The Einstein Intersection
Earth Abides
Peace on Earth
The Farthest Shore
Methuselah's Children
A Call to Arms
To your Scattered Bodies Go
The Lion of Comarre / Against the Fall of Night
To Say Nothing of the Dog
The Doomsday Book
Frankenstein Unbound
Batman - The Dark Knight Returns
Imperial Earth
A Case of Conscience
Solaris
The Sands of Mars
The Land of Laughs
Eden
His Masters Voice
Citizen of the Galaxy
King David's Spaceship
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Double Star
The Fabulous Riverboat
Songs of Distant Earth
Way Station
The Fountains of Paradise
The Long Tomorrow
Lincolns Dreams
Alas Babylon
More Than Human
1984
The Forever War
All the Myriad Ways
I Sing the Body Electric
Gateway
Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said
This Immortal
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Recommended:
Yes
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