I’ve got a long day of flying ahead of me, so of course the universe conspired to keep me awake last night. First, my bladder woke me up around 3am. Then a text from Edward Lee woke me again at 4am. Then the cats, seeing me blearily looking at the phone, decided I was awake enough to give them breakfast, so by 4:15 I was doing that.
~
Women In Horror Year: Day 138
False Dawn by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Out of Print
It is the turn of the twenty-first century. War, disease, and pollution have made the Earth nearly unfit for human habitation. In America, food is scarce, and what food remains is quickly confiscated by the Pirates--a murderous band of raiders determined to save themselves and to destroy the last stronghold of civlized human beings--the mutant population. One of these mutants, a woman named Thea, has eluded the Pirates for years. Armed only with a crossbow, her pride, and her common sense, she has been slowly making her way Eastward to Gold Lake-- a legendary place of safety and enlightenment. Until one day she meets Evan Montague, a man who needs her help, a man who is also on the run from the Pirates, but for a different reason--he once led the Pirates himself and has now become their most bitter and most hunted enemy. Together, Thea and Evan trek across a dangerous and wasted California, hoping to survive the brutality of twenty-first-century life..and perhaps, to find Eden before they die.
It is inconceivable to me that this absolute classic and vitally seminal work of post-apocalyptic science-fiction horror is currently out of print, and yet it is. I verified so with some disbelief as I was preparing this write-up. Luckily, it’s had at least 10 different printings and editions published since the first printing of 1978, so copies are readily available on the secondary market, although prices flucuate wildly. Do some comparison shopping if you buy on eBay or from a used book seller.
False Dawn was one of the first post-apocalyptic novels to deal with an environmental collapse instead of a nuclear or biological war, and was the first such work to be written by a woman. Many of the tropes we’ve since come to know as a staple of these settings — roving gangs of marauders, destructive death weather, and mutant cannibals, for example — sprung from this source.
More importantly, from a writer’s perspective, it’s one of the first works to ask the question “Is it really worth fighting to survive? Would humankind be better off just giving up?” That pervading existential sense of hope in a time of hopelessness, of faith in a place that faith has abandoned, makes for rich character work in the best post-apocalyptic stories, from Robert R. McCammon’s Swan Song to my own THE RISING to this year’s Died by Izzy Von.
A very important work that any serious writer of this stuff should read at least once in their life, and every fan of these genres should be familiar with, track down a copy of False Dawn today.
