Review: The Long Tomorrow

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I chose to read The Long Tomorrow on impulse because I was surprised, when I heard about it a week or two ago, that I hadn't heard of it earlier. The author, Leigh Brackett, was known as the "Queen of Space Opera" and loved writing science fantasy when neither space operas nor science fantasy garnered much respect - or money. She also wrote the first draft of the script for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. To my chagrin, I had no idea that there were any women who worked on the script for Star Wars, much less one of the credited scriptwriters! (Though apparently it's rumored that most of her contributions were thrown out, since she died very soon after completing the script and didn't get to do any rewrites - I'm gonna have to read through that later and see what the differences are.)

Thankfully, this novel didn't disappoint. It's from her later work, which is less pulpy. It's a pretty standard post-nuclear apocalypse tale but one written before such stories had been run into the ground. It's also surprisingly prescient in its prediction of peoples' reactions to such an apocalypse. When nuclear war finally happened, civilian cities were the main target of attacks, which killed off large portions of the population and destroyed centers of industry and production. The U.S. government decided to pass an amendment banning the creation of cities larger than a certain population and number of buildings, and the U.S. population collectively decided that any technology more complex than a steam engine was dangerous and taboo. With all production centers, industry, and technology pretty much destroyed, the only people who were having any success surviving and feeding themselves were fundamentalist religious people, like Mennonites, who were self-sufficient farmers unaccustomed to technology before the Destruction. In the aftermath, many people fled populous areas and joined these fundamentalist religious, fueling their anti-science sentiment with religion as well as fear.

This particular story is set about 80 years after the Destruction, and focuses on two cousins, Len and Esau, both New Mennonites who visit a more fundamentalist sect in their teenage years and witness the stoning of a man accused of being from Bartorstown. Bartorstown, they learn, is a place where men of science still live, maintaining the old technologies and working to bring back the grand cities of old - a dramatically romantic (and extremely taboo) notion to young teenage boys. They discover and steal what they believe to be a radio from the cart of a local trader, Mister Hostetter, and spend the next year trying to figure out how it works. When they are finally caught, their parents and the local townspeople are both out for punishment (though they realize they are young boys and that young boys make such mistakes, and their religion is more lenient, so luckily they're not going to be killed). Len and Esau flee, both to avoid punishment and to find Bartorstown, and the story then jumps to five or ten years later.

At this point, Len and Esau are both in love with a judge's daughter, Amity, and they are both helping build a warehouse for a local trader. The problem is that this particular town is already at the legal maximum for number of buildings, and one more would constitute an illegal step toward a city. But the people of the town are divided, because there is more trade - and therefore more potential cash inflow - than the town can handle, so another town is being built across the river to profit from the trade, and some people think that's just not fair. There's a heated dispute that ends with Len and Esau fleeing (along with Amity) again, this time rescued by Hostetter and heading to Bartorstown.

The trip to Bartorstown is long and arduous and along the way Hostetter repeatedly tells Len that he will probably be disappointed with what he sees. Len gets this warning from several other people once in Bartorstown, too, and then there is a big reveal (spoilers follow): Bartorstown gets its energy from nuclear power. This is anathema to Len and Esau, who had been raised to believe that nuclear power is evil (and also that it was completely destroyed across the world). Esau comes to terms with it pretty quickly, accepting the rationalization of the locals that it was created once, so even if they destroyed it it would eventually be created again, and it's likely there are other secret caches of nuclear power in the world anyway. He accepts their goal - to find a field that will perfectly control atoms, preventing them from being split and hopefully keeping another nuclear war from ever happening again - but it's much more difficult for Len. He wants to leave, but the men of Bartorstown took a huge risk in accepting him and won't risk letting him leave to tell the world where they are. As Hostetter warns him, there is a crucial similarity between the people of Bartorstown and the religious people outside: they are both fanatics, in their own way, because to be so devoted to one way of life requires a kind of fanaticism.

This is primarily a character study of a novel, where the climax of the novel is Len's internal crisis, deciding whether to return to his home or stay in Bartorstown. Given that we're a bit past the nuclear hysteria of the 40s and 50s it would be easy for this story to feel stale and unrelatable. It doesn't, though - I was with Len all the way, from his eager but naive and reckless attempts to find a place of learning and freedom, to his disillusionment upon realizing that there will still be limits to what he is allowed to think in this place of supposedly free thought, to his religious fear of the sin of working alongside nuclear power. And his decision is conveyed powerfully, so it feels of utmost importance not just to Len but to the world. I liked that the story went past the black and white of 'science is good, religion is bad' and acknowledged that any sort of belief that disallows any other belief is dangerous. There was a funny comment that seems remarkably applicable even today, though: one character mentions that the religious zealots common in their Midwest who devote their lives to asceticism and violence didn't appear out of nowhere, but were there all along - the structure of society was just able to keep their crazy under the surface.

My one gripe would be the treatment of female characters, which I found a bit surprising given the female author. There are only three of note: Len's Gran, who is wonderfully ornery and expresses an impetuous and scandalous desire to return to the way things were when she was young - to enjoy the ease and the luxury of pre-Destruction industry; Amity, who shows some bite when Len is overly aggressive with her, but is otherwise a pliable girl with no visible desires of her own; and Joan, who serves as a seductress and would be a great foil for Len (he wanted nothing more than to find Bartorstown, she wants nothing more than to leave it) if she were given much of an identity beyond leading Len astray.

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