Earthdoom

by John Grant, David Langford

Grant, John, Langford, David

Genres: Humor, Science Fiction

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

John Grant is author of over eighty books, of which about twenty-five are fiction, including novels like The World, The Hundredfold Problem, The Far-Enough Window and most recently The Dragons of Manhattan and Leaving Fortusa. His “book-length fiction” Dragonhenge, illustrated by Bob Eggleton, was shortlisted for a Hugo Award in 2003; its successor was The Stardragons. His first story collection, Take No Prisoners, appeared in 2004. He is editor of the anthology New Writings in the Fantastic, which was shortlisted for a British Fantasy Award. His novellas The City in These Pages and The Lonely Hunter have appeared from PS Publishing.

His latest fiction book is Tell No Lies , his second story collection; it's published by Alchemy Press. His most recent nonfiction is A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir . Earlier, he coedited with John Clute The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and wrote in their entirety all three editions of The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters; both encyclopedias are standard reference works in their field. Among other recent nonfictions have been Discarded Science, Corrupted Science (a USA Today Book of the Year), Bogus Science and Denying Science.

As John Grant he has to date received two Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award, and a number of other international literary awards. He has written books under other names, even including his real one: as Paul Barnett, he has written a few books (like the space operas Strider’s Galaxy and Strider’s Universe) and for a number of years ran the world-famous fantasy-artbook imprint Paper Tiger, for this work earning a Chesley Award and a nomination for the World Fantasy Award.

Reviews

[David Hebblethwaite · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gloriously over-the-top spoof disaster novel featuring all manner of world-ending phenomena which appear on the scene in quick succession: a spacecraft on a collision course with Earth; an antimatter comet on a collision course with Earth; invading aliens; rabid lemmings; the Loch Ness Monster; a time-travelling Hitler who takes advantage of the handy cloning technology he finds on a Devon farm; sentient superglue… You get the idea.

Langford and Grant relentlessly send up the conventions of the disaster novel, with their cast of gung-ho male scientists and impossibly-attractive-yet-brilliant-except-when-the-guys-need-to-show-how-much-better-they-are female scientists; the plot contrivances which are eventually abandoned altogether when it suits; the characters’ helpful-for-the-reader recapping things they already know; and the prose. For example:

Jeb’s [the Devonian farmer] words rang hollow in his ears, not merely because in these grim days his accent was failing to convince even himself. Ambledyke Farmhouse was sealed against the horrors outside, its boarded-up windows blind as proofreaders’ eyyes. The inner dimness throbbed with a stench of ancient, decaying pizza. (p. 121)

Great stuff.

[Wendy S. Delmater · Rating 3 out of 5]

Humor is subjective. Reviewers, when confronted with novels that do not align themselves with their personal idea of humor, are allowed to complain a little. So let me simply state that I’ve enjoyed David Langford’s work before, like his collection Different Kinds of Darkness, which got a Hugo nomination. And I was therefore singularly unprepared for the intentional farce that is Earthdoom.

Earthdoom is not Different Kinds of Darkness. It tries, and mostly succeeds, in parodying every single sort of disaster movie and story ever written or made, all at once, in one slim volume. It’s a bit much. It’s like someone tried to cram too much in there, and then forgot their safe word. Yes – words fail.

The running gag where Death, who can see what is probably coming and succumbs to repeated giggle fits feels overdone the first couple of times. Not to mention the sex-obsessed characters—male and female. Then there is the time-travelling Hitler who wants to clone himself into an army, the Cornish-language enthusiast-cum-terrorist, the lemming-obsessed scientist, the anti-matter comet, the obvious but ignored super-caldera . . . I might run out of room to list all the improbable disasters.

But the most representative disaster can be found on a doomed space station, soon to crash into the Earth, with its lecherous male American astronaut who has turned the only way to warn the world into an alcohol still. His pursuit of the female cosmonaut halts as he realizes they will soon die, but he is not sure if this has caused him to lose his erection, since, as he has repeatedly noted, “. . . there is no up or down in space.” Similarly, I can neither make up nor down, nor heads nor tails (giant, Galactic lemming tails), of this over-the-top novel.

Read it at your own risk. Who knows? You’re not me and the humor might actually appeal to you.

[Jonathan Palfrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This parody of disaster novels is not well aimed at me, as I don’t normally read disaster novels.