Earthdoom

by David Langford, John Grant

GULP? As the Earth tilts on its axis, precipitating a new Ice Age, hordes of rabid lemmings race towards Europe. Meanwhile a time-travelling Hitler emerges in sleepy Devonshire and proceeds to clone himself in preparation for the march on London. Will a Fourth Reich rise to strangle the Mother of Parliaments? Or will London be devastated by a nuclear accident on the Bakerloo line? The luckless crew of Spaceship Earth have no time to pose such questions as an epidemic of demonic possession and prophetic visions erupts in the USA and an approaching envoy from a distant galaxy broadcasts the following message: YOU EARTHLING SCUM ARE THE DREGS OF THE UNIVERSE. WE COME TO ANNIHILATE YOU PAINFULLY AND RAPE YOUR PLANET EARTHDOOM! is the disaster novel to end 'em all. And not before time . . The trouble with Earthdoom! is that you really have to grope through a host of books with titles like Tapeworm! and Sludge! and plots like - well, like episodes of Earthdoom! to appreciate just what Langford and Grant are sending up. By then, of course, either your brain has rotted away from disuse or you're so paranoid that the next time the gerbils nip your finger you come down with psychosomatic rabies and infect half the neighbourhood. Even if you forego the study of literary influences, however, you'll still enjoy Earthdoom! You won't, of course, be able to read another Disaster Novel without giggling (but don't you, anyway?) as what we have here is a scenario for just about every end-of-the world novel possible, starting with the earth tilting on its axis and taking in Hitler cloning himself on a Devonshire farm, the Loch Ness Monster, comets and Horrible Slimy Aliens on a collision course with earth and sub-critical-mass bits of plutonium doing likewise in the London Underground - and I won't even mention the lemmings and the superglue save to say that you'll probably never want to go to the lavatory again. It's all held together with a plot line involving Death, the Antichrist, various sets of incompetent scientists as two-fistedly gung-ho as any Doc Smith character (but randier) and numerous knock-knock jokes ... If you don't get a copy of this for your collection of skiffy blockbusters there isn't much hope for you. Andy Sawyer, Paperback Inferno

Genres: Humor, Science Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

British science-fiction author, editor and critic. He publishes the newsletter Ansible.

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.