#165 After two catastrophes: The Uncertain Midnight (1958) and The Cloud Walker (1973) by Edmund Cooper

Edmund Cooper is hardly a familiar name today, but he was once a significant presence on the British science fiction scene. For 23 years, he reviewed new SF books for The Sunday Times, and one of his short stories was adapted into the 1957 film The Invisible Boy  - which featured the second screen appearance of Robby the Robot, introduced in the more famous Forbidden Planet.

More relevantly, Cooper was also a novelist who had an abiding interest in post-nuclear war scenarios. This episode examines two novels with quite different approaches to this theme - one is his 1958 debut (under his own name) The Uncertain Midnight, and the other is his 1973 late-career highlight The Cloud Walker.

For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.

Transcript

He described himself as “a compulsive guesser, an addict of possibilities. And, I hope, an entertainer.” Edmund Cooper (1926 - 1982) was a veteran of the British Merchant Navy who became a prominent science fiction writer and critic. He began to write short fiction in the early 1950s, but it was as a novelist that he became most notable. He repeatedly explored post-holocaust settings in his fiction, and it has been argued that in this respect he was “probably expressing his own conviction about the future course of events.” 

What follows is a brief look at two notable novels by Cooper, both set in post-nuclear scenarios which differ dramatically. In his debut The Uncertain Midnight (1958), a man is woken from over a century in suspended animation and confronted by a world dominated by androids. In one of Cooper’s last novels, the much-praised The Cloud Walker (1973), society has become militantly anti-technology in the aftermath of not one, but two nuclear conflicts.

The Uncertain Midnight (1958)

Cooper's first novel was also published as Deadly Image in the United States - neither title gives much clue as to what to expect. In the tradition of the late Victorian novels News From Nowhere (1890) by William Morris and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) by H. G. Wells, this is a story of a man waking up in a radically changed future after a lengthy period spent in suspended animation.

The novel opens very strongly, with John Markham slowly waking up from a sleep of 146 years. As he thaws, he recalls his life back in the late 1960s. In these fragmentary flashbacks, he is a happily married engineer working in the industrial refrigeration business. His career prospers due to growing fears of nuclear war - the British government commissions massive deep-freeze facilities to preserve food that survivors will need in the aftermath of a nuclear strike. 

As luck would have it, he is inspecting one such facility in Epping Forest when the bombs come down, and is frozen as a result. He wakes in 2113, with his wife and child long dead. The UK is gone, and in its place is the Republic of London. A small population of humans is outnumbered by a seemingly servile mass of androids, and Markham becomes a celebrity known as “the Survivor”. Slowly but surely, he questions this new society and joins a resistance movement which aims to claw back true freedom, work, and responsibility for humankind.

The Uncertain Midnight reflects the view that abundance would rob people of their creative energy, and would generally stifle the human spirit. Iain M. Banks rejected this with his Culture series, a very different take on a post-scarcity society run by machines. The novel also brings to mind Barrington J. Bayley's later novels The Soul of the Robot (1974) and The Rod of Light (1985), in its combination of philosophical speculation about consciousness with high adventure - which in Cooper's novel comes belatedly.

The novel never recovers the skill or energy of its excellent, carefully crafted opening - its middle section in particular is too dialogue-heavy. In his later introduction written in 1970, Cooper observes that “it is a regrettable fact that war is a great stimulus to science”. However, the idea that advanced androids would be created in an irradiated post-nuclear UK with a surviving population of just 60,000 seems frankly absurd.

The Cloud Walker (1973)

According to the SFE, this was Cooper’s “best received novel (certainly in the USA) and the last to be much praised.” He would publish only three further novels before he died in 1982, “with his reputation at a low ebb.” In contrast to the pronounced and perhaps abrasive political leanings of some of his late work - it would be difficult to defend him against charges of sexism - The Cloud Walker is a relatively straightforward but highly competent science fiction adventure in a post-apocalyptic mode.

In the future - perhaps at some point in the 21st century - it is the time of the Third Men. Both the First Men and their successors the Second Men destroyed themselves and their civilisations, presumably through nuclear war. In what was once the UK, the Third Men have a simple, chiefly agrarian society ruled over by the Luddite Church, which forbids all but the most basic technologies and venerates a version of Ned Ludd as its deity.

When the novel opens, Kieron Joinerson is a teenager living in Arundel with a dangerous dream - he longs to build a flying machine and take to the air. While apprenticed to a master painter and betrothed to a local girl, Kieron builds increasingly elaborate kites and contraptions which bring the suspicion of the Church down on him. The stubbornly wayward young man seems doomed to execution, until a deadly external threat - a band of marauding pirates - causes the townspeople to reconsider their fear and hatred for technology.

The Cloud Walker is about science and technology, progress, and their moral implications. In Kieron’s future time, the religious authorities blame technological development for the disasters that destroyed civilisation - twice. By restricting technology, they believe they can rid the world of evil. This rigid dogma is undermined when the pirates arrive, because the horrors they unleash require no devices which the Church forbids. Indeed, it is only Kieron’s “sinful” flying machines which provide even a chance to stave them off.

Cooper crafts a stirring adventure in The Cloud Walker. The battle scenes and flight discoveries are exciting high points in a propulsive plot. Kieron’s interactions with others are sometimes quite moving, especially his relationship with the kindly master painter who had no child of his own. Cooper inspires with his theme of restoring progress to a civilisation frozen in time, but also leaves us wondering whether the Third Men are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. 

The Cloud Walker has some clear similarities with Keith Roberts’ superb Pavane (1968). This is a hugely different piece of work - and much more conventional in many respects - but is just as entertaining in its own way.

Taken together, The Uncertain Midnight and The Cloud Walker demonstrate Edmund Cooper's long-term consideration of the threat of nuclear war, and his views about technology, progress, and the human spirit. Clearly, Cooper's ideas changed significantly in the 15 years between these two novels, each a major point in his career. His skills also advanced greatly - while The Uncertain Midnight has powerful opening and closing sections, The Cloud Walker is a much slicker and more consistent SF adventure, which marries high action with philosophical interest to good effect.

While Cooper had fallen out of favour by the time of his death in 1982, and now languishes in obscurity, these novels are reason enough to re-examine his work - especially as we still grapple with issues of technology and its effect on our lives and societies.