The Long Tomorrow

One possible definition of science fiction is that SF is about the potential effects of technology on humanity and the human environment. The potential of technology can create the "sense of wonder" that SF readers are often looking for, but technology can also be seen as a potential danger. Out of hand or out of our control, technology can become the source of our destruction—thus the cautionary dystopias of nuclear apocalypse and climate change that appear alongside more hopeful stories of space exploration and other wonders of the future.

Leigh Brackett plays with this dichotomy masterfully in The Long Tomorrow (1955), the story of two teenage cousins brought up in Piper's Run—a community of "New Mennonites" in Ohio eighty years after a nuclear war destroyed most U.S. cities. (The details of the war itself are not presented, but apparently the U.S. "won", for whatever it's worth.) In the aftermath of the Destruction, as the nuclear devastation has come to be known, fundamentalist religious groups have gained political power, enforcing, with popular support, an anti-technological society supported by the Thirtieth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the growth of any town's population beyond one thousand people, or the number of buildings beyond two hundred per square mile. The cultural mores of the Amish and the Mennonites dominate America, and more violent anti-technology sects threaten death by stoning for anyone caught with illegal technology—"the terror brought the great boiling up of faith that birthed new sects and strengthened the old ones."

It is the witnessing of the murder by stoning of a man accused of being from Bartorstown—a rumored stronghold of prewar technology somewhere in the West—that precipitates the flight of Len Colter and his cousin Esau from the reasonably comfortable but never-changing rural life of their home town of Piper's Run. Esau finds a radio among the possessions of the dead man, verifying the existence of the banned technology for which he was killed. The two boys are fascinated by the artifact, which works, though they don't know how to use it—a sign that there is something greater beyond their small-town world. After being caught with the radio and beaten by their fathers, the cousins determine to run away and find Bartorstown. Esau's motivation is utilitarian—he's drawn to the possibilities of a more interesting life, with no regrets or religious scruples—but Len, from whose perspective the novel is related, is more philosophical and conflicted, and it is through him that the conflict between the two ways of life plays out. When asked by his father why he kept the radio, and some stolen ancient books he hoped would help him understand its workings, his response is, "Because I couldn't help it. I want to learn, I want to know!" Technology destroyed the cities, so the conservative religious response was to prevent the cities and their technological way of life from coming back, but is the repression of human knowledge desirable, or even possible, despite its destructive potential?

In Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, David Pringle calls The Long Tomorrow "a very pro-science novel." While this is an accurate appraisal, the road to this conclusion is not without its pitfalls, or the theme without its ambiguities. Ultimately, Brackett seems to be telling us, humanity's curiosity and invention cannot be repressed, but the attractions of the pastoral lifestyle and the desire to avoid the complications of technological progress cannot be entirely denied, however ultimately misguided.

Len is drawn to move beyond the narrow confines of Piper's Run, and his experiences in the somewhat larger town of Refuge, which makes up the middle section of the novel, strengthen his belief that progress is being stifled pointlessly. The warehouse-owner who employs Len and Esau tries to convince the town to expand beyond its legal limit in the interest of economic growth, and as a result is gunned down by fundamentalists from the countryside. The cousins must flee Refuge, but when he and Esau finally do find Bartorstown, it is not the shiny technological city they expected, and the technology they find there reignites the fear Len was brought up with. He falls in love with a Bartorstown girl, who yearns for the outside world that Len had come there to escape, and who soon convinces him to take her away. His inner battle is the heart of the novel:

Esau never fought this battle, nor [Len's] Brother James. They're the lucky ones. But Pa did…, and now it is my time. The battle of decision, the time of choice. I made a decision in Piper's Run. It was a child's decision, based on a child's dreams. I made a decision in Bartorstown, and it was still a childish decision, based on emotion. Now I am finished with dreams, I am finished with emotions… What decision I make I will make as a man, and there will be no turning back from it after it is made… Sooner or later a man has to stop and choose his way, not out of the ways he would like there to be, or the ways there ought to be, but out of the ways there are.

He can't go back to Piper's Run after all, no matter how attractive his childhood memories now seem. And the fear of Bartorstown's technology is not without foundation, but its existence cannot be undone. The fundamentalists maintain that it was the worship of machines—the false god Moloch—that led to the Destruction. But Len cannot go back to that way of thinking. He finally realizes the nature of the anti-technologists: "They call if faith, but it is not faith. It is fear. The people have clapped a shelter over their head, a necessity of ignorance, a passion of retreat, and they have called it God, and worshipped it. And it is as false as any Moloch… And it will betray its worshipers, leaving them defenseless in the face of a tomorrow that will surely come."

Brackett's novel is deservedly seen today as a classic of 1950s SF, and is included in the Library of America's American Science Fiction collection. The writing is among the best of the period, and the novel is, unusually for science fiction of the time, driven more by character than plot, while still presenting clearly and fascinatingly one of the classic science fiction themes embodied in Len's journey, which takes place both geographically across a future America clinging to a pre-technological past, and in his own psychology. The novel is also interestingly prescient in its portrayal of the influence of religious fundamentalism on U.S. politics, complete with the use fear to convince the population not to question its moral precepts and to ignore or deny science, the enforcement of religious moral precepts with national legislation, and the censure and punishment of those who have the temerity to disagree or prefer a different lifestyle. Fear of progress and change, and the yearning for a simpler past, seems to be a common aspect of human psychology, but the "Golden Age" of the past is no more realistic than the shiny futures portrayed by many of Brackett's contemporaries in the science fiction of the 1950s. To repeat Len's realization: our choice is "not out of the ways [we] would like there to be, or the ways there ought to be, but out of the ways there are."