This book from 1955 is on a par with the dystopian tales from Margaret Atwood and I am really surprised it is not better known. I read this at a slow pace which worked well for me, as the book goes at a slow pace. It describes a life in Ohio about 75 years after an atomic war that destroyed the cities. What survives is a society who could live off the land, the New Mennonites, and similar sects. But there is also a secret place, rumored anyways, where the old technology knowledge is kept alive. This is almost a young adult novel with the issues it addresses but it is really a finely written piece of literature.

The novel is divided into three books and I think the final book, for me, and maybe the characters themselves, was a bit of a letdown. The novel as a whole is still deserving of 4 stars, and recommended to anyone who reads dystopian fiction. ( )

Written fewer than ten years after Hiroshima, this classic SF novel depicts a post-apocalyptic society rebuilding itself after a nuclear war. No horrors of war are shown, and people live in mostly rural and agrarian groups. Technology is frowned upon, even banned, and no town is permitted to have more than 200 buildings. The society has a very 19th century feel, and religion is an important part of most people's lives.

Len and Esau are cousins living on adjoining farms. They have heard rumors of a big city where technology has been preserved, and become obsessed with someday finding that city. When they become teenagers, they run away in search of that city.

There are themes of the conflicts between knowledge and progress vs. ignorance and the status quo. There is a good depiction of the many different religious sects and how they divide people.

There is not a lot of action in the book, and while it is a quick and easy ready, I found it a bit slow-moving. It also has a rather YA feel, not my favorite genre. So while I'm not sorry I read it, it is not one I would whole-heartedly recommend. ( )

Oof. There were some bits in this book that got a little bogged down in religion, but by the end I thought I knew what was going to happen and it kept surprising me. I literally slapped my hand to my forehead at one point. Warning, some ideas of gender that are a bit rough (but almost vaguely progressive for the time) even if written by the woman who wrote Rio Bravo. ( )

When Fear Rules, Reason Dies

Many consider Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow a science fiction classic because it is among the first mediations on the aftermath of nuclear holocaust and probably because she was one of the few successful female sci-fi writers of the era. Modern readers may find it slow by today’s standards and the science antiquated, particularly the giant computer brain on the order of an overgrown UNIVAC (itself notable at the time for predicting the outcome of the 1952 U.S. Presidential Election). But others will recognize the theme of fear and ignorance vs. human curiosity and scientific advancement as pertinent today as it was in the 1950s (recall the Red Scare-mongering and national Cold War paranoia). Scientific inquiry and its findings, after all, can be tough for many to abide, especially when it debunks cherished beliefs.

And such is the case in The Long Tomorrow. Not many years after the end of a worldwide nuclear war, around eighty years, the United States eschews science, reverts to religious dominance and its strict rules of faith and conformity, and restricts settlements to maximum populations of one thousand and no more than two hundred buildings per square mile. Thus, no more big cities, no more electricity and the conveniences and communications it supports, no more autos, trucks, trains, and planes. Steam power produced by crude engines becomes the technology of the day, livestock provides transportation and power, and roaming traders supply the goods that rural communities can’t manufacture for themselves. Instead of respecting and encouraging scientific exploration and knowledge, society represses both for fear of another conflagration.

Two teen boys, cousins, Len and Esau Colter, chaff at the insularity of their Mennonite community. They’ve heard stories of the past, of the big cities, of the wonders of modern life fostered by the remembrances of their old grandmother, and most particularly of a mystical big city called Bartorstown. They yearn to find it. After a devastating trading day, when a mob of ultra religious zealots kill a trader, Esau finds a radio in the wagon of another, Ed Hostetter. Later, they try unsuccessfully puzzling how to operate it. Nonetheless, it spurs them on to escape their stringent community and set out to find Bardorstown. Along the way, they arrive in a town called Refuge, where they work for an expansion minded businessman, Mike Dulinsky and Esau meets a girl, Amity. When Dulinsky repudiates the wishes of Refuge religious elders and the ambitions of a rival town by building an additional warehouse, retribution and mob action follow. Dulinsky dies at the hands of a local elder, while Hostetter appears to save Len and Esau.

The three, plus Amity, then make the journey to a town in the Rocky Mountains called Falls Creek and there find the Bartorstown they have dreamed about. Except that it bears no resemblance to what they imagined. Instead, it is a small community of scientists technicians who maintain a giant computer called Clementine and a nuclear reactor. They people work tirelessly and to their great frustration to discover a shield to protect humankind from the kind of destruction suffered at the hands of misused nuclear power. The endeavor seems hopeless and the achievement, if it can be had, appears long off in the distant, long tomorrow. Len and his new Bartorstown wife Joan, who long has been disillusioned and seeking escape, devise and execute a plan to flee Bartorstown, though the penalty for such action is death. After attempting to reach his hometown a thousand miles away, being buffeted by hardship, and engulfed again by the religious fatalism he fled, Hostetter finds them and arranges for them to be accepted back into Bartorstown. Len, for his part, accepts that change will come eventually, though he may not live to see it.

Though nearly sixty-five years old, the underlying theme of the novel will still resonate with certain readers.
( )

When Fear Rules, Reason Dies

Many consider Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow a science fiction classic because it is among the first mediations on the aftermath of nuclear holocaust and probably because she was one of the few successful female sci-fi writers of the era. Modern readers may find it slow by today’s standards and the science antiquated, particularly the giant computer brain on the order of an overgrown UNIVAC (itself notable at the time for predicting the outcome of the 1952 U.S. Presidential Election). But others will recognize the theme of fear and ignorance vs. human curiosity and scientific advancement as pertinent today as it was in the 1950s (recall the Red Scare-mongering and national Cold War paranoia). Scientific inquiry and its findings, after all, can be tough for many to abide, especially when it debunks cherished beliefs.

And such is the case in The Long Tomorrow. Not many years after the end of a worldwide nuclear war, around eighty years, the United States eschews science, reverts to religious dominance and its strict rules of faith and conformity, and restricts settlements to maximum populations of one thousand and no more than two hundred buildings per square mile. Thus, no more big cities, no more electricity and the conveniences and communications it supports, no more autos, trucks, trains, and planes. Steam power produced by crude engines becomes the technology of the day, livestock provides transportation and power, and roaming traders supply the goods that rural communities can’t manufacture for themselves. Instead of respecting and encouraging scientific exploration and knowledge, society represses both for fear of another conflagration.

Two teen boys, cousins, Len and Esau Colter, chaff at the insularity of their Mennonite community. They’ve heard stories of the past, of the big cities, of the wonders of modern life fostered by the remembrances of their old grandmother, and most particularly of a mystical big city called Bartorstown. They yearn to find it. After a devastating trading day, when a mob of ultra religious zealots kill a trader, Esau finds a radio in the wagon of another, Ed Hostetter. Later, they try unsuccessfully puzzling how to operate it. Nonetheless, it spurs them on to escape their stringent community and set out to find Bardorstown. Along the way, they arrive in a town called Refuge, where they work for an expansion minded businessman, Mike Dulinsky and Esau meets a girl, Amity. When Dulinsky repudiates the wishes of Refuge religious elders and the ambitions of a rival town by building an additional warehouse, retribution and mob action follow. Dulinsky dies at the hands of a local elder, while Hostetter appears to save Len and Esau.

The three, plus Amity, then make the journey to a town in the Rocky Mountains called Falls Creek and there find the Bartorstown they have dreamed about. Except that it bears no resemblance to what they imagined. Instead, it is a small community of scientists technicians who maintain a giant computer called Clementine and a nuclear reactor. They people work tirelessly and to their great frustration to discover a shield to protect humankind from the kind of destruction suffered at the hands of misused nuclear power. The endeavor seems hopeless and the achievement, if it can be had, appears long off in the distant, long tomorrow. Len and his new Bartorstown wife Joan, who long has been disillusioned and seeking escape, devise and execute a plan to flee Bartorstown, though the penalty for such action is death. After attempting to reach his hometown a thousand miles away, being buffeted by hardship, and engulfed again by the religious fatalism he fled, Hostetter finds them and arranges for them to be accepted back into Bartorstown. Len, for his part, accepts that change will come eventually, though he may not live to see it.

Though nearly sixty-five years old, the underlying theme of the novel will still resonate with certain readers.
( )