{"id":13002,"date":"2022-07-11T03:38:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-11T03:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/ja\/?post_type=product&p=13002"},"modified":"2022-07-11T03:45:11","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T03:45:11","slug":"bad-air","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/ja\/bad-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Air"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay\u2019s The Doom of the Great City (1880)<\/span><\/h2>\n

Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory \u2014 Brett Beasley explores a piece of Victorian science fiction considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse.<\/p>\n

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Scarcely can I portray in words the dire and dismal scenes that met my vision here. … For here, where on the previous night had throbbed hot and high the flood-tide of London\u2019s evening gaiety, was now presented to my poor fevered sight, the worst, the most awful features of the whole terrific calamity. I had entered into the very heart and home of horror itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. That is, at least, according to William Delisle Hay\u2019s<\/a> 1880 novella,\u00a0The Doom of the Great City<\/em>. It imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event\u2019s lone survivor sixty years later as he recalls \u201cthe greatest calamity that perhaps this earth has ever witnessed\u201d at what was, for Hay\u2019s first readers, the distant future date of 1942.<\/p>\n

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The novella received only mild acclaim among its late Victorian readers, and today it is almost forgotten. But, surprisingly enough, it has become possible to read our social and environmental problems foretold in Hay\u2019s strange little story. In our age of global warming, acid rain, and atmospheric pollution, we may become the first readers to take Hay seriously. When Hay imagines a city whose wealth and \u201cfalse social system\u201d lulls it into complacency, we can recognize ourselves in his words. And as for those air problems that loomed dangerously around them, Londoners \u201clooked upon them in the light of a regular institution, not caring to investigate their cause with a view to some means of mitigating them\u201d. At moments like these, we get the feeling that Hay\u2019s obscure 135-year-old story is eerily prophetic.<\/p>\n

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But before we canonize Hay as an environmentalist and his story as\u00a0An Inconvenient Truth<\/em>\u00a0in Victorian garb, we have to look at the story\u2019s other features. Readers of\u00a0The Doom of the Great City<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>unfailingly notice that the story does not fit easily with other science fiction narratives, but seems to belong also to another class of tales, which Brian Stableford has called \u201cringing accounts of richly deserved punishment\u201d. This is because Hay\u2019s narrator seems to slide back and forth between material and moral explanations for pollution. While he talks of how \u201cIn those latter days there had been past years of terribly bad weather, destroying harvests\u201d, he adds in the same paragraph, \u201cprostitution flourished rampantly, while Chastity laid down her head and died! Evil! \u2014 one seemed to see it everywhere!\u201d<\/p>\n

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In fact, the narrator goes so far as to cast himself as a prophet. Like a latterday Jeremiah he reviles London as \u201cfoul and rotten to the very core, and steeped in sin of every imaginable variety\u201d. In a twenty-page diatribe he catalogues vices such as prodigality, corruption, avarice, and aestheticism \u2014 not to mention feminine vanity, for which he reserves special scorn. He denounces tradesmen, aristocrats, theater-goers, and the young as well as the old. For him, London is like Atlantis or Babylon standing blithely unaware of the divine wrath about to strike it.<\/p>\n

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All of this raises an important question: can pollution be material (i.e. made of soot, ashes, smoke, chemicals, etc.) and moral as well? The same question could also be stated as a problem of genre. What exactly are we reading when we read\u00a0The Doom of the Great City<\/em>? Is it a forward-looking sci-fi tale about a dystopian future that may yet arrive? Or is it a fantasy of divine retribution that belongs with the ancient past?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"