If you dive back deep into the stacks of this blog you may come across some good-natured grumbling from your correspondent about a certain lack of imagination in the titling department of some SF movies from, mostly, the 1960s. I refer to films like The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Day the Sky Exploded, and Crack in the World (the situation being somewhat confused by the existence – more accurately non-existence – of the Hammer-Harryhausen collaboration When the Earth Cracked Open).
At the time I was, as far as I can tell, completely unaware of the existence of Charles Eric Maine’s The Tide Went Out (‘a novel for adult minds only’, according to the original blurb), a 1958 novel which fits so smoothly into the narrative space between all these films it’s scarcely credible. This book was reissued in 1977 under the punchier (if less representative) title Thirst!; I imagine it would have felt fairly dated 45 years ago – it certainly feels like historical literature now. And yet it is back on sale as part of a new British Library imprint which boldly declares itself to be ‘Science Fiction Classics’. On the evidence I’ve seen this is only accurate if you accept a fairly generous definition of ‘classic’ – all the really good stuff has been snapped up by Orion’s long-running SF Masterworks range.
Maine’s tale concerns the travails of Philip Wade, a hard-bitten writer and journalist with a drink problem, a mildly unhappy marriage, and a young son who’s not much more than a plot device. The book doesn’t hang about and opens with a bit of a crisis at the office – the latest edition of Wade’s magazine has to be recalled and one of the articles replaced, on the orders of the government. How come? Well, the offending article is a speculative, sensationalist piece wondering if a spate of recent earthquakes and apparent falls in sea level in the Pacific region could be linked to Anglo-American H-bomb tests in the same area. Could, in fact, the bomb have cracked open the ocean floor and allowed the water to start draining away?
Needless to say, it looks like Wade has inadvertently hit the nail on the head, and those in high places don’t even want the suggestion of this getting out. His publisher, Stenniger, reveals that he is selling up and moving to Canada, a country blessed with much snow and ice, while it is intimated that in return for his cooperation Wade will be given a job with a new government department concerned with the control of information to avoid unnecessary public panic (i.e., an official censorship and propaganda bureau). All this duly begins to come to pass, even as earthquakes begin to affect Britain.
The government’s plan (and that of the other world powers) is to retreat to the polar regions, where the vast reserves of ice will allow some form of civilised existence to exist for quite a while. The vast majority of the population, however, is to be abandoned to die as water and food supplies are exhausted; Wade’s job, in part, is to jolly the masses along with fake good news stories and thus allow the authorities to quietly pull out without risking uproar and civil disturbances. But he will be one of the last of the lucky ones to leave the country – if anything goes wrong, his own survival may be in peril…
As a book in its own right, The Tide Went Out is fairly competently done. Every review of it I’ve read has commented on the implausibility of the central premise (where exactly is all the world’s water draining away to?), but the focus is not really on what is happening, but the effect this has on the characters and society at large. This is briskly, credibly done, although there is a bit too much telling rather than showing. Events lose their impact as a result – at one point Wade is dragged from his car and attacked by an angry mob, which Maine describes in the detached manner of a background event. Occasionally he slips into a mode where Wade is effectively talking to himself, roughly and angrily, and this is effective, but too much of the book is cool and distant.
It’s also, as noted, very much a book of its time – it certainly feels like it was written for a male audience, although this is probably a textbook case of unconscious bias. Wade and the other male characters are in charge of getting stuff done; the female characters are mainly there as either objects of sexual interest, or nuisances, or both. Not that they are any different from the men when it comes to cigarettes and alcohol – until supplies of both run out, Wade meanders through the book in what feels like a permanent boozed-up fug: every time he meets another character some variation on ‘they both lit up’ makes an appearance.
I’ve read worse, but the main problem with The Tide Went Out is that – if you know much about British SF literature of the mid 20th century – you’ve almost certainly read better books in an extremely similar style. And not just books – I’d be prepared to bet a substantial sum that this was the primary inspiration for the wonderful 1961 movie The Day the Earth Caught Fire. The similarities between the two stories are too numerous to list in detail, but they both depict the news media dealing with an apocalyptic environmental event caused by H-bomb testing and the ensuing collapse of society (the main character in the film is named Stenning; compare with Stenniger, a character in the book).
The main difference comes at the end, which in the book’s case surely makes clear its own inspiration. The first name which comes up in any discussion of the apocalyptic British SF novel is usually that of John Wyndham, but this overlooks the contribution of John Christopher. There’s certainly a touch of Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes to the decline of civilisation in Maine’s book, but its bleakness and psychological clarity are pure Christopher – taken, I would guess, from his The Death of Grass (famine destroys civilisation!), published two years earlier, but also evident in The World in Winter (a new ice age destroys civilisation!) and A Wrinkle in the Skin (immense earthquakes destroy civilisation!). All these explore the death of civilisation through the loss of the protagonists’ civilised values as they adapt to their new circumstances – something Wyndham touches on but never really examines rigorously.
I’m such an admirer of Christopher’s work in this genre that I spent a month in 2010 writing an 80,000 word pastiche of this type of story (a gaseous alien life form colonises the upper atmosphere, gradually causing the destruction of civilisation!). There was a flawed main character, a gradual collapse in civilised values, an eventual apocalypse, and all the usual stuff. Maybe it wasn’t quite as bad as I remember it being (my writing coach at the time eviscerated my outline for its non-adherence to the standard story structure), but The Tide Went Out is still probably a better book. That’s not much of a recommendation, I admit, but there you go. I’d recommend any number of John Christopher or John Wyndham books, or indeed The Day the Earth Caught Fire, ahead of it, but if you’re already familiar with those it might make an interesting example of the same material treated differently. But not that differently.