THE DOOMSMAN (2)
By:
March 11, 2024
Set ninety years after the cataclysmic pandemic of 1925, Van Tassel Sutphen’s The Doomsman imagines a Kamandi-like future in which medievalized American tribes struggle with the marauding Doomsmen for control of the ruins of New York City… where a mad priest worships a powerful technology. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize this 1905–1906 proto-sf novel for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30.
THE NIGHT OF THE TERROR
The reader, desiring to inform himself in extenso regarding the physical and social changes that followed the catastrophe by which the ancient civilization was so suddenly subverted, would do well to consult the final authority upon the subject, the learned Vigilas, author of The Later Cosmos (elephant folio edition). But for our present purpose a brief epitome should suffice. To borrow then, with all due acknowledgments, from our admirable historian:
“It was in the later years of the twentieth century that the Great Change came; at least, so the traditions agree, and how is a man to know certainly of such things except as he learns them from his father’s lips? True, the accounts differ, and widely so at times, but that much is to be expected — where were there ever two men who heard or saw the same things in the same way? It is human nature that we should color even transparent fact with the reflected glow of our passions and fancies, and so the distortion becomes inevitable; we should be satisfied if, to-day, we succeed in making out even the broad outlines of the picture.
“It appears tolerably certain that the wreck of the ancient civilization took place about three generations ago, the catastrophe being both sudden and overwhelming; moreover, all the authorities agree that only an infinitesimal portion of the race escaped, with whole skins, from what were, in very sooth, cities of destruction. These fortunate ones were naturally the politically powerful and the immensely rich, and they owed their safety to the fact that they were able to seize upon the shipping in the harbors for their exclusive use. The fugitives sailed away, presumably to the southward, and so disappeared from the pages of authentic history. We know nothing for certain; only that they departed, and that we saw their faces no more.
“Let us reconstruct, as best we may, the panorama of those few but awful days. The first rush was naturally to the country, but the crowds, choking the ferry and railway stations, were quickly confronted with the terror-stricken thousands of the suburbs, who were flocking to the city for refuge. And all through the dragging hours the same despairing reports flowed in from the remoter rural districts; everywhere the Terror walked, and men were dying like flies. From ocean to ocean, from the lakes to the gulf, the shadow rushed, and now the whole land lay in darkness.
“Such was the situation in what was then the United States of America, and similar conditions prevailed throughout the habitable world. London and Hong-Kong, Vienna and Pekin, Buenos Ayres and Archangel — from every direction came the same inquiry, to every questioner was returned the same answer. It was the end of all things.
“Coincidently with this great recession of the human tide, occurred the eclipse of industry, science, and, indeed, every form of thought and progress. The plough rusted in the furrow, the half-formed web dropped to pieces in the loom, the very crops stood unharvested in the fields, to be finally devoured by the birds and by a horde of rats and mice. Up to the last moment there had been confusion and dismay certainly, but the wheels of trade and of the civil administration had continued to turn; men had stood at their posts in answer to the call of duty or impressed by the blind instinct of habit. And then, suddenly, the sun went down, only to rise again upon a silent land.
“The relapse into barbarism was swift. The few who had escaped were segregated from one another in small family groups, each man content with the bare necessities of animal existence and fearing the face of the stranger. Under such circumstances, there could be but little neighborly intercourse, and the ancient highways speedily became overgrown with grass and weeds, or else they were undermined and washed out by the winter storms. It was not until the second generation after the Terror that men once more began to draw together, in obedience to inherited instincts, and even then the new movement must have been largely brought about through the increasing aggressions of the Doomsmen. But of this in another place.
“It has been asserted that fire played a principal part in the destruction of the ancient cities, and it was at one time supposed that these extensive conflagrations were partly accidental and partly attributable to the wide-spread lawlessness that marked the closing hours of the greatest drama in all history. But later researches have evolved a new theory, and it now seems probable that the torch was employed by the authorities themselves as a final and truly a desperate measure. An heroic cautery, but, alas, a useless one.
“The comparative exemption of New York from the universal fate goes to support rather than to discredit this hypothesis. It escaped the dynamite cartridge and the torch simply because in that city no recognized authority remained in power; there was no one to carry out the imperative orders of the federal government. There were, of course, many isolated cases of incendiarism, but the city did not suffer from any general and organized conflagration, as was the fate of Philadelphia and St. Louis and New Orleans. The destiny of the metropolis was decided in a different way; already it had passed into the keeping of the Doomsmen.
“In effect, then, the highly civilized North American continent had relapsed, within the brief period of ninety years, into its primeval estate. In every direction stretched an inhospitable wilderness of morass and forest, with a few feeble settlements of the Stockade people fringing the principal waterways, and here and there the smoke of an encampment of the Painted Men rising in a thin spiral from out of the vast ocean of green leaves. To-day the wild boar ranges where once the tide of human passion most turbulently flowed, and the poor herdsman, eating his noonday curds from a wooden bowl, crushes with indifferent heel the priceless bit of faience lying half hidden in the rotting leaves. Everywhere, the old order changing and disappearing, only to recreate itself in form ever more fantastic and enfeebled, a dead being, and yet inextricably bound up with the life of the new age. And over all, the shadow of Doom, gigantic, threatening, omnipotent.”
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.