The Darkest of Nights - Charles Eric Maine

 Charles Eric Maine (real name David McIlwain) was a pioneer of British sci fi in the late Forties through to his early death in 1981.   To my mind, only John Wyndham is better.   Maine's gift is for very near future cataclysm brought on by man's reckless technical innovations.   In The Tide Went Out nuclear tests crack the earth's crust and all the water drains away.   Here - startlingly - a covid virus develops in the Far East and becomes a worldwide pandemic.  In reaction, governments hugely restrict personal freedom and protect the elite in secure underground bunkers.

The relevance is so extreme that even this British Library reprint predates Covid 19.   The novel itself came out in 1962.   I mean ... wow!  OK, there are differences.  For one thing there are always two versions of the Hueste virus; one which kills in hours, another which is harmless to the victim, granting them immunity but making them carriers.  Actually, that second version sounds very much like Covid 19, now I come to think about it.   The other major difference is that the underclass rise up in rebellion when they are effectively left to die by the state.   Of course, Maine wrote before social media - indeed, before absolutely every household had a TV.

As ever, once he has set up his disaster, Maine personalises it through characters at the heart of the dilemma.   He does so especially well in The Darkest of Nights.   Pauline Brant works for the International Virus Research Organisation (IVRO) in Tokyo, and is thus on hand when the virus first begins to spread.   She is sent back to England where she reunites with her husband Clive, Foreign editor for a major Fleet Street newspaper.   Clive has been offered a gig in America and wants a divorce so he can marry the boss's daughter.   Pauline asks for time to think it over.   Then the virus comes to Britain and Pauline is subsumed back into IVRO where she meets DR 'Vince' Vincent.   The triangle plays out to very end, with a twist I didn't foresee.

Whilst not perhaps the Maine novel closest to my academic interests (that remains Spaceways), The Darkest of Nights is a better novel than The Tide Went Out, itself very good.  My appetite for more is whetted and fortunately series editor Mike Ashley includes some useful pointers in his introduction.

The Tide Went Out - Charles Eric Maine

 

I have written before on this blog about the twisted road that led me to the speculative fiction of Charles Eric Maine (David McIlwain, 1921-81).  His writing career really only covered the Fifties and Sixties but he was at the top of his game from the outset and for a time was up there with John Wyndham, John Christopher and the young J G Ballard.  Like them, he tended towards the eco-disaster, which is what The Tide Went Out is.

It is 1958 (Maine is always contemporaneous) and US A-Bomb tests have gone too far.  A sub-ocean blast has cracked the Earth's crust and all the water is seeping away.  Philip Wade is seconded from the science weekly he edits and placed at the secret governmental hub in London's Kingsway (I suspect at the former General Electric building where the BBC started out) to produce sanitised news for the Press.  Officially the world's combined efforts and trying to pump water back from the core.  In reality, there is nothing they can do and ninety percent or more of the population is going to die very soon.  Wade's family, and the families of other personnel chosen to survive, have been taken to polar camps where there is still plenty of ice.

Maine paints a vivid portrait of London at the time as society slowly begins to crumble.  Barricades go up and the army comes in to protect the elite from the masses, and soon the soldiers go rogue too, but with all the weaponry they can want.

Maine explores the key questions we are currently asking about the COVID pandemic.  Why have we so crazily damaged the only world we have?  Who chooses the elite?  Can we trust anything the government tells us?

Another well-selected reprint from the British Library.