I Was A Teenaged Troglodyte, Part II
This theme comes up again and again. Not just merely surviving, but prospering well enough to rule the world, king and sultan of all you see. If that is the kind of future you are hoping for as you dig that Acme bunker out behind your split level, you are probably not thinking about the little things like water and food and medicine, stuff like that. Logistics is a minor thing compared with all those groovy chicks you'll get to harem it up with, right?
It seems to me that this fantasy is very much peculiar to the male of our species.
Remember "Dr. Strangelove?" Toward the end of that film, those quite crazy generals and politicians in the war room talk about a secret male-dominated society they would create deep underground.
But science fiction, what I might be so bold as to call "The Offical Voice of the Cold War" usually moves beyond how to get babies into cribs and deals instead with the bare bones of surviving our own best attempts at obliteration. Is it possible to fathom what society would become, provided you got to wipe out 99.93% of the human race? Writers and artists have tried, some badly, some well, and left us disturbed and amused at the same time.
In George Pal's film version of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine," it is the bright mushroom sprouts of nuclear war that drive the humans underground to eventually become, thanks to devolution, the Morlock and the Eloi. How the Morlocks handle food supplies is, on a vastly more complex level, how the Donner Party handled emergency rations. Yummy yum yum.
In Harlon Ellison's "A Boy And His Dog," you get to follow our hero as he adventures among a very peculiar type of underground Midwest paradise, which is not much better than the one the bulk of that story's humanity is stuck with, poking among the rubble for canned goods and other savory treats, your occasional gang rape, and...movies! Take that, Blockbuster.
The list goes on and on -- many variants, same basic destination. Remember that last (and worst) Planet of the Apes films (this one being the atrocious "Battle For The Planet Of The Apes") had the astronauts discover, to their great misfortune, a degenerate, radiated freak circus of humanity hiding in the subway tunnels of what used to be New York. These robed wonders enjoy many tasty vices, including inflicting telepathic agony on their victims, getting some major kicks from cruel gladiator-like games, and of course, they happen to worship a working atomic bomb. Alas, epiphany is just not the same in the far future.
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