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Sat 03 Mar 2007An apocalypse without convictionFictionPost-apocalypse America is the new theme. Writers have taken the events of 9/11 as a rallying cry of sorts. While there is no doubt that the second World War remains the single big story, and continues to inspire fiction writers, a near biblical fear of the coming retribution is also preoccupying many people, including writers. It all makes sense; after all, we have destroyed the planet, it is dying.During the past 40 years the great JG Ballard has given his maverick imagination free rein. His cautionary prophetic futurism has become the now. Science fiction writers have long grasped the reality of a more primitive life existing far in the future, when the world as we know it has been humbled and is forced to start again. Generations from now, though fewer than we like to think, man will have to return to the past in order to survive in a more primitive way. In 1985, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood evoked a future that was terrifying, in The Handmaid's Tale. Set in the 21st-century Republic of Gilead, it depicted a world in which selected women were effectively to serve as brood mares. It is a modern classic, although it must have drawn some of its inspiration from earlier political allegories, such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and the Russian cult masterwork, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, dating from about 1920, which seems to overshadow all else - even something as recent as Ishiguro's haunting Never Let Me Go. Atwood, it must be said, returned, albeit satirically, to the future with Oryx and Crake in 2005 and played the theme for caustic laughs.