Lot & Lot's Daughter

By Ward Moore

Two classic science fiction stories about a California family fleeing a nuclear holocaust, written in an era when a dystopian future seemed inevitable.

An atomic bomb has struck Los Angeles, and the streets are filled with cars fleeing the city. But Mr. Jimmon knows that things will be different for his family. He has meticulously prepared for such an event, and now that it has arrived, he carries out his plan almost gleefully. The Jimmons get in their station wagon, filled with supplies, and head for the predetermined base. From the backseat, his children are complaining. In denial about the world’s precarious future, they would prefer to find their friends and wait out the crisis in the comfort of their home. But in reality, there is no guarantee of escape—or survival.
 
Savage, unromantic, and unflinchingly honest, these two dark tales by “one of the best American writers,” describe what could really happen at the end of the world, and what it takes to get there (Ray Bradbury).
 
This ebook features an introduction by Michael Swanwick and an illustrated biography of Ward Moore including rare images from the author’s estate.


 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jun 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504044646

Book preview

Lot’s Children

by Michael Swanwick

Lot and Lot’s Daughter are more than just terrifying stories. They are bleak works indeed, so horrifying as to be difficult to read at times and, as such, a complete success. But one of the duties of a writer (honored, perhaps, more in the breach than the observance) is to engage the most serious issues of the day. By which standard these works are something more. They are a portrait of an age. They are a dissection of the dark psyche of 1950s America. And they are the nightmares of my childhood.

To appreciate the magnitude of Ward Moore’s accomplishment, it’s necessary to know a little about the period in which these stories were written, the decade immediately following World War II.

At the time, nobody doubted that nuclear war would come. Indeed, Edward Teller, best known as the father of the H-bomb, was actively lobbying for a pre-emptive first strike against the Soviet Union for that very reason. His argument was that since World War III was inevitable, the longer it was put off, the more fearsome the weapons that would be used and the worse the devastation for the survivors. A significant fraction of the American public agreed. Those who didn’t had no choice but to take precautions anyway.

When I was in first grade, Woodlawn Elementary had a three-signal alarm system. For a fire, one long siren blast. For an air raid, two blasts. For an atomic bomb, three. When we heard three blasts, repeated, we were drilled to crawl beneath our desks and huddle up as small as we could, hands over our heads. This was to protect our skulls from shards of flying glass.

I was horrified at the thought of long slivers of glass penetrating my hands. In my imagination I could feel them slicing through the muscles and scraping against the bones. The thought was so vividly painful it made my flesh ache. So I tucked my hands into my armpits until the teacher scolded me into putting them where I’d been told. But secretly I resolved that when the real bomb fell, I wasn’t going to listen. I was going to keep my hands where they were safe, no matter what the teacher said.

We were also taught that if we were at home when the sirens signaled the approaching missiles, we should go into the basement and cower in a corner, where the timbers of the collapsing house were most likely to leave some small space. Enough, perhaps, to survive within.

One Saturday the inevitable happened. I heard a siren sound three long blasts, over and over. Maybe they were trying out a new system at the fire station. Perhaps a factory was having a drill. In any case, I believed what I had been so carefully taught. I went into the basement and cringed in a corner, hands tucked firmly under my arms. And I waited.

In the afternoon quiet I could hear the unconcerned world outside. Cars were going by. Dogs barked. Somebody was mowing his lawn.

My parents and sisters were not at home when the siren sounded. They had gone out in the car on some errand—to buy shoes for Patty, or take Mary to the doctor for her yearly check-up. I prayed to God as fervently as I could that they would make it to a shelter in time.

I was only six years old.

Now, some forty years later, the memory of that time still angers me, not for the terror I personally experienced, but because there was nothing special or unusual about what happened to me. This terror was forced upon children everywhere. A moral evil so pervasive it had to be taught alongside counting and our ABC’s was loose in the world. It had been fashioned at least in part by our own leaders.

What kind of monsters were they, to create such a world?

In that same horrifying world, Ward Moore wrote Lot and Lot’s Daughter. The existence of the atom bomb was revealed to the world on August 6, 1945, at Hiroshima. In 1953, Lot appeared in print. In literary terms it was a staggering accomplishment. Right at the very beginning of the atomic era, Moore nailed the nuclear holocaust survival story. Nobody has ever told it more convincingly. Even after four decades of dizzying change, the reader still thinks, Yes, this is the way it would be.

A year later, in 1954, Lot’s Daughter tied up the loose ends.

But these are more than just victim tales or deromanticized takes on survivalist fantasies. For Mr. Jimmon—censorious, resentful, elated by the destruction of civilization—is the personification of the mind-set that brought the world to the brink of extinction. He is the Patriarch gone mad, not merely a survivor of the holocaust, but its architect.

Grim-jawed and intolerant, Mr. Jimmon would certainly agree with Edward Teller’s unprovoked doomsday attack as the only reasonable thing to do. He uses his hard-headedness as a weapon. His recurrent demands that his family face reality are his means of keeping them in line and his justification for whatever dark impulses he may feel. He defines the world in the ugliest possible terms, and by so doing drives it toward that ugliness. His is the voice of self-justifying pragmatism, and because it admits to neither doubts nor alternatives, it is unanswerable.

In Lot, Ward Moore answered the unanswerable. He faced down the logic of brute toughness, cut it open, and laid out its workings for all to see. He showed the obscenity that lies at its core.

The decision to write a sequel must surely have been at least partly in response to the first story’s critics. Because such people never change, it’s easy to hear their voices. "Yes, but Mr. Jimmon survived, they say. Morality is a luxury that depends first of all upon survival."

Lot’s Daughter puts the nails in Mr. Jimmon’s coffin by demonstrating how perfectly unfit such a man would be for the hard work of rebuilding a culture. More importantly, it makes explicit that the real tragedy has nothing to do with what becomes of Mr. Jimmon. The real tragedy is what he makes of his offspring.

What goes around, comes around. The sins of the father are visited upon the children. Lot had a daughter and she turned out about as you’d expect. Posterity would not justify the coming war.

The war which never came.

I don’t want to exaggerate these stories’ part in the aversion of thermonuclear holocaust. But the fact remains that we’re still alive, long after we were all supposed to die. For which I credit a host of people who, when the need was greatest, stood up and were counted. Who spoke truthfully and