In January 1960, Fritz Leiber published the novella The Night of the Long Knives in Amazing Science Fiction Stories magazine. I recently read the book, freely available from Project Gutenberg, and this is my review of it. It's so terribly good that I almost don't want to write about it at all, for fear of spoiling the barest nuance, so I'm compromising and reviewing it with no spoilers of plot points. If you're a fan of Fallout or post-apocalyptic fiction in general, then this is required reading. If you're just a fan of good scifi, this is also required reading. Heck, if you're just a fan of good [but admittedly grim] writing, you should read this.
You can love a genre so much that the story becomes incidental. It's an easy trap for anyone to fall into, and it's not even a bad trap to fall into, frankly. It's alright to love a genre so much that all you really care about is that you get to spend time in it. The Night of the Long Knives may well trick you into thinking, at first, that that's what you're in for. It tricked me, but in the end all the worldbuilding and all the seemingly arbitrary paths the main characters suddenly takes shape. Leiber had a plan all along, and this story is perfectly orchestrated.
What's more, this is one of the stories that created the milieu upon which Fallout and Planet of the Apes and Mad Mab and The Bad Batch (2016) and Necromunda and lots more. It's early post-apocalypse fiction, and boy is it an understated whopper.
The first chapter of the book is a bizarre combination of terrifyingly grim worldbuilding and documentation into a certain introverted mindset. The grim worldbuilding is partly pragmatic and partly philosophical. You learn about the Deathlands, the irradiated region of what used to be the southwest corners of the USA, and about a town called Nowhere, and about the daily fight for survival that happens there. You learn the protocol what you do when you cross paths with a stranger out in the Deadlands, and about how soon is too soon to murder them. You learn about the two primary urges of the post-apocalyptic human: Murder and Sex, in that order.
You get all of this insight though the main character's narration about an experience he had when he, by chance, crossed paths with a woman with only half a right arm (the bottom half is a sickle blade, but she has a variety of other attachments, most of which are equally as deadly.) There's no dialogue, and in fact the lack of dialogue is intentional in-world, because both characters know that conversation is useless. In the Deadlands, conversation doesn't matter because it doesn't last. Whatever placating affect it has while it's happening is replaced by the horrors of reality the moment it's over. That's a central theme of the story, and when a third character is introduced his greatest weakness (or strength?) is that he can't seem to stop talking. He uses conversation as a communal drug, to keep reality at bay by analysing it, pndering it, offering homespun philosophies about it. And people hate him for it.
Really the book has lied to us readers. Its narrator tells us there are 2 urges, Murder and Sex, that can't be denied. But really the 2 urges are Murder and Conversation.
I'm not a scholar or literature, so I don't have the time to research the origins of traditions in fiction, or even the understanding of how to do it. So I can't say any of the tropes I recognise from modern science fiction were definitely born of The Night of the Long Knives but I certainly can say that this book contributed to their popularity. If you're a fan of speculative fiction, then you'll recognise things like needle guns, robot guardians, wasteland cults, familiar religious leaders that crucify deaders, plague, irradiated forbidden zones, mythical pockets of civilisation, and so on. It's all here, every single thread you could possibly think to pull to develop your post-apocalyptic story, RPG setting, movie, video game, and whatever else. This may or may not have Started It All, but it was obviously there early on, and it's rightfully had a lasting affect.
Not to be trite about it, but one of the appeals of postapocalyptic fiction is the underlying sense that the postapocalypse is actually right now. The grim wasteland and hyperbolic desperation in a postapocalyptic setting doesn't rely on a nuclear bomb having gone off. It's describing the world we live in, with just a little polite cosmetic rearrangement. The wealthy who've saved themselves from the horrors of daily life are over in a conclave somewhere off screen, your existential fear is expressed as a gun and a knife hidden in your boot (or attached to the stub of your arm), your insecurity are radiation scars on your flesh, and the inevitability of death is moved from an optimistic 80 or 90 down to 40 or 50.
In a deft manipulation of plot, Leiber brings all of his meticulous science fiction storytelling into a timely and relevant reminder of what we humans are dealing with, and how it all depends on the individual. Not in the sense of the over-esteemed "rugged individual" made popular by the mythos of the USA, but in the sense that we each have choices to make about how we live our lives.
This story particularly is about several rugged individuals who, mostly unwillingly, form a collective, and end up doing something significant, sometimes despite themselves. The worldbuidling is so powerfully complete that you scold them, sometimes, for going against their better judgement. Everything we know about their world, and arguably our own, reinforces their paranoia, thei distrust, the things they do as insurance for their own survival. Not for a minute do we doubt them when they extend one hand in friendship while keeping their gun or knife behind their back. What's more is we'd think they were being stupid if they did anything differently. As a reader, you are fully invested and integrated with these desperate murderers of the Deathlands. No questions asked. And that's why, in the end, you become part of their story. SH Read this book
Fritz Leiber is kinda famous for being a pretty good author, so it probably doesn't take much persuasion to convince a speculative fiction nerd to read a story by him. If you're never read Leiber, but maybe you saw him mentioned in Appendix N and have been meaning to, but didn't know where to start, this is actually a pretty great introduction. It's not fantasy, so this isn't exactly what he's best known for, but if this doesn't show off his writing chops then I don't know what does. And if you're a post-apocalyptic fiction nerd, this is a must. It's a no-cost download from Project Gutenberg, and it's only 83 pages, so it's a pretty quick read that you're not likely to forget.