It was the kind of night, I thought, for the world we knew to come crashing down. No, not crashing down, for that was too dramatic. Sagging, rather. The kind of night for the world to come sagging down, weakened without knowing it was being weakened or what had weakened it, and falling so smoothly and so steadily it did not know it was falling until it had collapsed.
— Clifford D. Simak, They Walked Like Men
It was pure coincidence that brought these books together for me—Clifford D. Simak’s They Walked Like Men (1963) and David Koepp’s Aurora (2022). One is an ancient paperback that’s been sitting on a shelf in my office for years; the other is a thrift-shop impulse purchase from a couple of weeks ago. I happened to read them one after the other. They’re not much alike—in some ways they’re wildly different—but both have something interesting to say about the times in which they were written and what we expect from popular literature.
Both novels are about global catastrophes, either narrowly averted or narrowly survived. In David Koepp’s post-pandemic thriller, it’s a geomagnetic storm that cripples the Earth’s electrical grid for months on end. In the Simak novel, it’s an invasion of bowling-ball-shaped aliens who go on a real-estate buying spree. (Yes, really. We’ll get to that.)
The Northern Lights and the Dark at the Doorstep
David Koepp is a screenwriter whose credits include the original Jurassic Park and the 2002 Spider-Man, so book-to-movie was probably always part of the plan for Aurora. A big-budget Netflix adaptation starring Kathryn Bigelow was duly announced in 2022, but it was scrapped when Netflix restructured its film department, leaving Koepp’s novel stranded on the printed page like an orca on a California beach.
As a novel, it occupies a middle ground between science fiction and the contemporary thriller. Its premise is solidly science-fictional, and at first it seems as if we’ll see that global catastrophe play out on the large scale, but the narrative quickly narrows down to the more intimate story of a woman in a small town in middle America, the teenage son of her ex-lover, the billionaire brother from whom she is estranged, and a small but colorful supporting cast. In that mode, the book hits all the marks you would expect of a modern thriller. To call it formulaic would be beside the point—in novels (and movies) like this, the formula is a large part of the attraction; you’d be disappointed if it veered too far afield. Suffice to say that backstories are gradually revealed, guns are fired, and life lessons are learned.
The premise is perfectly plausible. Geomagnetic storms are caused by intense solar flares sending streams of charged particles into space. When a strong enough geomagnetic storm hits the Earth’s magnetic field, the high atmosphere begins to luminesce like a Star Wars lightsaber and electrical conductors at ground level sizzle with induced current. The classic example is the 1859 Carrington Event, when the Aurora Borealis was visible as far south as Colombia and copper wires sparked fires in telegraph stations.
That was 1859. A similar event today would fry communications satellites and incapacitate much of our energy infrastructure. Koepp imagines an even more powerful event, one that blacks out most of the civilized world for more than a year.
You can feel echoes of pandemic anxiety in the narrative—the collapse of supply chains, the uncertainty about what’s going on and what might come next. But the effect is almost the opposite of what happened during the COVID lockdown: instead of cocooning, people are forced to put down their devices and get to know their neighbors. One of the smartest things about the novel is the contrast between the Silicon Valley billionaire’s high-tech bunker, where things quickly go sour, and his sister’s working-class suburbia, where the locals learn to skill-share their way to sustainable survival.
Death by Bowling Ball
They Walked Like Men is…something else again.
I’m old enough that I can’t look at this paperback without being transported to the 1960s, when it was exactly the sort of thing I liked to curl up with on winter nights when the wind seeped past the window jambs and my homework still wasn’t done. A gorgeous Richard Powers cover and a title that promises a touch of cosmic dread—who could ask for more?
Clifford Simak was one of the giants of the genre, still remembered for his novels City (1952), Ring Around the Sun (1953), and the Hugo Award-winning Way Station (1963).
I’ve read those books, of course, but so long ago that I can’t say much about them except that they’re high on my read-again list.
Simak was a newspaperman, and from 1936 to 1976 he was associated with the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. They Walked Like Men is told in the first person by a reporter for a paper in an unnamed Midwestern city who stumbles onto a story so strange no one will believe it. The newsroom scenes are some of the best parts of the book, an atmospheric evocation of a setting Simak must have known intimately. The newsroom, the streets of the city, the woods and streams of the surrounding countryside—these are where the novel comes most vividly to life.
The story is told in a dry, noir-mystery style…it’s almost a noir parody, given the events it depicts. Unknown entities, through various intermediaries, are buying up properties around the world and evicting tenants, causing a housing crisis. Also: mysterious black bowling balls have been seen rolling around town at night, apparently under their own volition. In the office of one sinister real estate buyer, our protagonist discovers a stash of shoe boxes containing strangely realistic human figurines…and, at the back of a closet, a bowling-ball-sized tunnel into an interstellar void. Not weird enough for you? There’s also a talking dog from another planet. And the denouement involves…skunks. Of this I will say no more.
So it’s whimsical, right? Well, kinda. Or spooky? In places. Or clever? Often, yes. It’s a novel of many parts, and they don’t fit together particularly well. Which I assume is why it isn’t as well remembered as the award-winning Way Station, published the following year.
But I don’t regret reading it. In some ways, it resonates more strongly with our current situation than David Koepp’s novel. The apocalyptic threat in Koepp’s story is an anomalous event, easily understood, terrifying but with a perceptible end point. In that sense, it’s a cozy catastrophe.
They Walked Like Men is heir to a whole genre of alien-invasion and mind-possession stories, including Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951), and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), all understood to express certain postwar anxieties—the fear of communism, or McCarthyism, or corporate conformity. Simak, intentionally or not, subverts that tradition by taking it less than seriously.
But the nature of the threat he offers in its place—aliens manipulating the real-estate market!—rings oddly true. Like the threats we face today (global warming, weaponized disinformation, creeping authoritarianism), it’s everywhere and nowhere, a mundane process gone horribly awry, difficult to recognize and almost impossible to fight precisely because it’s made of such familiar, prosaic parts.
In other words, what we see in the news nowadays looks less like Koepp’s catastrophe and more like Simak’s—a civilization “weakened without knowing it was being weakened or what had weakened it…falling so smoothly and steadily it did not know it was falling until it had collapsed.”