What is an apocalypse librarian?

SO THEY’VE FINALLY GONE AND DONE IT

I was much too young to fully remember Logan’s Run when it first showed in theaters or the TV show spin-off that followed. Eight or nine years later, I first saw it on HBO at an almost proper age to view an R-rated movie, give or take three years (its take). It stirred up the fever dream memory of it all as a five or six-year-old. Even as a teenager, I did not understand the movie’s significance. I was familiar with science fiction and was aware that there were times when social commentary was the underlying theme, but I really had no context to put that in at the age of fifteen. I have returned to Logan’s Run many times over the years because of its quirky 1970s aesthetic and because it is an excellent dystopian setting. After a few views, I fell in love with Peter Ustinov’s portrayal of a T.S. Eliot quoting a cat librarian. I’ll avoid as many spoilers as possible. Still, towards the end of the movie, which centers around an encapsulated society that is force-managed into never exceeding the age of 30, Ustinov’s character is introduced. He is something none of the young people have ever seen: an old person. Ultimately, the entire enclosed society of young people is forced into the real apocalyptic world, presumably with only Ustinov, his library, and his cats as guides.

I began to wonder what future challenges he faced. How would he have to change his ideas about a library to suit his new patrons? Would he get help from one of his many new young friends? Maybe teach them how to be a librarian? What would he have to sacrifice? Or maybe a better question would be, what has he sacrificed already, and can he get it back?

I had many questions. During this same discovery period, I encountered other movie classics like Omega Man, Mad Max, Damnation Alley, The Terminator, and the entire Planet of the Apes series. Dystopian literature started to creep into my diet, Huxley, Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, etc. It was an easy rabbit hole for me to slide down. I was hooked. Years later, with some perspective, I realized that many of the main characters were, at their core, librarians. They may not have had a single book, but they were still, in their most basic function, caretakers of information and, often, sought to provide access to that information.

Dr. Nevil is on trial by "The Family" for the heresy of preserving technology. The Omega Man (1971) is an adaptation of the 1954 novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, directed by Boris Sagal, Warner Brothers.

Dr. Neville (Charlton Heston) in Omega Man has walled himself into a fortress and only goes out in the daytime to collect the remnants of society; he continues to reach out with a short-wave radio while avoiding 1970s zombies, which incidentally are the best zombies in my opinion. That’s really just a librarian or archivist. Bernard Marx in Brave New World --librarian. Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five; time traveling librarian. You could almost use Charleton Heston movies alone for this example. In almost every instance I could find, there were Librarians, maybe not apparent librarians, acting against a background or active element in a world that oppresses or drastically modifies the flow of information. Examples continued in more recent material from

Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Cormack McCarthy, and additional movies, all featuring what I have come to know as the Apocalypse Librarian trope.

Henry Bemis celebrates, prematurely, in Time Enough at Last, The Twilight Zone. directed by John Brahm. Paramount, 1959

I realized that our Apocalypse Librarians were a central plot theme in almost all cases. Many of these stories were about the challenges those Apocalypse Librarians faced adapting to a changing information and ethical landscape.

That sounded very familiar. Could we, as librarians, gain some insight into the modern juxtaposition between social obligation and intellectual freedom? Could warning signs be waiting in the world-building of these apocalyptic settings? Could looking at the bleakest examples of dystopian media elucidate a path through these ethical quagmires? Well, sure, otherwise I wasted much time writing this.