Sad Topographies

Damien Rudd

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781471169298
• eBook ISBN: 9781471169304
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Technology & Engineering Research & Skills
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Sad Topographies is an illustrated guide for the melancholic among us. Dispirited travellers rejoice as Damien Rudd journeys across continents in search of the world's most joyless place names and their fascinating etymologies. Behind each lugubrious place name exists a story, a richly interwoven narrative of mythology, history, landscape, misadventure and tragedy. From Disappointment Island in the Southern Ocean to Misery in Germany, across to Lonely Island in Russia, or, if you're feeling more intrepid, pay a visit to Mount Hopeless in Australia – all from the comfort of your armchair. With hand drawn maps by illustrator Kateryna Didyk, Sad Topographies will steer you along paths that lead to strange and obscure places, navigating the terrains of historical fact and imaginative fiction. At turns poetic and dark-humoured, this is a travel guide quite like no other. DamienRudd is the founder of the hugely popular Instagram account @sadtopographies.

WELCOME TO DOOM TOWN: the American dream in the heart of the Nevada desert. The 1954 Civil Defense propaganda film Let’s Face It describes this magical place as made, ‘with steel and stone and brick and mortar, with precision and skill – as though it were to last a thousand years. But it is a weird, fantastic city. A creation right out of science fiction. A city like no other on the face of the earth. Homes, neat and clean and completely furnished that will never be occupied. Bridges, massive girders of steel spanning the empty desert. Railway tracks that lead to nowhere, for this is the end of the line.’

On the morning of 5 May 1955 at 5.10am, a 29-kiloton atomic bomb (twice the size of that dropped on Hiroshima) obliterated this cheerful town from the face of the earth. Known to the Civil Defense as Apple II Test Site, to the optimistic as Survival Town and to everyone else as Doom Town, it was designed and built for the sole purpose of destruction. The detonation was just part of numerous operations in which the town was built, destroyed, then rebuilt and re-destroyed like a nightmarish version of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. It was the quintessential American suburb: along with a fire and radio station, it had a library, buses and cars, and a dozen homes filled with all-white, smiling, middle-class American families (substituted with mannequins). It was no longer necessary to imagine the destructive havoc of Soviet bombs on American cities – it could now be created. The ‘before’ photos appear like advertisements from a 1950s Harper’s Bazaar magazine. In one black-and-white photograph from Operation Doorstep we see two youthful, smartly dressed mannequin couples sitting casually around a kitchen table. It appears they are about to dine; white porcelain plates and decorative glassware are set neatly across the table’s sleek wooden surface. In another ‘before’ image, we see a different house with a family relaxing in a large, brightly lit living room. On a long, floral-patterned couch a handsome middle-aged man casually reclines. Across from him a tanned and identically dressed man perches on the edge of a chair, his head cocked slightly to one side, as if listening to the man on the couch argue the unfavourable state of the economy. Around them, small children play. To the left of the men a slender, attractive woman sits on a round leather footrest. She is wearing an elegant evening dress. Perhaps they are going to dinner. The fiction unravels when one looks out of the window behind her – not over lush green lawns marked by a white picket fence, but across a bleached desert landscape, an endless expanse that stretches to meet a cloudless Nevada sky. Each of the dozen or so houses was carefully arranged to depict similar dioramic scenes: untroubled children being tucked into bed, archetypal housewives preparing dinner, proud fathers reading the evening paper. What is perhaps most disturbing is the way in which Civil Defense scientists – who could simply have positioned the mannequins in any arbitrary arrangement – intentionally replicated innocent moments of everyday ordinariness, as if to say, this could happen to you at any moment.

The ‘after’ photos deliver on their perversely satisfying promise. The dinner party looks like it has been crashed by a gang of deranged axe murderers – plastic arms and legs lay scattered among shards of wood and broken glass. One man appears reasonably unscathed, until one notices that light shines through coin-sized holes in his head as if it were an ornamental light shade. Surprisingly, the living room of the second house appears only marginally ruined. The coffee table is overturned, the woman by the window has toppled drunkenly backwards, glass fragments and plaster debris litter the floor. While the children have mysteriously disappeared, the man sitting on the chair has not moved at all – as if completely unaware of the nuclear explosion across town, he continues to stare fixedly on an indeterminate point in space, deep in thought.

It is, of course, what happens between before and after, the fleeting moment in which the physical world is permanently unmade, that we really want to see. And thanks to stop-motion photography we can. In the 1953 film Operation Doorstep our wildest destruction fantasies are realized. ‘Here now again is house number one collapsing, shown now in stop-motion,’ the narrator announces with considerable pride. We see a blinding light illuminate a moonscape desert, revealing a white timber house standing in the centre of the frame. It spontaneously combusts in black smoke. A moment of calm, followed by an invisible tsunami that tears through the house like a child blowing hundreds of fine white dandelion seeds into the air. ‘Remember,’ the narrator concludes in a solemn tone, ‘what you saw here in detail, happened in just two and one-third seconds.’ It is made all the more suspenseful by the dramatic Hitchcockian soundtrack.

It is Eadweard Muybridge, the inventor of stop-motion photography, that we have to thank, at least in part, for making this cinematic experience possible. He was a scientist, innovator and artist; a surgeon of time itself, a taxidermist who captured motion and movement to be dissected and studied. It was in 1878 that Muybridge’s famous horse galloped into a future where photography would rapidly become cinema. We would discover in the next century that to see an atomic blast tear through a house is to watch an autopsy of destruction, in all its slow, glorious and undeniable beauty.

No fewer than 928 atomic bombs were detonated at the Nevada test site between 1951 and 1992. During the 1950s, the tests became a popular tourist attraction. Las Vegas, just 65 miles south-east of the Nevada test site, quickly capitalized on its advantageous location. Dubbed ‘Atomic City’, Vegas’s Chamber of Commerce designed calendars and pamphlets advertising detonation times and prime viewing locations. Hotels and casinos hosted ‘Dawn Bomb Parties’ where guests sipped ‘atomic cocktails’ and danced through the night until their very own atomic fireworks show lit up the morning sky. For those unable to witness the dazzling spectacle with their own eyes, tests were frequently broadcast live into homes across the country.

A postcard advertising Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Club in Las Vegas.

A series of high-speed images captured during Operation Doorstep.

While propaganda films attempted to persuade the public that a nuclear attack was survivable, the public inadvertently discovered the perverse pleasure of witnessing its own self-destruction, cinematically produced and delivered into the comfort of their homes. Given a taste of something we never knew we wanted, there was no putting the destruction genie back in its bottle. Instead, it evolved into the 500-billion-dollar industry that we know today as Hollywood. It is here in the film lots of this strange new city that constructed worlds are routinely annihilated, ever more outrageously apocalyptic scenarios in which we theatrically rehearse our own self-annihilation.

Doom Town was the fictional suburb onto which the anxieties of the future were projected, rewound, replayed, rebuilt and then destroyed once more. Muybridge’s primitive stop-motion photography is a retrospective vision of the future in which he showed us how to make the invisible visible. Rebecca Solnit writes of Muybridge, ‘He is the man who split the second, as dramatic and far-reaching an action as the splitting of the atom.’

DURING THE SUMMER of 1958, a group of geology students and staff from New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington were on their annual Antarctic research trip when, sailing around the protruding outcrop of Victoria Land, they observed four ragged, mountainous peaks against the bleak Antarctic sky. With exceptional imaginative dexterity for geology students, they remarked that the four peaks resembled none other than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They christened the unnamed mountains the ‘Apocalypse Peaks’.

Despite contemporary use of the term to describe an endless array of world-ending calamities, the apocalypse was once exclusively a religious event. The word derives from Greek, meaning to ‘reveal’ or ‘unveil’, and refers directly to the Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse of John. According to most Christians, the biblical apocalypse is a future prophesied by God to end the world with a series of events. Firstly, seven scrolls are opened by ‘the Lamb’ – a being with no fewer than seven horns and seven eyes – each scroll revealing a depressing future for mankind (except for repentant Christians). The breaking of the first four seals unleashes the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: the white horse conquers, the red horse brings war, the black horse famine and the pale green horse brings death. The opening of the fifth seal reveals the souls of slain martyrs that cry out that God will soon, ‘avenge our blood’. When the sixth seal is opened, ‘…the sky receded like a scroll, rolling up and every mountain and island was removed from its place’. The seventh seal brings half an hour of, ‘silence in heaven’ followed by the arrival of seven angels, each with a trumpet. This, however, is no musical rendition. As each angel blows its trumpet, a series of calamities is inflicted upon the world. These include (in no particular order) a rain of hail and fire, a five-month plague of horse-sized, human-faced locusts with women’s hair, a star named ‘Wormwood’ that falls from the sky, a mountain of fire that collapses into the sea – annihilating all sea creatures and turning it to blood – destructive earthquakes, and, finally, the extermination of one-third of any thoroughly tormented humans still milling about. The excessiveness of blood, gore and outlandish monsters gives the Book of Revelation the hilarity of a 1980s B-movie horror. Curiously, while the work is attributed to John, no scholar is actually certain who John is. It is as if the sheer comical outrageousness of the book’s content was such that a fictional pen name was needed to conceal the author’s true identity.

There are, however, many millions of people today who both fear and eagerly await the biblical apocalypse. A 2012 international poll conducted by Reuters found that nearly 15 per cent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime. Americans top the chart at 22 per cent, with the British trailing behind at 8 per cent.

For as long as people have populated the world, they have also anticipated its demise. The oldest known apocalyptic prediction dates back to 2800 BC. Assyrian tablets were found to bear the inscription, ‘Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.’

In 1499, Johannes Stöffler, a respected German mathematician and astrologer, predicted that a biblical flood would consume the earth on 20 February 1524, when all the known planets would align under Pisces, the sign of water. Hundreds of pamphlets announcing the world-ending event were distributed, generating a state of general panic across the country. In one attempt at self-preservation, a German nobleman – Count von Iggleheim – built a luxurious, three-storey ark. The day of reckoning was slightly overcast. When light showers began to fall, hysterical crowds fought for a seat on von Iggleheim’s ark, leading to hundreds being killed and von Iggleheim being stoned to death.

For obvious reasons, 1666 was a particularly worrisome year for Christians. For those living in the squalor of London – whose population had already been reduced by one-fifth the year before, thanks to the Black Death – the end times seemed close at hand. On 2 September, a fire broke out in a bakery which raged across London over three days, turning the city into a flaming hell. After some 13,000 buildings and thousands more homes were turned to ash, many saw it as a fulfilment of the apocalypse. In the end, however, the fire claimed only ten lives. While unfortunate, it was not quite the end of the world.

The episode that would become known as the Great Disappointment began during the 1840s when William Miller, a Massachusetts preacher, announced the forthcoming apocalypse. Posters, newsletters and charts circulated his message that the world would end sometime between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844. Curiously, in late February 1843, a bright comet appeared in the sky. The Great Comet of 1843 blazed so brightly that for days it could be seen in broad daylight. This ominous sign only served to attract thousands more to the Millerite movement, with as many as 100,000 people discarding their now useless worldly possessions and taking to the surrounding mountains to await the end of the world. When the end failed to arrive, Miller revised the date to 22 October 1844. In the glorious morning sunshine of 23 October, his loyal followers were lamenting once more. One follower, Henry Emmons, wrote, ‘I waited all Tuesday and dear Jesus did not come… I lay prostrate for 2 days without any pain, sick with disappointment.’

William Miller’s 1843 Prophecy Chart.

Perhaps the most prolific of modern apocalyptic predictors was Harold Camping, who publicly announced dates for the end of the world no fewer than twelve times. Based on calculations he made through numbers and dates found in the Bible, in 1992 he published a book titled 1994? which predicted the end of the world sometime in that year. Perhaps his most infamous prediction was for 21 May 2011, a date he calculated to be exactly seven thousand years after the biblical flood. After the day passed without the appearance of a single horseman, he declared his maths to be off and revised the end of the world to 21 October 2011. ‘I’m like the boy who cried wolf again and again and the wolf didn’t come,’ Camping said. ‘This doesn’t bother me in the slightest.’

It is not prophets of religion but science that now forecasts the demise of the world. It is not into the sky above they say we should gaze with fearful...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Cartographies of Space
• Atlas of Melancholy
• Memory of the Nameless
• Place Directory
• About Damien Rudd and Kateryna Didyk
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright