owers of War By Nick Hubble 'My name is Sistei Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army (2007) begins and ends with the same note of defiance: 'My name is Sister' (pp.5, 207). The combination of nameless heroine and resistance to patriarchal authority has inevitably led to comparisons with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985)but the similarities are superficial. Where Atwood criticises radical feminism for its complicity with the sexual repression which underlies the Republic of Gilead and implies that separatism is not a challenge but merely a means of accommodation to traditional hierarchy, Hall deliberately reinstates both tendencies at the core of her strange beauty that is nothiig to do with sanitising war and everything to do with getting beyond the limits of normal existence. Such desires appear psychopathic because they are not manifestations of the familiar death drive, but the product of a much rarer life force. It is a rejection of what Fredric Jameson identifies in Archaeulogies of the Fu ture as the 'literary "reality principle"' which triggers high-cultural 'generic revulsion' [2] and it clearly distinguishes Hall from those mainstream writers who deploy isolated genre tropes to spice up otherwise conventional narratives. 'Powell's got control of the party' - - novel in o;der to recover the utopian impulses within them as forces for active intervention in the twenty- The Carhullan Army, therefore, is inherently science first century. Neither is The Carhullan Army a "literary fictional and needs to be considered in relation to books dystopia" in the manner of Atwood's Oryx and Crake written within the sf tradition. The two most significant (2003) or Cormac McCarthy's The Road contexts in this respect are the 1970s feminist sf of writers (2006) because unlike those works its such as Marge Piercy, James Tiptree, Jnr. driving force and moral intensity stem and Joanna Russ, which I will return from an unwavering belief in human to, and the postwar English disaster society, explicitly acknowledged by novels written by John Wyndham, Sister towards the end of the novel: John Christopher and many others. As ' ... we had a duty to liberate society, I've argued elsewhere, these so-called to recreate it' (196).As such, the novel 'cosy catastrophes' may be read as the eschews the playful satire of Atwood expression of a progressive English and the easy narrative pleasures of opposition to the postwar British state McCarthy (who, in best Tolkien style, [3]. A common feature of such works is ensures every ordeal is followed by the depiction of the circular mechanism a reassuring meal) in favour of direct by which deliberately created scarcity engagement with the horrors it reveals, triggers a return of the wartime which are thus demystified and 'Dunkirk Spirit' to British society and rendered subject to human agency. the consequent passive acceptance of Central to this project is Jackie draconian social controls. The 'Civil Nixon, the enigmatic leader at Reorganisation' that we learn about Carhullan, the community which Sister from the opening page of The Carhullan joins. It is Jackie who singlehandedly Army is a prime example of exactly transforms the women of Carhullan such a mechanism. Sister, like the misfit into 'inviolable creatures' immune to heroes of the postwar disaster novels, the horrors of civilisation. Sister says of is one of those who can't adjust to Jackie that such a limited existence, much to her husband's dismay: 'Perhaps he'd thought I was depressed, like so many She broke down the walls that had kept us others, and that I wasn't trying hard enough to find the contained. There was a fresh red field on the other spirit we were a11 being asked to conjure, like. a replica side, and in its rich soil were growing all the flowers of that war-time stoicism of which the previous century of war that history had never let us gather. It was had proudly boastedf (24). It is Hall's awareness of the beautiful to walk in. AS beautiful as the fells that persistence of this tendency, which might be termed autumn (187). the British ideology, that guides her depiction of future Although communicated in a different style and tone, authoritarian government. the valedictory outlook expressed here is reminiscent of Her account of life in Rith under 'the Authority' the death speech of Blade ~~~~~~t~ Batty: trve seen appears more like an identikit dictatorship from the things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire Cold War Years than anything that might reasonably be off the shoulder of Orion. I c-beams glitter in Occur in the precisely the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those . . . moments because the responses of the British State to the challenges will be lost . . . in time' [l]. Both passages acknowledge a of the twenty-first century are unlikely to be reasonable. 23