Stephen Vincent Benét’s Short Story ‘By the Waters of Babylon’: Fatal Forward Progress

An artist's conception of the splendid city of Babylon with its hanging gardens. AstralManSigmaDelta/Shutterstock

Today we continually build more buildings, update new electronics, create better platforms, invent different cars. We seem to be dominated by a craze for continual forward progress, keeping ourselves forever busy. How often do we pause this frenetic forward motion to consider where we are heading?

Two years before World War II and as the atom bomb was being developed, Stephen Vincent Benét pondered this question in his science fiction short story “By the Waters of Babylon.”

A Society Doomed

Set in a future, post-apocalyptic time when an atomic bomb left a major city destroyed (called the “Great Burning”), Benét’s story follows a young man who is training to become a priest in a primitive tribe.