Appalachia in Science Fiction: Traditional Music in Novels by Manly Wade Wellman and Suzanne Collins

This paper examines the important role that Appalachian music and folk songs play in science fiction works set in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. As a literary genre, science fiction is typically devoted to technology and an imaginary future, while the Appalachia region is often celebrated for its tradition and history. But while science fiction and Appalachia may seem to exist in two separate—even opposing—worlds, there are a number of literary works where they not only cross paths, but converge. Two notable examples are Manly Wade Wellman’s novel The Beyonders and Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. North Carolina author Manly Wade Wellman is rightly celebrated for his fantasy fiction short stories featuring the character Silver John, a wandering balladeer who fights supernatural evil with the aid of his silver-stringed guitar and traditional folk songs. Yet in his understudied science fiction works like The Beyonders, which centers on a thwarted invasion by interdimensional beings on an Appalachian town, Appalachian music plays an important role in fostering community and underlying the humanness of the Appalachian characters in opposition to the alien invaders. Similarly, in the postapocalyptic Appalachian setting of Collins’s The Hunger Games, characters discover that traditional folk songs not only celebrate the spirit and history of a subjugated region, but they also become a powerful tool of resistance against the totalitarian government. In both these science fiction works, Appalachian music plays an important role in optimistically bridging the past with the future