Living underground believing earth's atmosphere is unbreathable

[Annie x]

This book was out in paperback in the mid 1970s. My English teacher read us a chapter in class and it has been haunting me for decades. I remember only that the protagonist was living underground in a bunker where computers and tech did everything for him, woke him up, gave him food. He spent the day online I think. Everyone there had been told the atmosphere above ground was unbreathable. But something went wrong and he had to crawl above ground. When he got there, he found it had been a lie - and he could breathe. Any help would be SO appreciated. I would so like to read it to the end.

 

[Toby Frost]

Something like this happens in a Philip K Dick book called The Penultimate Truth, which then gets weirder. But I suspect it's been used in a few novels. I wonder if there's a YA story like this?

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Since your teacher read only one chapter, this could be The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick.

The Penultimate Truth - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

World War III begins late in the 20th century. It is fought between the two superpowers, Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop. The fighting is extensive and severe, most of it performed by "leadies", robots built to withstand the most extreme circumstances. The Earth becomes a battlefield. Unable to exist in the atmosphere created by robot war, vast "ant tanks" are constructed underground to save the diminishing human population.

The government and war engine remains on the surface; the elite "Yance-men". Their president, Talbot Yancy, delivers inspirational speeches to the tankers, motivating them to increase their production of leadies and win the war. The war does eventually end. However, the Yance-men design a conspiracy to maintain the wealth of the Earth for themselves. Yancy continues to describe devastation in televised speeches. The tankers continue to produce leadies.

. . . .

The story begins in one of the tanks, named Tom Mix (named after the actor Tom Mix). The tank president, Nicholas St. James, is forced to go to the surface to buy an artificial pancreas on the black market.

EDIT: Toby Frost beat me to it.

 

[Dave]

Hi Annie x. That plot is very common in both books and on screen, so that there will be hundreds of similar stories. As Toby and Victoria have mentioned PKD wrote many short stories that have people living in underground shelters such as in that book, first published in 1964. Was the story set in the far future or during a future envisaged after a 1960's-70's nuclear war?

What would be quite unusual was if the book actually said that "He spent the day online". Being "online" originally meant being near to the rail network, and this possibly transferred use to telephone networks from the 1950's onwards, but obviously, there was no internet in the mid-1970's, so it's use to refer to connected computers might be a first example.

The novella, A Boy and his Dog, by Harlan Ellison, would also be a prime candidate published in 1969 (with a 'loosely-based upon film' in 1975.) Did he have telepathic dog? (But in other stories, the boy clearly had been on the surface before.)

 

[Danny McG]

It could be The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)

Excerpt - a character speaking to another:-

"The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies immediately in the outer air."

 

[Yammerhant]

This book was out in paperback in the mid 1970s. My English teacher read us a chapter in class and it has been haunting me for decades. I remember only that the protagonist was living underground in a bunker where computers and tech did everything for him, woke him up, gave him food. He spent the day online I think. Everyone there had been told the atmosphere above ground was unbreathable. But something went wrong and he had to crawl above ground. When he got there, he found it had been a lie - and he could breathe. Any help would be SO appreciated. I would so like to read it to the end.

To me this sounds like the classic story "The Machine Stops", where everyone lives underground in small rooms, everyone is perpetually "online" via the "Machine" that runs everything (though it isn't called "online" of course since the story was written before computers), and everyone believes the atmosphere aboveground is unbreathable. The protagonist makes it aboveground and finds the air is in fact breathable, and is dragged back below by the Machine's remotes. In Chapter 3 he realizes that the Machine is beginning to fail...

I encountered the story for the first time in an English class many years ago.

There is an online version at Wikisource here.

 

[Orcadian]

This request has made me think of Dark Universe by Daniel Galouye, which I read as a young adult. Everyone has lived underground in total darkness for countless generations. People have adapted and some can 'see' by infra-red, and some by echo-location. Then some enterprising folk decide to explore...

 

[hitmouse]

This request has made me think of Dark Universe by Daniel Galouye, which I read as a young adult. Everyone has lived underground in total darkness for countless generations. People have adapted and some can 'see' by infra-red, and some by echo-location. Then some enterprising folk decide to explore...

I enjoyed this one.

 

[JunkMonkey]

My first thought was The Machine Stops as well