This month's Book Club selection, Cormac McCarthy's The Road,
- Books have long been set in post-apocalyptic futures, with the seminal work in this genre being Walter M. Miller Jr's A Canticle for Leibowitz. Where The Road is a tone poem about love in the bleakest of circumstances, Leibowitz is a broader sociological survey of post-nuclear man -- not that the one is better than the other, they simply take a different approach. A Canticle for Leibowitz holds up incredibly well in the present day, despite being written in 1959; setting a story in a technologically backward, post-holocaust environment turns out to be a pretty good way of future-proofing it. It's got some dark humor, too, so it's not all bleakness.
Runner up: David Brin's The Postman. Coincidentally, I participated in a book club over a decade ago in which this was the selection, well before the not-so-great Kevin Costner adaptation had been announced. The group consensus held that it was an enjoyable book, and I really liked it too. - Movies are another fertile field of post-apocalyptic settings. In fact, there are so many of such diverse nature -- from bioterror to climate change -- that it's hard to compare them properly. For old time's sake, I'll go with the Road Warrior / Mad Max series. Somehow I suspect that I may be missing some obvious ones here...
- Video games have plumbed the post-apocalyptic depths, too, though the most acclaimed titles were in the Role-Playing Game (RPG) genre that I never really cottoned to. Wasteland and then Fallout are the two that I can recall having an especially devoted following.
- Television has a new post-apocalyptic gold standard in Jericho. Literally in the dark when they are cut off from civilization in the wake of a nuclear blast, the inhabitants of Jericho, Kansas must attend to immediate survival while unraveling the narrative of just what the hell happened. While the writing and acting are sometimes a little weak, especially at the beginning, the show really came into its own in the second half of the first season.
- Music videos are an art form unto themselves, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of the greatest videos of all time, set in post-apocalyptic Oakland:
Until digging this up, I had forgotten that it features a pre-Rush Hour (and even pre-Fifth Element) Chris Tucker!
Which works of post-apocalyptic fiction have I left out? Which are your favorites? Is 2Pac really dead?? Let me know!
4 comments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_(TV_series)
Jeremiah, while not an *incredible* show, had its moments.
^m^
Sweet. I'll check it out sometime, thanks.
Your esteemed presence reminds me that my inclusion of "I Am Legend" in the movie examples may have been hasty, as it might be more accurately categorized as a zombie movie.
The zombie sub-genre of science fiction is popular enough that it certainly deserves equal billing with the post-apocalyptic sub-genre. Taxonomically speaking, though, an apocalypse is an apocalypse, even when it's a zombocalypse, so it could be argued that it's a sub-sub-genre. :) Not that I have a strong opinion or mean to spark a holy war of nerdery on the matter (the Enterprise would totally out-fight a Star Destroyer, maaaan...).
But zombies and generic post-apocalypse have a lot of interesting similarities, now that I think about it.
Even though the movie was incredibly low-quality, I did like the fact that it actually had the protagonist be involved in the climatic conflict in The Postman movie. In the book you're coasting along towards the climax and then all the sudden random good and evil super soldiers show up and fight it out while the Postman watches.
That is an interesting point about The Postman. I for one recall liking the fact that the main character was just some regular dude who stumbled over a mailman's bag. He may have been swept up in larger events, and even became an inspirational figure to many, but he remained an essentially random ordinary dude. To me, that made his acts of courage more poignant. As a result, I thought his relative unimportance among the greater forces was a feature, not a bug. But I can see the other side of it.
With that said, I barely recall the movie at all. The Waterworld exhibition at Universal Studios was fun, though.
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