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I am going to confess. I am a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction. I am a sucker for post-human books and TV shows like The World Without Us and Life After People and the like. I have always been interested in huge catastrophes, and as I grow I become more interested in the effect of those catastrophes on the people who survive them - and not the catastrophes we know, but on a greater scale. The kind where the World Ends As We Know It and no one is feeling fine.
I was going to do a focus on this last year, but got distracted by A Song of Ice and Fire, among other things, and didn't finish my shelf full of post-apocalpytic novels. I still had them, though, and I've been working my way slowly through them. Among others, this would include In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster, Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven andcetera, and The Forge of God by Greg Bear. Not, by far, complete reading. I still have Alas, Babylon and A Canticle for Leibowitz to get through, for example, and I might also throw books like Perdido Street Station and Iron Council in here, for various reasons.
There is also Life As We Knew It which if you ask me is not worth reading, let along paying money for. ppfft. Waste of time, that was. :|
So the problem I always have with the things I like is when people don't know the terminology I use. Or when I say 'fantasy' they ask what kind of fantasy and don't recognize the names - though this doesn't happen so much anymore. I am still immensely pleased when someone knows the authors I name, but that's a tangent. Post-apocalyptic fiction, though, in recent years, is easy. I can name one book, usually, and people get what I'm talking about. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
It's gotten a crapton of recognition - he is a well known writer as is - and lots of notice, a movie already made (with Viggo Mortensen, no less!). I picked it up with some optimism and some skepticism.
( rest of review here, some small spoilers though there's not much to spoil )
That's all out of me. This has been stewing for a while. Am now reading The Atrocity Archives, definitely a drastic change in genre - and probably a much needed one. After that, I think I'll dive headlong into some urban fantasy again - Caitlin R. Kiernan - and see how that goes.
As always, anyone with dissenting thoughts is welcome to tell me what I have missed.
I was going to do a focus on this last year, but got distracted by A Song of Ice and Fire, among other things, and didn't finish my shelf full of post-apocalpytic novels. I still had them, though, and I've been working my way slowly through them. Among others, this would include In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster, Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven andcetera, and The Forge of God by Greg Bear. Not, by far, complete reading. I still have Alas, Babylon and A Canticle for Leibowitz to get through, for example, and I might also throw books like Perdido Street Station and Iron Council in here, for various reasons.
There is also Life As We Knew It which if you ask me is not worth reading, let along paying money for. ppfft. Waste of time, that was. :|
So the problem I always have with the things I like is when people don't know the terminology I use. Or when I say 'fantasy' they ask what kind of fantasy and don't recognize the names - though this doesn't happen so much anymore. I am still immensely pleased when someone knows the authors I name, but that's a tangent. Post-apocalyptic fiction, though, in recent years, is easy. I can name one book, usually, and people get what I'm talking about. The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
It's gotten a crapton of recognition - he is a well known writer as is - and lots of notice, a movie already made (with Viggo Mortensen, no less!). I picked it up with some optimism and some skepticism.
( rest of review here, some small spoilers though there's not much to spoil )
That's all out of me. This has been stewing for a while. Am now reading The Atrocity Archives, definitely a drastic change in genre - and probably a much needed one. After that, I think I'll dive headlong into some urban fantasy again - Caitlin R. Kiernan - and see how that goes.
As always, anyone with dissenting thoughts is welcome to tell me what I have missed.
