comic updated November 7, 2008

I certainly didn't engineer it this way, but somehow, a whole lot of post-apocalypse-themed art and literature converged on my entertainment schedule, recently -- Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," Max Brooks' "World War Z," "Children of Men," "The Omega Man," an, of course, "Fallout 3."

"The Road" is, I suppose, the only real exception to the bunch; there's a fairly consistent undercurrent in most post-apocalypse literature that says (and with our current level of technology to engineer the world thus, I think it's somewhat more-realistic to assume) that the end of the world, as it were, is not going to be the, you know, End of the World. You'll have your mutants and your raiders and your giant crabs, of course, but you'll also have your settlements of dusty people who start work and rebuild civilization, bit by bit.

"The Road," on the other hand, is relentlessly bleak, and what few dusty people there are in the world are usually COMPOSED of dust, since they were charred to a crisp ages ago. Survival is presented as a very temporary condition; everybody's starving, and most of the remaining few have turned to cannibalism. Only not fun, horror-movie cannibalism. Bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak, bleak. You'll want to finish this book fast, so you'll have time  afterwards to sit alone in a dark room and shoot yourself in the head.

"Fallout 3," on the other hand -- that's right back into Mad Max territory. Post-apocalyptic escapism, right there. I'll have to save most of that for another post, however, as there's a heck of a lot of work to be done this weekend, starting... now-ish.

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