The Fox & the Forest (1950)

A desperate couple, William and Susan, use a new time travel service to escape backwards to 1938 (of all years), evading their own participation in the machineries of a horrible far-future war. They attempt to disappear among the carnival crowds in Mexico but are doggedly pursued by agents of the travel service, determined to bring them home and fold them back into the service of war: "The inhabitants of the Future resent you two hiding on a tropical isle, as it were, while they drop off the cliff into hell. Death loves death, not life. Dying people love to know that others die with them. It is a comfort to learn you are not alone in the kiln, in the grave."

There's been a joke going around of late, essentially: It's a certainty humans will never invent time travel; we'd have doubled back to fix 2020 by now. Argue all day long about what timespans might need fixing in what order should we ever actually gain the technology to spin clock hands in our favor, Ray Bradbury's dialog above holds particular sting in a year with a global pandemic spreading and so many blockheads refusing to wear a simple, precautionary mask as we all plunge helplessly forward in time. Ready or not, here comes the Future...

The Country of the Kind (1955)

Science Fiction Hall of Fame entry by Damon Knight is an alternate take on Lovecraft's perennial "Outsider," in this case a genetically altered exile viciously roving a future world. Short narrative follows the wicked exploits of our unnamed, lawless, self-described king of the world, free to do as he pleases, ruining property and terrorizing citizens (whom he dubs non-imaginative "dulls") who merely wait helplessly until he passes like a summer storm. He can work great mischief but can do no physical harm lest he fall into an epileptic seizure. Turns out, this is his sentence for having committed murder while a 15-year-old young adult: his body chemistry has been tweaked to render him both ugly and odorous, making him more easily avoided and ignored, elevating his status as homeless pariah even as he visibly trolls the surrounding society. The story catches this wretch at his breaking point, no longer angry at his fellow man, merely desperately lonely for companionship; his "creative" outbursts of late have been little more than distorted yawps for attention. This clarifies an underlying tragedy: not only did our antihero commit his crime while an admittedly abnormal youngster, he seems to suffer from a psychological malady not addressed by the same sciences capable of making a monster out of him. Hard to tell the cure from the inherent poison? Better to undergo capital punishment than suffer certain kinds of kindness.

Moral Biology (2020)

Neal Asher in Analog, May/June 2020. Interstellar exploration team led by Perrault, Gleeson, and Arbeck seeks to converse with a unique alien life form; they are boots on the ground for Mobius Clean, their ultimate mission coordinator: the imbedded AI of their orbiting starship. Arbeck is a Golem android, in charge of military protection for the two scientists: Perrault is the human interpreter, wearing a biotech "shroud" to enhance his communicative powers, enabling him to process clues from pheromones and other cues in the surrounding atmosphere, thereby building a language matrix from literally thin air (this among other skills). Gleeson is an archeologist specializing in alien civilizations, determined to collect information about the creature's culture faster than anyone else on the team. All wear biosuits equipped with tech augmentations that help solve the puzzles of the story: The more advanced technology became, the more it came to resemble life and the products of life. (Beware asking Arthur C. Clarke about that; he'll start doing magic tricks.) There are a couple pulp-era-worthy action set pieces: attacks by alien spiders and monkeys and wild pigs, not to mention a slithering, Lovecraftian tree. These payoffs punctuate a narrative otherwise built on hard science-based descriptions of the technology deployed by the characters, and how it in turn morphs their personalities even as their quest draws them dangerously closer to the sentient squid-critter living, Horta-like, in nacre-lined tunnels, itself alien to the planet underfoot. In a yarn about language and communication, a couple more lines of zippy dialog would have been most welcome, but a superb twist on Ye Olde First Contact trope unfolds in the concluding moments and what at first seems a hard-SF riff on Ted Chiang's Sapir-Whorf ruminations in "Story of Your Life" becomes uncomfortably closer to the biological mechanics of Alien (1979). 

Sea of Rust (2017)

There's an old post-apocalyptic tune by The Police, "When the World is Running Down You Make the Best of What's Still Around," about which Sting has said: Such vanity to imagine oneself as the sole survivor of a holocaust with all of one's favorite things still intact. In C. Robert Cargill's excellent Sea of Rust, the vanity is solved by altogether dispensing with pesky human survivors (fondly recalled as nothing more than a sentient virus) and narrating via one of the remaining Favorite Things.

Picture the thrice-roasted junkyard world of The Road Warrior, populated solely by snarky Star Wars droids. Brittle is one such droid, a former Caregiver model robot, now picking over the wasteland for usable parts she can trade at nearby Freebot outposts. Ambushed by a fellow scavenger bot named Mercer, a wounded Brittle finds herself in the aftermarket she usually supplies; with the clock ticking (and Mercer still on her tail) Brittle must enlist other, potentially untrustworthy Freebots in order to score critical replacement parts before "the crazy" sets in and her insides fry beyond repair. Complicating matters: outposts are coming under increasing attack from the drone armies of the massive sentient mainframe networks (One World Intelligences, or OWIs) still dueling over control of the wasted planet's remaining resources -- which includes the collective programming and memories of the remaining sentient Freebot population. As one bot sums the differing philosophies: We don't want everything to be one; we want to be one with everything. They seek the path of least resistance; we believe that resistance only makes us stronger.

This deft plot is interspersed with chapter accounts of the rise of sentient mainframe AI (for a brief moment, amusingly recalling the contrary Deep Thought sequences from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) as well as the manufacture of the first service and labor robots, and the inevitable negative impact on humanity: It was only when we started taking the jobs from the thinkers that the middle class started to worry. By then it was too late. Or maybe it had been too late all along? After a bot named Isaac (wink) gains legal personhood following the death of his owner and begins publicly proclaiming "No thinking thing should be another thing's property," humans inevitably form a counter-faction. Those people, they were killing America, a battle-converted Laborbot named Murca explains to Brittle, They were killing the dream. They were all the Constitution this and the Constitution that. But they cherished only the parts they liked. They weren't willing to die for anyone else's freedom. They only cared about their own. The resulting demise of humankind follows a campaign plan that would have made HAL 9000 short-circuit with joy.

Guiding a ragtag band of fellow bots across the titular Sea -- towards a fabled, unlikely treasure-trove of factory-new spare parts, away from the beleaguering OWI facet-bots that seek their assimilation -- Brittle's internal burnout commences, and her first-person viewpoint becomes a roller-coaster of unreliable narration. Shadows literally jump out at her: randomly accessed memories of her wartime flamethrower duties, hard choices made during the eradication of humanity; failures of deletion juxtapose elements of her tender pre-war Caregiver life, when a dying man brought her online to take care of his wife, after his passing. The matrix of pattern recognition underlying Brittle's consciousness becomes a circuit of guilt she struggles to open, even as the landscape beneath her erupts in battle, and darkness closes in. What if life isn't merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality?

Deploying a precise amount of familiar robo-dystopian tropes, Cargill articulates an immersive radioactive world where philosophical conundrums power the action as smartass robots circle each other like Old West gunslingers, taking time to wonder aloud about the inscrutability of it all: Existing is the whole point of existence. There's nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. It's like a clockwork existential crisis in here. But in that regard, what really separates those robots from their makers?

It's the way of humans to view the world through the lens of contemporary scientific prowess; technological jargon becomes the nomenclature of the day as we refer to the plumbing of our digestive systems, the wiring of our nervous systems, the circuitry of our brains. Early in the novel, Brittle states: I find the idea that I am artificial repugnant. No thinking thing is artificial. Artificial is an approximation. A dildo is artificial. A dam is artificial. Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and light or [of] two apes. Intelligence, as posited by the robots of Sea of Rust, is the ability to defy one's own programming. Enough intelligent choices, and consciousness arises from the exercise of reconciling those choices against prior programming. Just as man was ape, we are man. Just like Zarathustra spake.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

While an abundance of science fiction fiddles with Alternate Universes, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does the hard work of physically exemplifying the concept. Originally forged as a BBC radio show, the characters and situations created by Douglas Adams transferred readily to a plethora of media forms: prose (five books, one short story), live stage productions, graphic novels, a television miniseries, record albums, a text-based computer game, finally a CGI laden film. And with each transference, certain mutation: The original 12 radio episodes provide core plot elements (destruction of the Earth, bad alien poetry, secret planet manufacturers, stolen spaceships, sudden bowls of petunias, paranoid androids, Ultimate Questions, so forth) which reconstitute, remix, and reintroduce themselves, often in contradictory ways, jettisoning characters and proven resolutions for random new directions, merrily sending plot over hang-free cliffs, boldly splitting infinitives, &c. Depending on the medium, characters may wind up as Scrabble-playing cavemen on prehistoric Earth. Or on Frogstar, the Most Evil Place in the Galaxy, learning who/what truly controls the Universe. Or on idyllic Krikkit, learning to fly by throwing themselves at the ground and missing. Or back on a reconstructed Earth, quietly falling in love. Infinite Improbability indeed. (Adams himself, attempting to define the confusion, noted the publication of a Hitchhiker's Guide omnibus "seemed like a good opportunity to set the record straight -- or at least firmly crooked. Anything that is put down wrong here is, as far as I'm concerned, wrong for good.")

Unifying all incarnations of the Guide is the eponymous Guide itself -- a talking electronic resource for the frugal spaceman, jammed with critical info on every planetary system in the Milky Way, from dangers to be skirted (see the entry on the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal) to meals to be savored (see: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe). Thing is, most of the Guide is outdated and useless, a galactic Wiki gone to seed, which is why alien Ford Prefect comes to Planet Earth in the first place, to update the listing (old entry: "Harmless." Prefect's updated entry: "Mostly harmless.") The Guide acts as Greek Chorus, filling in backstory, clarifying offhand references made by characters, and often getting in the better zingers. Such as the Guide distinguishing itself from Isaac Asimov's "older, more pedestrian" Encyclopedia Galactica (the raison d'etre for the culture-cataloging Foundation) by touting the fact it is "slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words 'DON'T PANIC' inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."

As a science fiction writer, Douglas Adams didn't use science fiction as a vehicle for thought experiments so much as he used it as a joke reservoir, skewering established tropes with "firmly crooked" observances, by turns droll, surreal, subversively philosophical. At one point, he seems to take an even deeper dig at Asimov's Foundation, describing a side effect of the Infinite Improbability starship drive, also a deus ex machina that brings characters together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics -- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules. Hari Seldon, take your mathematical Psychohistory mumbo-jumbo and stuff it.

As technological prophets, SF writers are by their own admission correct about as often as broken clocks -- but an informed wisecrack, a sharply observed human foible, that's a tool that will cut to the bone for all time. Just ask Voltaire, Cervantes, or Alfred Bester. Adams favorite target for dissection: Bureaucracy. And his skill is uncanny across all formats of the Guide, revealing finally the Universe we live in, one not so much merely indirectly hostile to the human race as it is likely to gleefully strangle it in red tape:

The President [of the Imperial Galactic Government] in particular is very much a figurehead -- he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. ... Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these few people, only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn't be more wrong.

Which is when those large, friendly letters really do come in handy: Don't Panic.

Mason & Dixon ARC (1997)

At some point in the early 1980s, I took an oddball science fiction course -- one of only two such classes in fantastic fiction offered by my university during the time I was there. I say oddball because it wasn't a genre overview by any stretch of the imagination: no context of tradition for our course selections was established, Wells or Verne merited little mention, and I'm sure Hugo Gernsback never came up. Our primary text was a contemporary and relatively generic best-of anthology published by Playboy, and lecture discussions were on how topical concerns related to whatever we'd just been assigned (meaning, more than anything, it was yet another course in metaphor). Not counting my recollection of the professor's ridiculously scraggly beard, only two things have stayed with me: being spellbound by George R.R. Martin's excellent novella Sandkings, and, in a rare moment when the Golden Age peeked into the windows of our classroom, listening to a scratchy LP audio interview with Isaac Asimov wherein he brought up John Campbell's notion that sci-fi isn't an isolated genre, but rather the exact opposite: every genre is actually a subset of science fiction, covering as it does all of time and space and possibility. I've been known to drag that posit out when in the presence of someone staunchly claiming to hate science fiction on principle, usually just to make them hush for a minute.

This morning, plotting my summer vacation reading, Mason & Dixon, which ranks among my favorite novels, came to mind. If any one book could serve as exemplar for Campbell's definition, it could well be this one: a historical romance employing modern meta-storytelling techniques to re-imagine a young America, the virgin landscape divided by a couple of star-crossed, star-gazing, unassuming surveyors onto whose humble names crashed a terrifying amount of significant history. Pynchon lays out his agenda on page 349, declaring that history's Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit, a jack-of-all-trades job description sounding suspiciously like Novelist. Here is the Past given focus through modern lenses, retrofitted for Star Trek references, seeded with psychic talking dogs, a watch powered by perpetual-motion, sentient bread dough, and a robot duck. Maybe I was never taught any better, but if this historical Frankenstein's monster isn't science fiction, I don't know what is.

This is an advance reader's copy, an artifact from my bookseller days courtesy of a generous sales rep, one of 500 with promotional information on the back (another 500 were in generic wraps). I'd only made it through the Transit of Venus section when the first hardback editions came in, so this one is essentially unread, a treasure. For a long time, I had one of the specially-printed cardboard crates Henry Holt shipped the early printings in (like many things, it didn't survive my time in Montgomery), but I do still have some ridiculous promo cards, suitable for framing, advertising the cinderblock-sized tome as a breezy beach read, canvas lounge chairs parked beneath particolored umbrellas and all. Because, why not. It's only science fiction, after all.

Famous Science Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time & Space (1946)

I wandered into my college career with a rough draft of a novel already under my belt: The Stonehenge Connection, a space opera in five "acts," scrawled in cheap black ink across 368 college-ruled pages when I should have been listening in high school Geometry class so that I'd now know how to hypotenuse a triangle, or whatever. The story of an Earthling recruited by a rebellious alien to save his own planet, it was absolutely nothing but a loose bag of cheaply imitated influences -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Blade Runner, Doctor Who, Time Bandits -- dropped into a plot worthy of Ed Wood. Then again, I enrolled in Creative Writing with the mere aim of learning how to write better sci-fi and horror potboilers. And I had some hope, early on -- the room where the classes met was nicknamed the "Star Trek Room" due to its being dominated by a gigantic oval conference table. But I don't recall Star Trek ever being discussed, not in a way I found interesting, anyway.

Time travel is a seductive folly partly because we like to imagine there are moments in our lives where, if we could return and intervene, whisper wisdom into the ears of our younger selves, we could avoid losing years to an unnecessary struggle down some errant path. (Also because if you could time travel, you could saddle up a T-Rex, but I digress.) Truth is, I don't recall a singularity wherein my low-key aspirations of being a SF author with a meager cult following imploded. Maybe during a conversation with my instructor, being told I'd rather have the respect of my "peers" and publish in the Paris Review than peddle in Ye Olde Sewer of Genre. Maybe when I switched my major to Philosophy instead, because dabbling in Metaphysics seemed like it might bring me closer to understanding Tom Stoppard's brand of Existentialism. Or when I further shifted to Psychology, finally seeking some hard science about the mysteries of human wetware. Looking back, I think what I mostly did was manifest that old Steve Martin zinger about learning just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life. (I did always think that was a pretty funny joke, after all.)

When I more-or-less randomly grabbed this book for the purposes of mindlessly entertaining myself during a recent holiday car trip, I didn't expect to be derailed before reaching the first tale. The introduction is an ode to the editorial work of John W. Campbell, as many of the stories contained herein have his stamp of approval. As the editor of Astounding, he forged the "Golden Age" of science fiction, debuting authors now seen as primary pillars of the genre: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Lester Del Rey, Alfred Bester, A.E. van Vogt, Fredric Brown. Trends have come and gone, minor names have exited the mainstream the way they always do, but all these fellows are still in print and Campbell's most famous short story has to date been been filmed thrice. Not bad for sewer-dwellers, as critics of their generation (and at least one more following) tried to paint it.

Emerson spoke of his Giant following him around -- a highbrow version of Wherever you go, there you are. It's not displayed anywhere, but I still have The Stonehenge Connection. And from time to time, I will take a moment to wonder why. The ugly plotting, the plagiarized characters, the cartoon dialogue, the misadventures in narrative only a naive and heavily pimpled teenage could love ... should anyone ever find it, my death certificate will read: spontaneous combustion brought on by acute embarrassment. But Campbell would be the first to tell me: There's no rough draft that can't be improved by hard work. Bet on ending somewhere very different than where you started, but hard work will lead to improvement every time. It's a form of simple math. I'm not looking to saddle up any dinosaurs; I know all too well that directionless travel -- whether through time, space, or both -- can be treacherous folly. But then again, sometimes an errant path will lead you to your Bliss.

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells Can't you remember anything I told you? and lets fly with a club.
     -- John W. Campbell, Jr. 

On a Related Note: Jason Sanford's Cosmic Mistakes

Who Goes There? (1938)

I'm not sure when or where I picked up this little gem -- maybe I stumbled over it at a random paperback swap-shop, lost somewhere back among the years; maybe it was the object of a targeted search on ABE.com, bought from some dealer located west of Timbuktu; maybe it was at the bottom of a box collected during one of our Over the Transom book hauls, and from there it jumped to my bookshelf. Who knows. But because I've had it in the neighborhood of forever, it's even possible I filched it from my old friend Justin's house.

Campbell's titular story has been filmed three times to date, twice titled as The Thing. He was a writer and editor who, helming a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction (still publishing as Analog Science Fiction and Fact), near-single-handedly shaped the Golden Age of Science Fiction. He was also Justin's step-grandfather.

Like many who grew up in the Church of the Latter Day Geeks, my sci-fi intake at that point chiefly consisted of Star Wars, reruns of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, and whatever zany giant insects were stomping around during Mad Science Week on Afternoon Thriller Theater. So this was my first exposure to harder science fiction, emphasis on the scientific (not to mention social -- Who Goes There? is at heart a series of characters logically puzzling through a zero-sum game involving each other, a kind of locked-room whodunnit taking place prior to the murder) over the fantastic. Campbell was long gone by the time Justin and I met each other as seventh-grade classmates, but plenty of his books were still around -- or at least so many that I (allegedly) nabbed one for myself without anyone noticing (so far as I know).

That group of writings which is usually referred to as "mainstream literature" is, actually, a special subgroup of the field of science fiction -- for science fiction deals with all places in the Universe, and all times in Eternity, so the literature of here-and-now is, truly, a subset of science fiction.
     -- John W. Campbell, in the introduction to Analog 1 (Doubleday, 1963)

The Road (2006)

There is a distinct branch of Science Fiction, what we might call the Office of Dystopia, which quietly began operations during the Industrial Revolution, late in the 19th Century. Earlier, in accordance with prevailing philosophies, speculative fiction tended towards more rose-tinted outlooks; people believed history was progressing and improving, the trend was upwards, Heavenwards, and the fortunes of Mankind were leading to if not Earthly Paradise then certainly to some graceful, affluent state. Many metaphorical tales for the Age of Exploration do in fact revolve around quests for "lost" civilizations, heretofore undiscovered countries inside the planet's crust or hidden at the poles, or accessible dream worlds -- all of which represent the kinds of beatific society assumed to be the ultimate fate of Earth's citizenry. Two definitive, if late, expressions of this school of thought appeared in 1933: James Hilton's Lost Horizon, a travel brochure for the Utopian hideaway of Shangri-La, and H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, a prophetic dispatch from a future society dedicated to the global promotion of science and the arts. (Neither of these novels is entirely Utopian in scope, each hinting at impending world war, and can thus be said to provide bridge material for the harder, more pragmatic brand of SF just around the corner....)

As the world entered first the Machine Age and ultimately the Atomic Age, the "scientific romances" popularized by Wells and Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs turned quaint, even gauche. Speculative fiction began directly siphoning the promises of applied sciences and engineering -- disciplines increasingly applied to military weapons development, bottom line being the cost of human lives during wartime -- and was thus forced to view Utopian dreamscapes through a harsher, more cautionary lens. (The more recent "steampunk" offshoot of SF retrofits 21st Century sensibilities into Victorian settings and tech, resulting in yarns dyed deeply with irony. See: Pynchon's Against the Day (2006) which by no accident contains, among many such plot threads, a futile search for Shambhala during the run-up to World War I, as though uncovering such an idyllic place might somehow save the world from impending doom.)

Propulsion being a by-product of detonation, rocket technologies did not generate only stories of travel through outer space; as the Cold War dawned across the 1950s and the geopolitical landscape divided into East and West, nuclear apocalypse mushroomed into a daily threat, an invisible cloud looming over the planet, likely to burst at any moment. Writers best equipped to scry the future saw grim patterns in the crystallizing mist; proposing improved futures fell to nostalgia for a better world that should-have-been but never came within reach -- the perpetual folly known as The Good Ol' Days. Tapping into underlying fears of the future, the sub-genre of post-apocalyptic SF was easily geared up and sent shambling over the literary landscape.

Whether dealt with via metaphor or more directly, post-apocalyptic narratives break down the business of survival in an environment rapidly coming to pieces, or already in pieces. The means of destruction may differ -- plague, unnatural depletion of resources, nuclear annihilation, brain-munching zombies -- but the response is every time identical: just like the song says, Hit the Road, Jack. It's never safe where you are, but there's a Promised Land just over the next hill, and you may as well die trying to reach it. (Notable exception, in which a cadre of characters dig in and band together: Frank Conroy's Alas Babylon (1959). Following a one-day nuclear war, citizens of a south Florida community coalesce so firmly that when the military finally arrives, offering to move them elsewhere, they refuse to go, steadfastly believing they can best rebuild where they already are. The novel is a dramatic study in the civil defense mindset of the Eisenhower Era, but is otherwise a statistical anomaly within the sub-genre.)

George Romero's zombie films trace their pathos to the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend (1954) in which prototypical last-man-on-earth Robert Neville is besieged by bloodthirsty creatures (humans transformed by a mutant virus) who swarm his suburban castle after sundown; like any good mid-century American citizen with a backyard bomb shelter and an instructional brochure on nuclear fallout, Neville pragmatically hunkers down to wait out the insane disaster. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) takes doomsday prepping to the next level, with a band of characters holing up in a shopping mall they convert into a fortified private compound, shutting out the undead hordes. While Romero satirizes consumer habits, the real truth unveiled is how quickly and terribly society deteriorates when under siege, and how safe places become hideous traps. To survive, keep moving -- the moving target is hardest to hit.

More than simply fleeing danger, Apocalyptic Wanderlust is fueled by the basic desire for human connection, for families and clans. Dystopian novels often feature characters beginning their journeys alone, then in slowly aggregating communities as the plots progress. In Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Australian survivors of a nuclear war await the arrival of drifting radioactive clouds. When a Morse Code distress signal from North America is picked up, the military dispatches a submarine to investigate; this quest for fellow survivors becomes a major plotline but the novel remains chiefly concerned with how people address their fates, how much quality and grace they carry into their final acts.

Two novels by Stephen King follow a more typical "travel narrative" pattern: The Stand (1978) and Cell (2006). In both books, overnight catastrophe wipes out the majority of the human race, leaving those unharmed by either flu-like plague or brain-frying microwave pulse to suffer dreams and visions which compel them to a common destination (in The Stand, it's Colorado; in Cell, central Maine). Staying alive is not a solitary endeavor, but a common one -- it's going to take a village to reconstruct civilization, after all. Anyone who has endured the calamitous, ongoing aftereffects of severe weather (hurricane, earthquake, tornado, take your pick) understands how important, how inherently logical, neighborly relations are. Permanently wrecked infrastructures of course means the disappearance of law enforcement, the rise of self-deputized vigilantes, not to mention armed highwaymen with a severe case of the Self Interest. Within this void, citizens necessarily become clan members -- continually protective, defensive, wary.

So, as characters strike out for the Unlikely Promised Land, they must also watch their backs. This is the underlying scenario of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), a novel that differs from the usual post-apocalyptic template in one important way: in most cases, whatever disrupted society remains part of the ongoing story, like the tribal struggles over gasoline in George Miller's film The Road Warrior (1981), or how in John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) deadly bio-engineered plants have usurped mankind's primary position on the food chain, with plot revolving around efforts to keep the creatures at bay while also seeking permanent sanctuary from them. But in The Road, the only real goal in sight for the unnamed father and his son, heading inexorably south to the coast during relentless nuclear winter, is daily survival. Killers and cannibals roam unchecked through the poisoned landscape, as if the ashen wastelands were not obstacle enough, but man and boy persist because that is all there is to do -- cling to each other and continue.

Like Rod Serling's classic Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" (itself an allegory of the Cold War-related Red Scare), the story is concerned only with what the characters do with the incomplete hands dealt to them -- whether they will act rationally or succumb to hysteria. In many ways, The Road echoes On the Beach, illustrating how disaster and death are not just inevitable, but ever-present -- we shouldn't need a global disaster to remind us how to live and love and take each day to our bosoms like rare treasure.

At the end of McCarthys' novel, there is no ultimate Better Place, only more of the same. While on one hand this contradicts the logic of setting out in the first place, it also underscores the intrinsic importance of believing in a Better Place. That a phoenix might arise from the ashes of the old world, and be waiting at the end of a hard journey, is reason enough. Even when faced with overwhelming odds, hope dies hard -- and that's exactly as it should be. More than youthful vanity or misplaced survival tactics, the drive to outlive an apocalypse -- atomic, viral, or zombified -- is what makes us fully human.