The End is Near

The apocalypse novel is one of my favorite literary genres, and I've been thinking lately about a subgenre I'm calling the soft apocalypse. It's halfway between Noah's Arc and the Book of Revelation -- midway between "London Calling" and "Ecotopia" -- and for historical reasons has been picking up steam the last few years. It's typically rustic, sad and often ambiguous rather than ultra-violent and abrupt. Though some of these books are described as science-fiction, there is typically little science extant in the worlds these novels describe.

HERE is my week of work on the science/technology/futurism/sci-fi site io9, with the apocalypse piece as my top post. Did not have room or time for some of my almost-favorites -- LeGuin's tribal, post-apoc Napa Valley in Always Coming Home, or Denis Johnson's shattered seaside world of cargo-cult pop-cult superstition in Fiskadoro.

Apocalypse authority Justin Taylor, whose Apocalypse Reader I heartily recommend, has pointed out that Robinson Jeffers rugged West Coast poetry, in its relations of human beings to surrounding flora and fauna, in its individualistic way fits the category.

One of my most requested pieces from the LATimes -- reprinted as the lead piece in the journal The Los Angeles Review -- was a an '07 piece about apocalypse fiction and where it was going. Cormac McCarthy's The Road was one of the keystones. That piece also asked, Why this? And why now? Here it is.

Riding West With Cormac McCarthy

ONE of the least likely success stories in recent years is the rise of Cormac McCarthy -- the reclusive, thesaurus-clutching author of unfashionable, hyper-violent Southern Gothic, who became the equally reclusive author of unfashionable Western novels of cowboy-myth.

But with "All the Pretty Horses," McCarthy became a literary superstar, with the critical and cinematic success of "No Country For Old Men" he became canonized in the academy, and with "The Road" he becomes one of the hottest properties in Hollywood.

Here is my LATimes story, which runs Sunday. I spoke to a UCLA scholar, the screenwriter and producer of "The Road," and Billy Bob Thornton, who directed the first McCarthy adaptation and wishes the world could see the film the way he shot it.

Screenwriter Joe Penhall, a playwright and former music journalist, was especially eloquent, talking about the novel's similarities to "Waiting for Godot," his interest in expanding the role of the wife/mother character, and the resonance between McCarthy's vision of the wilderness with the Australian tradition. (Both he and director John Hillcoat grew up there.)

"It's all about the elements, the landscape and pioneering endeavors," Penhall told me of McCarthy's work. "And man's endless struggle with the landscape, what it does to his psyche and his corporal existence. It's part of both nation's [Australia, U.S] mythologies. The countryside in Britain is the bosom, where you run in times of danger." In the American and Aussie tradition, "it's a place of tremendous, danger, despair and challenge."

For an experience of danger, despair and challenge, check out what they did with "The Road," which opens next Wednesday and which I found powerful and harrowing.