I posted this years ago and figured it was worth reposting.
Have at it: Post-Apocalyptic Book List
Also covers movie/TV , which is kinda nice.
Tag Archives: entertainment
Wisdom from the T-800
Really, these ‘reboots’ and unwanted sequels in The Terminator franchise are getting rather lame. BUT…once in while, there’s a nugget. Such as this:
To be honest, I was a little underwhelmed with the gun room. My own is a bit more…densely populated…than that one. But…I guess they needed to save money for all the CGI.
But the summation of why he has all these guns ‘around’? Spot on.
The ultimate survivor, it seems
I suppose it is sort of fitting that “The Survivalist” series of books has managed to …uhm..survive…after the death of it’s author. I may be a little late to the party on this, but it appears that despite Jerry Ahern dying a few years back his famous pulp series is continuing on…
I am a bit perturbed by this. Ahern’s original series, which is a guilty pleasure, required a certain suspension of disbelief if you wanted to make it through his books. But, despite the outrageous over-the-top invincibility and deus-ex-machina luck of the main character, there was still a bit of a foundation in reality…at least, up until a dozen books in where it became more sci-fi than just -fi. But even that still had a bit of a tenuous basis in reality. This book tells us “Corrupt politicians, Neo-Nazis, Aliens, the returned Atlanteans or those thought to be dead for centuries; who is about to finally bring down the human race?” Aliens? Atlantis? Ah, poor Jerry….they should have thrown the copyrights in the casket with you and let the series die a somewhat dignified death.
This somewhat parallels the old “Guardians” pulp series which met a similar fate – the original author moved on and strings of ghost writers came in and all consistency went out the window as, again, somewhat-based-in-reality gave in to shark-jumping nonsense.
Hands down winner, though, for most dissatisfying way to end a series goes to “J. Johnstone” of the infamous “ashes” series. A series of pulp novels so formulaic I literally believe they used the exact same text from the previous books and simply changed supporting character names and locations. The final chapter to this series was so dissatisfying and limp that it effectively alienated the few fans the series had left.
Post-apocalyptic fiction is a genre that used to be pretty fringe. It’s become far, far more mainstream as the whole ‘zombie’ thing has become a cultural touchstone for such fiction. Early fiction did exist, of course, but they were standalone books…not series. As best i can tell, Ahern’s series was the first modern post-apocalyptic serial. It’s heartening that there is still an audience for it, but it’s a little sad to see it become what it appears to have become. It’s like an old Hollywood starlet, far past her prime, slathering on makeup and old costumes to try and recapture the magic from her heydaynd instead being a pathetic and pitiful caricature of her past.
As much as I liked Ahern’s series, I think I’m going to give the post-mortem installments a pass.
The Ring Trick
I find the weirdest stuff when I finally get around to sweeping up the place….
ETA:
Entertainment – The Walking Dead
I’ve gotten out of watching TWD regularly. I let the DVR record it and then watch the whole season at once. (And, lemme tell ya, several hours of non-stop post-apocalypse viewing will cure any motivational issues you may have.) Anyway… I decided to go back to watching because TWD did a ‘time jump’ which they do every few seasons. In this case, they leapt ahead six years to give us this:
An utterly adorable 8-year-old with a Colt Python (which she holds better than Rick ever did) and a sword. (And, apparently, it’s still impossible to find a holster that fits a six-inch Python properly.)
There is something a little odd about seeing a tiny kid with a Python, but rationally it makes perfect sense. There’s a scene later in the episode where Michonne has an encounter that had the potential to turn violent. When its resolved peacefully, she turns around to see the kid providing overwatch with her Python. And the kids says: “..Dad would have wanted me to have it. To protect myself and the people I love.” Lovely sentiment and pretty much the reason many of us own guns.
What I’m going to find fascinating to watch is that this character will have absolutely zero normalcy bias. This kid will have been living in zombieland her entire life.. so itwill be interesting to see if they show that in her behavior, relational skills, pragmatism,emotional maturity, etc.
Certainly, what I’ve seen so far is a lot less annoying than Coral* ever was.
From a temporal standpoint, it is my understanding we are now six-years past Ricks last appearance, and Judith was about two when when that happened, so I’m saying it’s about eight years on at this point. And, from the looks of things, ammo is getting scarcer since virtually no one, except the eight-year-old, seems to be throwing bullets around.
*=For the humor-challenged who don’t get the joke, Rick always seems to pronounce Carl as ‘Coral’.
Never gets old
There’s a Venn diagram of politics, entertainment, and outrageousness and right in that little area where they all meet….
Say what you will, it’s never boring……
Where were his drops?
MegaMagMania runs for two more days… would you like to know more?
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Saw this, and a couple other similarly themed t-shirts and couldn’t help myself.
Starship Troopers is one of those rare books that gets the ol’ wheels turning. “Atlas Shrugged” was probably the one book that changed my way of thinking about a lot of things, but Troopers specifically gave me some thoughts about the nature of duty and obligation that I’d never really explored. (And for the love of Crom, read the book rather than see the movies.) It’s a book that clearly is more geared towards military folks, but it’s explorations about the nature of individual duties to the state, the states duties to the individual, and that sort of thing were quite interesting. It’s been labelled as fascist or racist, but that’s usually by people who think everyone without a certain melanin count is automatically a racist.
This being a college town, I look forward to seeing if anyone gets the reference.
Walking Dead – metaphors
Remember the last season episode where right before our crew of intrepid survivors walks into the setup at Terminus Rick is showing Carl how to make a snare to trap game? He explains how the animal is funneled into the trap and is caught before it knows its even in jeopardy. Remember that?
So look at the metaphor in tonights show. The horse has been running around during this crisis and has been surviving just fine. And then…someone tries to reintroduce it to civilization, and once its in the pen behind the fence it gets swarmed and killed by zombies. It was safer outside the confines of the pen, taking its chances with everyone else.
Foreshadow much?
Walking Dead – Shane Was Right Edition
My wife pointed out, after last weeks episode of TWD, that Rick has become Shane. Shane was all about how they needed to do whatever was necessary, that this would not all blow over in a few months, and that the world was going to be a completely different place with different rules and different morals.
And, now, it appears that in Season Five Rick has become what Shane was in Season Two.
Interesting.
Now, you could argue that Rick has never killed innocents for the sake of the group, as Shane did when he shot Otis, but in this most recent episode of TWD we see Rick casually saying that if it becomes necessary they’ll just “take” their new sanctuary from its owners. And Rick has, in the past, been less-than-reluctant to let strangers meet a gory demise without helping (which, yes, is not the same as killing them).
But it appears that ol’ Shane may have been ahead of his time in regards to his outlook and attitude.
Walking Dead – Episode 511
Man, I know the apocalypse can be a rough neighborhood….what with crazy one-eyed bossmen, colonies of cannibals, and just the general this-doesn’t-look-good crowd of dangerous survivors….but, geez….Rick and Co. are now just as bad as any post-apocalyptic gang of scumbags? Rick coldcocks a guy, takes his gear, takes his food, and threatens to kill him…and all the guy did was, unfortunately, use some language that was somewhat similar to what the folks at Terminus said. “Community for all” and “Stronger with you than without you” and all that jazz.
On the bright side, this episode was at least a somewhat better episode than the last couple that seemed to focus on experimental direction and storytelling.
Clearly, the end of the world is going to be rife with trust issues. Especially 18 months after the world flushes itself and you’ve spent the last year and a half being hunted, hounded, hungry, hurt and hopeless. But still….that was pretty thuggish behavior. I suppose it’s to show how the character of Rick has changed over time, or something like that.
Slightly better tactics than usual with a 2-man rule being shown, and more finger-off-the-trigger discipline than I’ve seen in a while. Thus far, these first three episodes of the new season seem pretty lame. I think I could have skipped the last three episodes and felt like I haven’t missed anything.
Oh, and probably more than anything else, the blogosphere will be burning up with much teeth-gnashing over the showing of a pair of gay guys kissing. You can show heads being impaled, limbs being ripped off, and cars literally covered in blood, but two guys kissing…thats objectionable. I kinda like the idea of them introducing a couple gay characters…(Everyone forget that there’s already a gay character in the group? Tara.) ..makes things seem a little more real and certainly opens up some previously unexplored story lines. When the end of the world rolls around there’s gonna be all sortsa folks running around trying to survive…men, women, blacks, whites, religious, non-religious, etc, etc. Stands to reason that there’s gonna be some gay folks and couples out there as well. I’d worry less about ‘what’ folks are and more about whether they’re ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
All in all, probably the strongest episode of the season in terms of story and plot development. Now that the ‘Alexandria Safe Zone’ storyline from the comics has been picked up I look forward to seeing how it develops.
