"The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence." This is the ending of a paragraph near the end of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I just finished. In some ways, a very typical bit of postapocalyptic fare. In other ways, more spare and unprogrammed, maybe. A gloomy, depressing book, though.
Oddly congruent with the current fall of yellow Mongolian dust – a seasonal visitation not uncommon in Korea, but rendered more worrisome now that it comes laden with the unquantifiable atmospheric toxicities of Northeast China's vast industrial effluence. All the cars were covered with a fine spattering of rain-patterned pale dirt, as the yellow dust had come accompanied by rain. All the piles of snow have melted. The cold, damp air tasted like sand. It was easy to imagine McCarthy's world, as I read while riding the subway into Seoul to buy my Sunday installment of English-language magazines.
The last time I was so profoundly affected by a post-apocalyptic story was perhaps James White's Second Ending novella, which sometimes still haunts my dreams even though it's been thirty years since I read it (and I had to spend 30 minutes with google to figure out the title of it). But overall I have always felt James White to be a vastly underrated sci-fi author.
And speaking of underrated, I found myself thinking of Alasdair Gray's Axletree for some reason, recently too – the tale of those men who build a babel-like tower to heaven, only to damage the surface of the sky and bring the deluge down upon Earth when it shatters.
Then there's John Lucian Jones' story of the Protagonist – a robot-sentience from a machine civilization called in to solve the mystery of an extinct primitive civilization that seems to have stopped in its tracks just as these robot-people from a distant star were about to make contact. We gradually learn that the extinct civilization in question is none other than Earth, as the Protagonist obsesses Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius-style over the ruins and artifacts. The stunning truth is that the robots themselves have inadvertently destroyed everything on the planet due to sheer ignorance of the possibility of carbon-based life.