I’ve been enjoying io9, the relatively new science fiction blog from the Gawker blog empire. They have a nice mix of current science fiction news and SF nostalgia, and they have a particular eye for apocalyptic articles.

They recently wrote about “Dark America”, an unfinished novel by Junot Diaz, whose well-reviwed current book "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is out in hardcover. While I’m unclear on what “Dark America” is actually about, the excerpt that io9 uses seems to have characters traveling in a robotic vehicle through post-apocalyptic America, always a plus in my opinion.
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We’re in Santiago, Chile for a few days, on our way home from a trip to see Easter Island - not a particularly apocalyptic thing although it might be a good place to ride out a zombie attack if you need to. I can’t remember if it was mentioned in “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” or not. The island is one of the most remote, and the ocean floor drops off sharply near it, possibly making it difficult for underwater zombies to reach land.

But I digress.

We took a break from sight-seeing and all the empanadas and ham-and-cheese sandwiches to see “Soy Leyenda” yesterday, which I’d been interested in seeing in the US but didn’t have time to catch before we left. The film was in English with Spanish subtitles… there are several places in the film where you can barely hear lines, and it’s odd to see them clearly (in Spanish) in the subtitles. Given how weak my Spanish is, I could barely understand the subtitles, too.

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Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has won many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, and was boosted by being a selection for Oprah’s book club. McCarthy is notoriously publicity-shy, but Oprah was able to lure him out to do an interview as well.

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“Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse” is an anthology of post-apocalyptic stories due out on January 8th. It includes stories by Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, Orson Scott Card, Octavia Butler, Cory Doctorow and others… and while it’s post-apocalyptic it apparently is grounded well enough to not include zombies or aliens.

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Apparently people, or at least newspaper reviewers, in Kansas aren’t fond of Cormac McCarthy’s recent apocalyptic novel “The Road”. While acknowledging McCarthy’s past success as a writer, they take issue with the world ravaged by nuclear war and yet allowing people to survive, and McCarthy’s swollen purple prose.

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