The Sci Fi Guy

As you might have noticed (and hopefully will notice more as you keep returning to the SciFi-Guy.com!), I’m a huge fan of post apocalypse. It’s a difficult genre though, because as popular as Kevin Costner’s movies have been, there just doesn’t seem to be much appeal for the subcategory of science fiction. The demise of Jericho is another in a long string of under-performing and critically panned post-apoc science fiction stories.

Jack McDevitt is one of my favorite science fiction authors, and he produced an absolutely awesome post apoc novel titled Eternity Road. Eternity Road is the tale of a group of travellers that embark on a journey to uncover the past - the past to them is our fairly near future. And the trick to McDevitt’s storytelling is that he creates a universe where we managed to annihilate ourselves nearly completely. Remnants of our civilization are now ghost stories and mythology, and McDevitt masterfully paints the story of our far away ancestors to be.

On the whole, EternityRoad isn’t a perfect story. The devestated civilization of the future seems unfortunately predictable, and there’s little description of how we managed to essentially re-emerge in to a pre-renaissance society. In fact, I think that’s one of the biggest challenge of many post apoc stories - its not the story itself that occurs, but how the author sculpts the formation of the future as a result of the apocalypse to come. However, whatever Eternity Road may lack in “present day” development, it makes up for in creating a journey across a vast landscape.

Most of the time, the characters are secondary to the action they’re faced with. This includes all manner of threats to their trek, including a fair mix of natural and man made. The story begins in the Mississippi delta area, and ends. . . Well, I won’t tell you where it ends, but I assure you it’s pretty far from where our main characters begin.

If you’re in the mood for one of the better examples of post apoc science fiction, I really encourage you to give Eternity Road a chance. Perhaps you’ll become a McDevitt fan like the SciFi-Guy!