21 / The Road

I am "on the road" in my around the globe travel, confused by the dateline thing and doing a lot of reading. Most recently, I finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, now a movie, and a movie I haven't seen, and probably never will see. It was quite enough to read the book.

Post apocalypse, it's the "good guys" versus the "bad guys." The difference seems to be that the "bad guys" will kill you and eat you. The "good guys," most specifically one father and his young son, the focus of the narrative, will kill you if they have to, but not to make it a meal.

The nature of the catastrophe that caused the problems isn't ever made clear, but the result seems to be that almost everything is burned, and that Nature no longer provides. There seem to be no animals, no fish, no crops, and I guess that sunlight itself is pretty scarce. Those who survive, good guys or bad, live only by uncovering and then utilizing the scarce remaining supplies and edible materials created by humans before the catastrophe. Unless Nature bounces back somehow, and the book holds out no specific hope that this will ever occur, the long term prospects aren't good.

In other words, if we're "on our own," at least for now, we're pretty much screwed, because it's the world of Nature on which our lives ultimately depend.