I'm retired. The house on Ash Tree lane is officially for sale. Dreaming of buying land a few hours north, building a compound near a small town, living alone in a straw bale house with a typewriter, a cat, a knife, and a gun, surrounded by people who share the vision.
In the wake of my passing, astrology fails, science wavers, faith shivers, knives become inexplicably sharper, and falling trees make noises that reach no ears.
My old man's a blind gun duelist. They call him the bat. He waits for the other guy to shoot so he knows where to shoot back. At the sonar cone, blooming bouquet-like. Sometimes just the creak of the holster is enough of a target. Says he sees the sound like a bullseye. Says he does what the other guy does: puts a bullet in the bullseye.
The other guy's dead.
My mother, a woman stronger than most middling trees, once told me this: "The real secret swords keep from us is the art by which they multiply a gram of pressure on their vanishing edges. A baby's muscle-twitch hews off a man's thigh. All the might in the world is a geriatric sigh until it's funneled through a keen blade." In this way was I cast into monomania--a kind of solipsism one might call swordipsism: the only known and verifiable thing is the sword.
Otherwise, my principle slogan is ignoramus et ignoramibus.
The task set before me as it is set before you: To read all post-apocalyptic novels worth reading.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Snow by Adam Roberts
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
The Wind from Nowhere by J.G. Ballard
The Drought by J G Ballard
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
The Postman by David Brin
The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Hollow Lands by Michael Moorcock
The Stand by Stephen King
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
And counting...
