The End, The Sequel

Thought I’d try and enumerate some of the End Of The World TV shows and books that I can think of off the top of my head:

There’s at least a couple episodes of The Twilight Zone that touch on this:

• Where Is Everybody? – Not sure I agree with the whole “no man is an island” bit but perhaps the fact that I virtually never suffer bouts of loneliness would be a strength should there be an upcoming apocalypse.
• Time Enough At Last – I can relate to the bookish guy in this one a little better in that all those societal distractions can be awfully annoying sometimes. You know stuff like work, talking to your wife, etc. Sure would be nice if everybody just kind of went away for a while. Of course, I’m guessing there probably wouldn’t be high speed intarweb in this new empty world and I’d probably end up suffering a similar fate as our lucky protagonist.

There are a ton of books out there. Feel free to offer suggestions!

• Oryx and Crake – Cautionary tale about the ramifications of genetic engineering. Love the pigoons (ruh-roh) and the bit where the characters wonder whether or not it would even be possible to rebuild society again. You know, I think we’ve consumed so many nonrenewable resources and technology requires such incredible specialization these days, we wouldn’t be able to unless a vast repository of knowledge remained intact somewhere. (Actually, wait a minute, now I’m not sure if that little discussion was even in this book.)
• The Stand – A classic and probably my favorite Stephen King book. Your typical catastrophic human engineered virus wipes out everybody which sets up a ginormous battle between the survivors split into good and evil camps. All the little ties to the Dark Tower series are fun too.
• I Am Legend – A cheery little vampire story. Again, its enjoyable because its a recognizable modern town, except devoid of people.
• Swan Song – An 956 page steaming pile of shit. Ridiculously shallow and one-dimensional characters and filled with trite, incredibly cheesy prose. I suppose people might say the same thing about King but I’ve always thought he was good at getting into his characters’ heads and sheesh, I like to read trash. But seriously, this one is really bad even by my standards.

It also occurs to me that I also need to read The Road. The fact that this is an Oprah book is a bit worrisome however. Must be the whole father/son bonding thing. I should be able to pick it up any day now from the library since I’m all the way up to #145 on the waiting list. Damn that Oprah!