The Road

In my reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road I have found the novel’s tone and mood to be mostly hopeless and very depressing, but with brief moments of humanity and small glimmers of hope. One scene in particular illustrates the novel’s back-and-forth between hope and despair. The man and boy have just witnessed a beautiful natural scene at a waterfall. Here McCarthy gives us a moment of father-son bonding when the man teaches his son to swim in the freezing water (39). This hopeful scene is punctuated when the man finds some morels on the ground and prepares a hearty and earthy meal with them. Surely, I thought, this is a breakthrough in the text—we can rejoice for the pair’s good luck. However, McCarthy immediately undercuts this hope and optimism when he describes the stories the man tells his son. They were “old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them” (41). By describing the stories as old we are given the sense that these stories of courage and justice are outdated in a post-apocalyptic world in which violence and brutality are commonplace. Furthermore, the stories are told as the man “remembered them.” It seems as if the man could be making up these tales of courage and justice in order to support his son, to give him the motivation to push forward and to survive. This is not an isolated incident and, as we read on, we come across more instances in which the man fabricates stories in order to motivate both himself and his son.

The Windup Girl

After Scott's enthusiastic description of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl in class on Friday, I was excited to investigate further. What I found was a genre and sub-genre that I am in no way familiar with, but that I am eager to explore. Not only am I unfamiliar with science fiction but also the cyberpunk sub-genre. The potential for the critique and subversion of social norms, which seems to be a theme common to most cyberpunk works, always interests me.

I poked around on Google looking for different reviews and came across a wonderfully in-depth review from the Washington Post. Offering a brief summary of the novel, Michael Dirda compares one character to Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, one of my favorite novels and one of the most influential and important of the Twentieth Century. Even the remotest connection to modernism--my area of concentration--inflames my literary passions:

From the windup, the smitten Anderson learns of a mysterious Gi Bu Sen, who has developed a new blight-resistant fruit that has recently appeared in the Thai markets. Protected by the government and living in luxurious seclusion somewhere, this Kurtz-like farang can only be the renegade AgriGen scientist Gibbons, the greatest generipper in the world, long thought to be dead. He must be found and restored to the corporation. It is because of his genius -- and the kingdom's hidden storehouse of carefully preserved seeds -- that Thailand has been able to stay "one step ahead of the plagues."

The biggest worry I always have when approaching Sci-Fi (always through film for me) is whether or not the world is believable. Adam Roberts addresses that concern directly in his review in the Guardian:

The Windup Girl embodies what SF does best of all: it remakes reality in compelling, absorbing and thought-provoking ways, and it lives on vividly in the mind.

This looks to be a fun and promising read and I am eager to pick it apart in order to discover Bacigalupi's vision of the apocalypse.