Parenthetical

Hey, everybody, it’s post-apocalyptic YA from the ’80s! Home, sweet home. It even has a watercolory cover and a fresh-faced, all-American heroine named “Janie Johnson”! This book was brought to my attention recently [and by "recently," I mean about six months ago, when I actually read it -- Ed.] by an old friend, who presented [...]

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From the (Environmental Protection) Agency’s Earth Day history page: EPA was born in 1970 – a time when rivers caught fire and cities were hidden under dense clouds of smoke. We’ve made remarkable progress since then in protecting human health and safeguarding the natural environment. Remember 40 years ago, when life was like a science [...]

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I wrote recently about the fact that my mental picture of “apocalypse” is stuck in the Cold War — instantaneous disaster, as opposed to the currently more likely slow(-ish) environmental collapse. I mused about what current YA readers of science fiction will picture, which made me wonder: other than Uglies, what’s being written in the [...]

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While cataloging Alas, Babylon, a classic 1959 apocalyptic sci-fi novel by Pat Frank, it occured to me how quaint nuclear holocausts seem to me now. Oh, the Russians bombed us into the Stone Age? How terrifying! We tore our short-sleeved dress shirts, and the girls in the typing pool were vaporized! I hardly ever read [...]

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Feed, M.T. Anderson: I don’t read post-apocalyptic sci-fi anymore, and certainly not immediately-pre-apocalyptic, but I didn’t know that’s what this was. All I knew was that it was about a future in which everyone has the internet in their brain and they’re advertised to all the time, and that it’s extremely popular and draped with [...]

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