binners – Member
Why would you bother reading it? They’ve made a film, so you don’t have too. Its got Will Smith in, and everyfink. He’s great, Will Smith
Cos it’s different, innit. 🙄
Another brilliant post-apocalyptic book, that was also a film is Damnation Alley, by Roger Zelazny. I’m a huge fan of Zelazney’s work, and have been for many years, he’s a writer who writes very descriptively, and is humorous with it.
The film is quite catastrophically bad, and Zelazney refused to have his name connected with it; his main character, Hell Tanner, is the last of the Hell’s Angels, but in the film he’s just Tanner, played by Jan-Michael Vincent, as a nice, clean-cut all-American boy!
Here’s the film synopsis:
garykmcd
In the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust a group of survivors, mostly US Air Force personnel, travel from the western US to Albany, New York from where a radio broadcast has been received. Led by a no nonsense Major, Eugene Denton, they travel in specialized vehicles built specifically for survival in harsh conditions. Along the way, they are joined by an attractive young woman when they stop in Las Vegas, are joined by a young boy when they meet desperate survivors in the desert, must face hoards of killer cockroaches and survive a major flood in Detroit. — IMDb Plot: Damnation Alley (1977)
Here’s the book synopsis:
Both the short story and the novel open in a post-apocalyptic Southern California, in a hellish world shattered by nuclear war decades before. Several police states have emerged in place of the former United States. Hurricane-force winds above five hundred feet prevent any sort of air travel from one state to the next, and sudden, violent, and unpredictable storms make day-to-day life a mini-hell. Hell Tanner, an imprisoned killer, is offered a full pardon in exchange for taking on a suicide mission—a drive through “Damnation Alley” across a ruined America from Los Angeles to Boston—as one of three vehicles attempting to deliver an urgently needed plague vaccine.
I would dearly love to see a new film made, preferably with Ron Pearlman in the lead rôle.
If you can track down any of Zelazney’s books, I recommend them very highly indeed.
Neil Stephenson, William Gibson, and Tim Powers are all really worth checking out, they write nice, big, holiday-sized books! 😀