"Earth Abides" just started

[Lionel Mandrake]

streaming on MGM+. Any thoughts?

[hunter]

1. Trailer...

Apocalyptic and post-apolyptic science fiction is lazy.

I generally end up rooting for Mother Nature to kill everyone that's left.

Someday she will kill all humans of course, extinction is the ultimate fate of all species, but maybe not ours today, no matter how damned hard we seem to be trying. (I'm looking at you, Trump voters...)

[bif]

3. Post-apocalyptic science fiction is lazy?

Please explain. It's one of my favorite genres.

[hunter]

4. It's lazy because it almost writes itself.

Create the characters, create the setting, and away you go!

It's really hard to create something fresh.

Two that I enjoyed were Seeking a Friend for the End of the World and Melancholia, both of these because the world just ends.

Seeking a Friend is the cheerful one, Melancholia is the heavy one. Both are explorations of how people might react to the end of the world.

I prefer optimistic science fiction and there's not enough of it, the kind where the future world isn't awful. Even Star Trek got broken because writers couldn't imagine a universe where humans basically just got along with one another, live and let live. Or maybe because our oligarchs didn't want anyone to get ideas. A society where nobody cares about money scares the shit out of them.

[lastlib]

2. OMG, I read that book in high school! and still have it!

Totally loved it, still consider it one of the best sci-fi novels I ever read. Since it's on a streaming service, I won't get to see the movie; I just hope it's somewhat true to the novel. I was really disappointed at the treatment of "Childhood's End" (truly one of the greatest sci-fi books of all time!), and would be very displeased if this one got botched as well.