Deluxe Editions Of Science Fiction/Fantasy Classics

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Additional reporting by Mary Ratliff.

Maybe PW didn't look hard enough, suggests About.Com's Linda Lowen. PW's list includes a John Cheever biography and some fairly doughty books of essay and non-fiction. But what about Cherie Priest's Boneshaker? "The fact that it's from Tor, an acclaimed science fiction/fantasy publisher with an award-winning author list, says something...as does PW's inclusion of it in their Top 100 Books of 2009," writes Lowen. Meanwhile, Lowen speculates that the literary ghost story in question was Sarah Waters' Booker Prize-shortlisted The Little Stranger — although there's also Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry.

Lowen's whole discussion of how the culture industry overlooks women writers, including links and quotes from other people's discussions, is well worth checking out. But it's also fascinating that, in a sense, women literary writers and science-fiction writers seem to get excluded from the mainstream "best of" lists for opposite reasons — the literary women's books are deemed too "small" and "unambitious," whereas science-fiction novels, one senses, are too huge and over-reaching, with their far-future settings or world-transforming technologies. [WomensIssues.About.Com]

In any given year, there are probably at least a dozen science fiction movies that all your friends are likely to have seen and be able to rave (and bitch) about over lunch. This year, they include Star Trek, Watchmen, District 9, Moon, G.I. Joe, Transformers 2, Terminator 4, and a few others. The same goes for several TV series: You can be in a room with a random assortment of science fiction lovers, and almost everyone will have an opinion about Dollhouse or the BSG finale.

But even though almost everybody I know reads books religiously, it's a lot harder to find a room full of science fiction nerds where everybody in the room has read the same recent book, and wants to praise it or tear it to pieces. Everybody's reading books, but they're all reading different stuff.

From asking around, I get the impression there are two or three exceptions to this rule in any given year. Often, there'll be at least a couple of science-fiction books that every science-fiction reader will read, or at least have a strong opinion about. Often, you'll find these books on the Hugo and Nebula ballots, which tend to select for the books that the most people have read.

Obviously, nobody expects books to get the same level of ubiquity as movies or television — those media have a much broader reach. Plus it's a much smaller time commitment to watch a terrible movie (one evening, versus a week or more to read a decent-sized book.)

But I feel like mainstream (for lack of a better term) books do produce more volumes in a given year that everybody from a particular social class will be expected to have read — or skimmed, at any rate. Every year, you've got your Life Of Pi, your Brief And Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, your And Then We Came To The End. There's a certain class of book, what agent Nathan Bransford calls "Book Club Fiction." As I understand it, this isn't just books that get read by book clubs — it's books that are pervasive and talked about everwhere among "mainstream literary" readers, books that you must read to get your membership card in the bibliophile squad renewed in good order.

Some science fiction books not only break out of the genre paddock, but also cross over to the extent that they become "book club" fiction. Bransford says these books include Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, Jonathan Lethem's early works (like Gun With Occasional Music), William Gibson's older works, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Iain Banks' stuff.

And there's a whole apparatus that generates these books and makes the machine keep churning. You've got your book clubs, of course, and publishers have become much more aggressive about marketing to them (just look in the back of any big Simon Says book, and there'll be a list of insipid book-club discussion points, which the paperback of Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters satirizes brilliantly.) There are newspaper book review sections, although those are shrinking and vanishing. There's Oprah.

We asked Bransford more about how a book becomes a "book club" book, and he said there's a certain type (regardless of genre) that seems to achieve mainstream book-clubbability: these books tend to be "accessible, slightly more highbrow than average (but not too highbrow), and different (but not too different)." And for a science-fiction book to reach the mainstream, non-genre book club audience, it helps for it not to be published by a genre imprint in the first place, adds Bransford.

So how does a science-fiction book become a "must read," talked-about book among science-fiction readers? (I.e., a book that every science fiction reader feels he/she must read, or risk being left out of the conversation.) We asked Bransford, and he says:

That's a great question. I hadn't actually thought of it before you brought it up, but there really does seem to be fewer writers that everyone reads in science fiction as opposed to other genres (at least none that are living - nearly everyone who reads sci-fi has read Phillip K. Dick and Douglas Adams).

I wonder if it's a matter of science fiction readers having stronger preferences about the types they like (hard vs. soft, outer space vs. on Earth, etc.) and tend to stick to them? Or maybe it's harder to find a publisher for more literary science fiction that may have broader appeal within the science fiction reading community?

The more I think about it, the more I think Bransford has a point — there's a lot of segmentation in science fiction publishing, between different types and flavors of SF, so it's less likely that you'll find a large swathe of readers who are all drawn to the same posthuman epic, or the same Heinlein-space-opera pastiche.

Another factor that springs to mind is that science-fiction readers may wait for a book to receive the imprimatur of mainstream acceptance before they adopt it as a must-read within the genre — so a book like Spook Country or The Road, by virtue of having been lifted up among the people who don't consider themselves science-fiction readers, becomes a book every science-fiction reader feels is essential reading. So maybe a book doesn't become a must-read among science-fiction fans unless it's already gotten "mainstream" cred — even if it's a much-touted, highly praised, thought-provoking read.

And then there's just the fact that most science-fiction readers are nerds — and nerds are an individualistic bunch, who pride themselves on doing their own thing. The phrase "nerd herd" is actually kind of an oxymoron, a lot of the time.

So how do you start making particular books into "must reads" for all science fiction readers, regardless of their individual tastes? How do you fashion a "book club" out of the mass of science fiction readers?

A few ideas occur to me — some cities already have SF book clubs, and chances are your local SF bookstore may sponsor one. Often, though, those book clubs are jointly reading something that came out years, or decades, ago, which limits the ability to get critical mass. There are ways that authors or publishers could be encouraging SF-specific book clubs to focus on newly published works — by offering a bulk discount, by bringing the author to the club (in person, or via Skype) to take part in the discussions.

Also, some cities have a "one city one book" event, where the local public library encourages everyone to read a particular book during a particular month, so people can discuss it together. (This October, all of San Francisco is reading Doug Dorst's quasi-zombie lit book Alive In Necropolis.) Science fiction bookstores, sites and magazines could get together and do something similar for a new (or new-ish) SF book, and encourage everyone to read it in that month.

Most of all, though, it's up to us, the readers. When we do come across a book that's especially mind-expanding, gut-wrenching or apt to give us three-AM flashbacks, we have to evangelize more. Bug your friends, spread the word, press the book into people's hands. With a constant flood of new books landing on shelves every month, it's really hard for any one book to break out — especially if it's in some way unusual or ground-breaking. Authors and publishers are already spinning their wheels as hard as they can, trying to make their books the ones everyone will want to read — so it's up to us, as readers, to help move the books that move us.

ABC claims it has been working with Kauffman for years on a possible small-screen adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's novel. The plan is for the romance between Clare and the time-traveling (and, incidentally, television-allergic) Henry to unfold over the course of several seasons, with individual episodes having their own story lines.

Normally, I'm all for adapting novels for television and giving them more room to breathe than they get in a feature film, but with The Time Traveler's Wife, I'm much more hesitant. The novel is such a self-contained animal, constantly folding in on itself and exploring the predestination paradox created by Henry's time travel and the tragic consequences of his condition, making it much more suited to a miniseries or feature film than a long-form television epic. And Journeyman, Fox's now-defunct series that also focused on involuntary time travel, worked because it was an adventure and mystery story, and its time-traveling protagonist was able to alter the timeline with his actions. Henry is, by comparison, leading a fairly ordinary life, and can alter nothing. But I suspect that, in a full-length series, Henry's time travel would be an incidental part of his character, and we would be seeing more of a How I Met Your Mother where the romantic lead occasionally happens to visit younger and older versions of his wife.

'Time Traveler's Wife' Series Travels to ABC [The Wrap via /Film]

Imagine if someone from the future came and told you what was going to happen to you: You'd be trapped in a story. In a sense, that "trapped in a story" feeling is what The Time Traveler's Wife is about — both Audrey Niffenegger's masterful book and the new movie. The difference is, the novel uses a million grace notes to show how you can still live a joyful life, even though you know you're trapped inside a story you can't really change. The movie, meanwhile, just shows us that we're trapped and there's no escape from the plodding story beats.

In most love stories, after all, you know what's going to happen. Including time travel as a concept just solidifies the sense we already have that love stories — especially Hollywood love stories — are utterly predictable, and the most you can expect is carefully titrated levels of quirkiness, mostly coming from the supporting cast. Unless the leading man is Jack Black — then he gets to bring the quirkiness himself.

But of course, in a larger sense, life is a story whose ending is known to us from the beginning, since as Prince says, "We're all gonna die."

The basic story of The Time Traveler's Wife is one that could be intensely schlocky, but isn't at all in the novel. Henry De Tamble has a weird, made-up genetic condition that causes him to become unstuck in time, and he journeys back to emotionally significant moments in his own life. (He visits his own mother's death often.) And he frequently appears during the childhood of Clare Abshire, the woman he marries as an adult. Because she grows up seeing him as this mysterious, sophisticated apparition, she grows to love and mythologize him — only to have to make a relationship with the real Henry when she meets him in real time. And then, of course, Henry's always vanishing into the past and future while he and Clare are building a life.

I just re-read Niffenegger's novel this week, so I apologize if I talk about the book as much as I do the movie. (The truth is, the book impressed me anew, and the movie seemed instantly forgettable.) The novel is a meditation on time, and the way in which we're all trapped inside linear time — even Henry, who can't stop getting older or advancing towards the bad things he knows are waiting for him. And yet, all the ways in which we're all time travelers. Niffenegger packs in funny observations about the socially constructed nature of time — you can travel backward an hour just by crossing over from Michigan to Illinois. The longer Clare and Henry are together, the more she, too, travels backwards in time, except that she does it in her mind. She's constantly thinking about the things that took place between the two of them when she was a child — even when Henry isn't physically returning to them.

As Henry says towards the end of the book, minutes and years are "the same thing" when you're dealing with a traumatic or powerful event — something that happened decades ago can feel like it happened just now. His time-slipping condition just makes that fact less metaphorical.

In all relationships, Niffenegger seems to say, we are constantly living in both the past and the future — you can't help reminiscing about how the relationship started, and you can't help imagining what'll happen when you have a child, or one of you leaves — or dies.

Like I said, this story would be trite, cheesy or even squicky in the hands of a less sure-handed writer. But Niffenegger gives these characters enough life, enough weirdness, to make the Henry-Clare relationship feel like ones you've known. Clare grabs Henry's cock through a hole in his suit, during their wedding, to try and keep him from slipping away through the timestream during their wedding (and it doesn't work.)

So, since I re-read Niffenegger's novel right before going to see the movie, I can report that the film follows the structure of the novel quite closely, with a few changes. (You're not going to see a middle-aged Bana taking an 18-year-old McAdams' virginity. Also, the Gomez-loves-Clare subplot is gone, probably for the best.) The skeleton is the same, but in the movie it's covered with flab.

It would probably be impossible to convey the books's awesomeness in a movie, but the screenplay (by Ghost scriptwriter Bruce Joel Rubin) doesn't even try. Instead, it takes Niffenegger's basic story and uses it as a vehicle for such overwhelming schlockiness that I was sickened. In the novel, Henry and Clare are both witty and weighty, talking about their relationship and their lives in self-aware, clever ways. In the movie, they mostly talk like little kids — Clare, in particular, is whiny and annoying, something she never is in the book.

The biggest problem with the film is the dialogue, honestly — you're not going to be able to pack as much complexity into a movie as you could into a novel, of course, but every single word that comes out of these people's mouths is utterly banal and dull. There were dozens of moments where instead of saying something else and letting the subtext convey an emotion, the characters stated their emotions in the blandest possible way: "I am feeling anxious." "I am filled with unease." That sort of thing. The screenwriting is so hamfisted, after a while everyone sounds like an android trying to identify the proper emotion for the situation.

It's uterly pointless to say that the movie version of a book is worse than the source material, or that the movie ruined the book. I am not saying that at all. Instead, I am saying: Niffenegger's basic story could be intensely schlocky in the wrong hands, and she avoids that pitfall with a balletic grace. The movie dives right into it. It would have taken immense skill and determination to avoid nausea in crafting the story of a man who's constantly vanishing on his wife becuase he's traipsing off to visit her as a little girl. And the movie simply lacks that skill, and what's worse, it doesn't care.

On the plus side, the movie is genuinely funny in parts — including some parts that are deadly serious in the book — and stars Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams have great comic timing, when they decide to play the material for laughs. The audience I saw the film with laughed boisterously and often. So there's that.

My biggest problem with the movie, actually, was that I didn't like these versions of Clare or Henry — they seemed shallow, boring, petulant. Clare whines an awful lot about the fact that Henry keeps disappearing, even though she knows he can't control it and is trying to prevent it at all costs. The movie seems determined to create melodrama out of moments that should be quiet, and to create comedy out of moments that should be dramatic.

In many ways, TTTW reminded me of a slightly worse version of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button — they're both about a man who has a weird condition, and the woman who loves him. In both, the man's condition compels him to disappear on the woman just as they're building a life together. (Although Benjamin Button has a choice, and just does the wrong thing because he's an asspot.) And they're both intensely cheesy, drowning us in sentimentality because they ultimately don't think there is any meaning in human relationships. (Sentimentality being the rich, creamy sauce you pour over the essential nothingness of empty romance.)

It makes me sad, because there seemed to be a boomlet in smart, quirky literary novels that played with time, about five years ago: Niffenegger's novel was one of them, and Andrew Sean Greer's Confessions Of Max Tivoli was another. And now we've gotten the movie version of that boomlet, with TTTW and Benjamin Button (which felt like an adaptation of Max Tivoli, even though it officially wasn't.) These movies are like the chick-flick versions of G.I. Joe — cheesy, silly, and sporting one-dimensional characters. It's only sad because the books they're based on actually did demand smarter takes, and lord knows we could use some more thought-provoking, grown up science fiction stories.

In the end, though, what I really can't forgive the movie for is saying that we're trapped, there's no point, it's all useless. Because it never even tries to answer the question Niffenegger deals with in her book: What do you do when everything is predestined? How do you make a meaningful life? Instead, it just revels in its own predictability and dullness, because it's a Hollywood love story. And predictability is the Hollywood love story's meat and drink, without which it withers away.

The Time Traveler's Wife opens August 14. And hopefully we'll get a bigger version of that poster soon. For now, you can watch the trailer in high definition over at Yahoo. [via RopeOfSilicon]

Audrey Niffenegger is the author of The Time Traveler's Wife, soon to be a movie, and the forthcoming Her Fearful Symmetry. She's also an artist, engraver and bookmaker, part of the T3 artists and writers' collective. She teaches Interdisciplinary Book Arts at Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, and has published two graphic novels: The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress.

And Niffenegger says that being a visual artist has definitely helped her to create storytelling that's more visually oriented. "I think that drawing, in particular, has trained me to observe and to be able to visualise things clearly. I teach a writing class for visual artists and I have found that they almost always excel at description, they seem to often possess the ability to organise and develop their train of thought very tangibly. I imagine this is due to constantly having to organise 2D space, it does carry over into the laying out of fictional worlds."

Rudy Rucker, meanwhile, is the author of numerous science fiction novels, including the Ware series, The Sex Sphere, Mathematicians In Love and Postsingular. He's been taking photos forever and has been doing paintings, often connected to his fiction, for several years, and has had some gallery shows recently. "All along, I've made little pen and paper drawings of my scenes before writing them, but now I enjoy the more heavy-duty process of breaking out my kit of acrylic paints. I took up painting when I was writing my historical novel about the painter Peter Bruegel, and I started using paintings for pre-visualization while I wrote Frek and the Elixir. A painting takes longer than a drawing, and I get more deeply into it. My sense is that I'm using a different part of my brain when I paint a picture­, as opposed to when I'm revising my written outline. It's like visiting a different muse."

Mary Robinette Kowal won the Campbell Award for best new SF writer, and has a story collection coming soon, called Scenting The Dark And Other Stories. She also has a novel coming out, called Shades Of Milk And Honey. And she works as a professional puppeteer, both making and operating puppets. She explains:

Performing and building puppets definitely has an impact on how I see the world and that directly influences what is important to me when I'm writing. But really, to answer this properly, I should probably back up a bit and explain what it's like to perform as a puppeteer. Puppetry is a form of acting. The main difference between an puppet actor and a "meat" actor is the tool we use to communicate with the audience. In both cases, it's about creating a believable character. A traditional actor inhabits their tool — their body — and learned to use it unconciously since the day they were born. Some might have to retrain it, but for the most part, it's so familiar, one doesn't think about the body as separate from the self. Make sense? With a puppet actor, my tool is external to my body. I had to learn to use a puppet as an adult and very consciously had to work to learn what makes something look alive. I had to learn to break body language down into pieces of discreet information so I could duplicate them with this tool. Ultimately, a puppeteer wants to learn to do all of this so naturally that it requires no more thought than a traditional actor requires to work their own body.

Here's her demo reel:

Visualizing characters, imagining plots:

And Kowal says that the biggest impact of her puppeteering experience is in how she thinks about creating believable characters, and plots that flow from their actions. That focus on "body language" has allowed her to portray lots of different characters, whether a dog, a badger, or a little boy. And one aspect of body language is that "every movement counts, because most puppets have no facial expression." That carries over to fiction, because every movement her characters make have to count as well. "If my character picks up a glass, it has to be for a reason, preferably one that expresses an emotional state as well as a plot point. "

And similarly, Rucker says that his painting has helped him figure out where a story should go next: "Painting gives me a different way of being surprised." Sometimes, when he's not sure what should happen in an upcoming scene, he'll get out the paints and "see what happens."

"If a narrative is 'storyboarded' — even in one's imagination — then the action of the plot will be more grounded," says Stephen Stanley, the only SF writer ever to place in both the Writers Of The Future and Illustrators Of The Future contests and the art director of Shimmer Magazine. "Drawings and sketches of setting, scenes, characters make excellent reference materials (non-visual writers can do the same by collecting photographs and images from magazines and web searches). Perhaps the act of personally drawing reference material makes the elements more real to me, and therefore more real when written. It doesn't hurt."

Stanley says he'll pre-visualize a character or a setting, before he writes, and one crucial question is how much visual detail to include: too much and the story gets bogged down. But not enough, and the story loses vividness.

"I've always sought to provoke the reader with a steady flow of powerful images," says Rucker. (Anyone who's read earlier works like Wetware or The Sex Sphere, or newer stuff, like the ultra-trippy Postsingular, knows this to be an understatement.) But like Stanley, he seeks a balance between strong images and story flow. "I like to keep things moving with action, dialog, and the stream of consciousness of the main character. Absorbing a story is quite different from looking at a painting. With a painting you have a synoptic view, that is, you can overview the whole scene at once. But in reading a story, you have to build the scene in your head by processing a linear sequence of descriptions. I don't like to overdo the visual description in the "fine writing" sense, which can be a pain for the reader. My goal is to put in just enough description so that when the reader looks back on the scene, they have a mental image similar to the one I started with. I don't mean that I want to be stark or minimalist, what I mean is that I like the conciseness of poetry­, where you line up exactly the right words and phrases to set off the intended response."

Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife is full of memorable images and telling descriptions, and she says that including a strong visual element is a good way to ground the story when you're dealing with fantastic elements like time travel or (in her new novel) ghosts. But too much visual detail can detract from the reader's imagination, she adds: "I do try to be careful about which things I render fully and which things I am vague about. I have found that letting readers fill things in for themselves can be effective. In the new book I am more spare with the visuals. I spend a lot of time inside various characters' minds, and most of these people are not especially visually aware."

Page 2: Worldbuilding Is Like Painting A Picture

"All along, I've had a visual imagination," says Rucker. "For me writing is a little like dreaming while I'm awake. That is, I see the scene in my mind's eye before I write it. Sometimes I'll nurse an image of a place or a situation for quite some time before I write about it, in fact I sometimes write a book simply to be able to mentally visit certain locales that I've dreamed up. I pretty much can't write a novel unless I have an image of a fabulous place where I want to go."

And when Rucker gets to write about those imaginary locales he's visualized, they become more real to him, and thus more compelling. It's sort of a feedback loop. "And painting is a way to layer on more details."

As for Kowal, she says working with puppets definitely helps her craft a scene or a locale in her mind. "The world-building is actually one of the key things that pulls me to both puppet building and SF and fantasy. Both forms are essentially the theater of the possible." At the start of a new story or a new puppet show, at first anything is possible — including defying the laws of physics.

The puppetry training also helps Kowal to visualize a new world, because her training has taught her to start a project by defining the parameters. "Since I'm creating a world from scratch, I need to make certain that the visual language I use is consistent and that the world has an internal logic. It's the same with writing."

Says Stanley:

For me, a story will evolve from a drawing (or an imagined visual) as often as a drawing comes out of a story. I'm writing about a space station. The more I pre-visualize, or draw, the interior and exterior of that station the more "real" the station becomes for me and the characters. The better I understand how certain areas look, smell, function, flow, etc., the better I can write about them. Any writer can do this (and for the most part does and should), but having trained and practiced the visualized representation of imagination, perhaps a visual artist who also writes can have an advantage. Of course, there is more to writing than describing visual experience, so it's not necessarily a "great" advantage. The processes in art/creativity tend to be similar.

Niffenegger says world-building is less of an issue for her, because she tends to set her stories in existing places. "The world is built." Where visualizing the story comes in, for her, is figuring out the best real-world location to set off something that happens in a scene.

Keeping it concrete

And perhaps the most important benefit of having access to another art form is that it helps you make the story more concrete. Kowal says that being concrete helps you think about how one little change alters everything else in the world. When she teaches about stage adaptations, she always says, "If you change one thing, you have to look at how it changes everything." And that comes back to writing SF: "Writing about the future is basically taking our world and making a change, which affects everything."

It's all very well to have crazy ideas and whiz-banging plot devices, says Rucker. But in the end, "everything has to be visual. I think I learned that from Robert Sheckley and Jorge Luis Borges. Ideas are important, but what you want in a novel is an objective correlative for the idea."

So instead of going on and on about your crazy ideas, you want to show the reader "some weird little physical device. Imagine, say, a wriggly green horseshoe with antennae on it, call it a jinker­and when you point your jinker at some object, the target object becomes weightless and the size of a matchbox and you can carry it off in your pocket. Maybe the jinker talks to you telepathically, maybe pairs of jinkers like to get together and mate, and while they're doing it, all the objects in your house are floating around and changing size. That's all much more interesting than talking about spatial metrics and gravity tensors!"

The New York Times weighs in on this recession-defying advance, noting that Time Traveler sold 113,000 copies in hardcover and another 1.3 million copies in paperback, after it was selected by the Today Show book club. Unlike Charles Frazier, who received an $8 million advance for his disappointing follow-up to Cold Mountain, Niffenegger has actually finished her new novel, which is

a supernatural story about twins who inherit an apartment near a London cemetery and become embroiled in the lives of the building's other residents and the ghost of their aunt, who left them the flat.

The new novel, according to Scribner's Nan Graham, is "a spectacular second novel."

Meanwhile, author Robert J. Sawyer puts it more succinctly:

You know what? She deserves it. Her The Time Traveler's Wife is one of the best science-fiction novels I've ever read.

The bad news, though, is that the long-awaited movie of TTTW isn't going to be out until February 2010.

What we found: As you might imagine, the real surge in literary novels with science fiction themes came in the past five or six years, after literary journal Conjunctions published its "New Wave Fabulist" issue and magical realism was on the wane. There were literary novels with SF themes, like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which didn't really fit into the general subject areas of "alternate history," "time warp," or "post-apocalyptic." We were most interested in seeing which years featured the most literary novels featuring those themes.

Of those three subcategories, alternate history was the most consistent, with literary authors using it to explore how wars could have gone differently, but also other topics. Not surprisingly, you saw more alternate history novels at the start of this period, when the U.S. was active in Somalia and still bombing Iraq, and then at the end, when we had invaded Iraq. Alternate history is traditionally a fairly conservative genre, with authors like Newt Gingrich dabbling in it and exploring how things could have turned out worse if we hadn't stiffened our spines. But a recent spate of alt-history novels is more liberal, exploring a world where the Aztecs never fell (Atomik Aztex) and a world where the Jews got a homeland in Alaska and we avoided the Middle East conflict (Yiddish Policemen's Union).

There was a boomlet in time-travel fiction, and stories about time acting strange, in 2003-2004, with Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife proving a huge mainstream hit. This was the peak of the Bush-era resurgence in conservativism, with a lot of mainstream nostalgia about World War II and the Greatest Generation.

And then was a boom in post-apocalyptic fiction in more recent years, with three huge classics of the genre hitting in 2006. In particular, Cormac McCarthy's The Road has become the poster-child for the literary-authors-going-speculative trend. These books coincided with the Indian Ocean Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and a worsening Iraq conflict. But there's been a lull in the post-apocalyptic genre since then as well.