I am a sucker for anything decent post-apocalypsish and endish of the world, and this liminal time as we approach two-faced Janus, looking forwards and back, is as good a time (as good an excuse) to recommend entertainment in this line. I have just finished watching Earth Abides, based on the novel by George R Stewart. We live in a post-pandemic world where the idea of a Captain Trips a la The Stand is no longer a frisson for those with too much imagination. We can see how exactly how it could play out without having to send our minds back to the 1300s or 1600s and the Black Death. I enjoyed spending time with Ish and his extending family and friends. The pace was a little odd – a lot would happen, and then a year or a decade would pass – but it fit well with this time of year in Australia – hot weather, the cricket on TV for most of the day as we followed the Boxing Day test intermittently (how good was that!) – so I enjoyed it almost meditatively, being in the moment, which turned out to be one of the messages of the show. I found it to be more positive than the novel, and certainly a better ending for Ish than he originally faced, being treated as a good luck charm in his old age by illiterate hunter-gatherers, pinched and punished until he would join in with them. It is streaming on Stan in Australia, where you can also see the television adaptation of the novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, another post-viral outbreak story. At first I found Station Eleven to be a little underwhelming, but that is probably because it was so overhyped in reviews by people like George R Martin. I enjoyed it more on a subsequent later reading. I preferred the assignment of the role of villain in the Station Eleven novel to that in the adaptation, to be honest, and found some of the connections to be a little far-fetched, but overall I enjoyed that adaptation as well. If you are looking for something decent to watch, I recommend Earth Abides. If you would prefer a post-virus apocalpse story to read rather than watch, I will again recommend The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, I love that book.

Not new, but I have been reading two series of novels recently, both recommended by a friend, and neither of which I would have picked up without his recommendation. The first series is The Long War by Christian Cameron, telling the story of the Peloponnesian war from the account of the Zelig or Flashman like character – well only insofar as he was almost everywhere that matters, he did bad things but was never a Flashman type cad – Arimnestos of Plataea, who grew up, became a slave, a farmer, a pirate, a warrior, a leader during the Greco-Persian war. I enjoyed these books very much, so much that I cannot bring myself to get more than a few pages into the final volume, Treason of Sparta, because that will mean the adventure ends. (My eldest daughter was like that with John Marsden’s Tomorrow War series, I think that all these years later she has still not finished reading the last novel. The other is a much shorter series by Joe Abercrombie which no doubt needs no introduction or promotion to fantasy readers, the First Law trilogy which commences with The Blade Itself. I am currently digging into the third, Last Argument of Kings. I enjoy the large canvas, characters being separated and coming back together, the building of friendships on unlikely grounds (eg biting someone’s nose off), and apparent character development which occurs through shared hardship and adversity, and then is (or at least appears to be) lost once the adversity is over, a lesson for creative writing MFA instructors and students everywhere! These have all been perfect for this torpid time of year, the summer Christmas of Australia, where I still want to think, but need a lot of plot and action to drag me along.

I suspect my new year meditations this year will be the same as every year, but I won’t know until the editing is done, so here goes:

I asked her what kind of books she wrote, and she replied horror stories. That pleased me … Anyone who’s capable of writing things like that must be a courageous Person.

– Drive your plow over the bones of the dead, Olga Tokarczuk

To anyone inclined to think that nature is God, nature replies: Have a cup of pus, Mystic Boy

-Francis Spufford

Do not be afraid.

– Jesus to the women, Matthew 28:10

My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.

-Do Androids Deam of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick

Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?

– Joseph Stalin

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

– Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

An answer for the rich. Start crying, weep for the miseries that are coming to you. Your wealth is all rotting, your clothes are all eaten up by moths. All your gold and your silver are corroding away, and the same corrosion will be your own sentence, and eat into your body, it was a burning fire that you stored up as your treasure for the last days. Labourers mowed your fields , and you cheated them – listen to the wages that you kept back, calling out, realise that the cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. On earth you have had a life of comfort and luxury, in the time of slaughter you went on eating to your heart’s content. It was you who condemned the innocent and killed them, they offered you no resistance.

– The letter of St James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ

And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them.

– On Writing, Stephen King

Tik tok, tik tok …