Dystopian science fiction by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. McCarthy died in 2023 at 89. The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel and only incidentally has become the pre-eminent example of dystopian science fiction in recent years. McCarthy’s applied his inimitable style to gothic Western stories and dark journeys into the psychology of violence or perhaps of madness.
The Road is a love story about a man and his son seeking hoped-for sanctuary from the effects of a global extinction event. The author has left enough clues that the world is in the tightening grasp of a lethal nuclear winter that has killed plant and animal life and most of the population. The horrors they experience are unspeakable but predictable. The Road is speculative because nuclear winter is a hypothetical construct; we’ve never experienced it. But the speculative leap is plausible enough. We know the power and effects of nuclear weapons, and nuclear winter – as a result of a full-on nuclear exchange – is a reasonable hypothesis from what we know.
So, then, the unrelenting, dark and brutal journey depicted in The Road is a natural and predictable setting, dire and unspeakable as it is. McCarthy, by his style and treatment, has raised the bar of speculative fiction. His storytelling is austere and powerful. McCarthy’s message, ironically, is about love and the importance of relationships.
Event Horizon 
Hi Lanning, Here is a poem for Event Horizon from Dan which Will edited from a letter he wrote.
Dear Jeanne
In bed after a shower, shave And dinner of sorts I thought of writing a poem Plainly obsessed With the absence of you
I’m like a plow set too high to turn the earth, A horse in a charge that has lost his rider, A fixed magnet trying to lift a fixed piece of metal, A flower in the dark Fruit in the cellar of a solitary man who has died
Anything made for something Not doing what it is meant to do
I am on the moon without you.
Dan Elliott
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