1985
321 pages
The Postman is an acclaimed science fiction novel that is now well known for inspiring a film adaptation that is considered one of the unloved movies of the 1990s. The film was directed by, and starred Kevin Costner, and its notoriety as a three hour long waste-of-money is probably only exceeded by his previous film, Waterworld. With that being said, the novel that provided the film with its source material is an interesting speculation on a post-apocalyptic America without industrial or electronic technology, that struggles to find a foundational myth upon which to rebuild. With THAT being said, and having read the novel, I am now interested in viewing the film adaptation regardless of how bad its supposed to be.
David Brin, the author of The Postman, is an astronomer and science-fiction novelist whose work is identified with an emphasis on ‘hard’ science in fiction. He has won a number of prestigious awards for science-fiction writing, including the Hugo award and the Nebula award. The Postman received the John W. Campbell award and the Locus Award for Science Fiction. Brin also writes a blog wherein he comments upon the political and cultural uses of science and technology, and maintains a speaking schedule where he gives talks on such matters.
The Postman is one of a number of science-fiction novels wherein the United States has experienced an apocalyptic collapse of their high-tech infrastructure, rather than the millennial singularity of a technological mediated Heavenly Jerusalem predicted by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil. Other novels that carry similar themes to Brin’s text are Hello America (1981) by JG Ballard, a post-apocalyptic parody of American culture, and the more recent World Made by Hand (2008) by James Howard Kunstler. While Kunstler’s novel is primarily focused on the details of an ecological collapse and the day to day life of its survivors, Brin’s novel appears focused on survival via cultural myths. In both Kunstler’s and Brin’s novels the characters do not know exactly what caused collapse, or what the state of the nation is, but it is presumed in both novels that former official forms of governance have been decimated and lawlessness and danger are the prevailing order.
The Postman is an acclaimed science fiction novel that is now well known for inspiring a film adaptation that is considered one of the unloved movies of the 1990s. The film was directed by, and starred Kevin Costner, and its notoriety as a three hour long waste-of-money is probably only exceeded by his previous film, Waterworld. With that being said, the novel that provided the film with its source material is an interesting speculation on a post-apocalyptic America without industrial or electronic technology, that struggles to find a foundational myth upon which to rebuild. With THAT being said, and having read the novel, I am now interested in viewing the film adaptation regardless of how bad its supposed to be.
David Brin, the author of The Postman, is an astronomer and science-fiction novelist whose work is identified with an emphasis on ‘hard’ science in fiction. He has won a number of prestigious awards for science-fiction writing, including the Hugo award and the Nebula award. The Postman received the John W. Campbell award and the Locus Award for Science Fiction. Brin also writes a blog wherein he comments upon the political and cultural uses of science and technology, and maintains a speaking schedule where he gives talks on such matters.
The Postman is one of a number of science-fiction novels wherein the United States has experienced an apocalyptic collapse of their high-tech infrastructure, rather than the millennial singularity of a technological mediated Heavenly Jerusalem predicted by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil. Other novels that carry similar themes to Brin’s text are Hello America (1981) by JG Ballard, a post-apocalyptic parody of American culture, and the more recent World Made by Hand (2008) by James Howard Kunstler. While Kunstler’s novel is primarily focused on the details of an ecological collapse and the day to day life of its survivors, Brin’s novel appears focused on survival via cultural myths. In both Kunstler’s and Brin’s novels the characters do not know exactly what caused collapse, or what the state of the nation is, but it is presumed in both novels that former official forms of governance have been decimated and lawlessness and danger are the prevailing order.
The protagonist of Brin's novel is Gordon Krantz, a nomadic, reluctant hero. Following an ambush by bandits who took his clothes and belongings, Krantz stumbles across the skeleton of a postman in an old USPS van. Krantz took the uniform and mailbag off of the skeleton and began posing as a postman for the Restored United States. For Krantz, his new profession was simply a ruse he developed so that he could better survive the treacheries of long distance foot-travel and gain leverage in dealing with dangerous town officials. Krantz skillfully escapes many dangerous situations and that, in combination with his consistent posturing as a postman, establishes him as a trickster. This role for Krantz recalls in a distant although not unconnected manner the character of Nicho, the (actual) postman who transforms into a coyote (a trickster animal), from Miguel Ángel Asturias’ novel, Men of Maize (1949). Krantz pretends to be founding post offices in various towns across the northwestern United States and he finds that people are eager to assist his work because of their desire to believe that the United States may be restored.
The bane of existance for Krantz and everyone he meets are the ‘hypersurvivalist’ followers of an ultra-Macho philosopher named Nathan Holn. These men are referred to as Holnists and through their devotion to Holn’s philosophy, believe that they are superior human specimens and that the conditions of the collapse will reshuffle the social order so that their natural abilities and will-to-violence will place them on top. In The Postman, encounters with Holnists are a recurring problem, and fighting with them is the theme of the second half of the novel, however it is also clear that many communities have already driven away Holnist groups. This representation of macho survivalists as a threat to communities is the result of fairly astute observation of actual far-right survivalist groups. Rebecca Solnit, in her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, suggests that when collapse or disaster occurs, most people consolidate community bonds and build mutual networks of support. The converse side to this behavior is that individualist survivalists who consider the accumulation of weapons to be rule number one for post-disaster continuity are inevitably threats to such altruistic social networks.
The Holnists are, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect to The Postman. They preach a perverse gospel of Übermenschianism, and to emphasize their ethos, two of their leaders are, in fact, artificially augmented as the results of a pre-collapse military experiment. Their adherence to the text of a distant philosopher recalls the real-life survivalist-terror group, The Order. In the early 1980s, The Order was a small group of violent white power nationalists who drew inspiration from the writings of William Luther Pierce, a former physics professor who became the leader of the white power organization, National Alliance. The Order lived in the wilderness of the American Northwest (rural Washington in particular, and incidentally some of the filming for The Postman was done relatively close to The Order member’s homesteads) and launched attacks on sites in nearby cities. Some statements issued by Holnists are inflected by concerns about race, although they are not explicitly racist, and there is some resemblance between the fictional survivalists and the real white nationalist cell.
Fundamentally, The Postman is about cultural myths; how they compete for dominance or possibly merge with others into a foundation for national development. The Holnist myth was persistent but already dying before the events of the novel. A group of women, working as assassins but posing as submissives, exploit the macho ideals of the Holnists to get close to them in order to kill them off. Krantz reflects on how this event created a new myth, one that may pose similar dangers to that of the Holnist philosophy. The novel thus thrives on a tension between negative cultural myths of violent destruction and inherent group superiority, and positive myths of community building and social advancement. For much of the novel Gordon works with a group of people who maintain a myth that
an artificial intelligence called ‘Cyclops’ is in command of the social order, ironically so that people do not give up on the idea of the pursuit of knowledge and scientific progress. Finally, the novel ends with Krantz reflecting on one of his postmen doing the work to perpetuate the myth of a postal system until the myth is no longer necessary. Krantz imagines the possibility that his illusory postal system will become real, and in becoming real, unify the states into the actual Restored United States.
No comments:
Post a Comment