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I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I kind of liked it? I felt it's written in a very sincere and fearless way and it's nice that there isn't a "moral" to the whole thing. Unfortunately I think McCarthy sucks at writing SF so the apocalypse feels a bit contrived or unbelievable. Not that that is the point of the book whatsoever but it does detract a bit and require at least a bit of suspension of disbelief. The prose was very nice and lurid. I liked Blood Meridian a lot more, I felt that book actually changed me a bit.
I think he does a good job at portraying the evils of a post-apocalyptic world though. One semi-popular Reddit-tier opinion that often gets repeated is that video game writing is really bad compared to literary/book-writing. So what comes to mind here is comparing The Road with the first two Fallout games (the third onwards, while being fun as games, are utter slop on a writing level so I'll discount them. NV could be included). And if I look at the first Fallout game and at least some parts of the second and consider them as what life in a post-apocalypse would look like, I don't know if I would say The Road is that much of a more of a compelling story. Fallout (again, discounting the slop Bethesda written later entries) did a good enough rendition of things like slavery, cannibalism, crime, etc. Not as dark as The Road but video games generally can't be for various reasons. Not as personal maybe (with the whole father-son thing in the Road) but I think as an overall experience I wouldn't say that they stuck with me much less than McCarthy's work. Maybe you could say modern video games have shitty slop writing (and you'd be right to a large degree), but that's also true of most books. Maybe I'd also rate it different if I had a kid. There are definitely a lot of literary works that blow any game out of the water but that's comparing the greatest of the great of a medium that's more than 2000 years old with a 30-40 year old medium. I don't know, I feel like you can feel creative mastery in any medium and it's also quite rare in any medium.
I am also reading Roadside Picnic by the Strugastky brothers. I'm actually really enjoying it so far. The main character going from being a young man with all that entails, i.e. not caring as much about the future, not caring about engaging in daring adventures to becoming more settled as he has a wife and a child is quite relatable to me. I am not at the child part but life at the end of your 20s with a GF is very different to my early 20s. You mostly don't have to care as much when you're younger? It's very nicely written, the Zone is described in a very compelling way and the characters seem real. You notice it was written in the Soviet era but that's charming more than anything. Halfway through but it's very enjoyable. Can see why it had such a long tail as a literary work (the Stalker movie and later games).
Notice that in order to be compelling, the story is set in some unnamed capitalist country.
In USSR, "stalkers" monkeying with incomprehensible alien stuff for private profits would not be tolerated, and writing about brave and competent Soviet scientists selflessly exploring the zones for common good just would not be believable in 1972.
They are already not tolerated - stalkers are explicitly violating international law.
Yes, with enforcement akin to any other breach of international law. This figures.
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