A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.
You can lead with all new linesIf you believe in what you sayAnd life can be just as you make itBelieve the lie and it will all come true
Yeah, OK, so sometimes the lie is easier to tell than the truth.
But what happens when the lie is a noble one, one that (to borrow from The Simpsons) embiggens your fellow man? And what happens if the lie
gets out of control and takes on a life of its own?
That's the basic idea behind The Postman, by which I
mean the lauded David Brin novel, not the critically savaged (hello
Razzies!) Kevin Costner flick that sprang from it. Gordon Krantz is not
actually the titular postman - indeed, there are no such things in the
post-apocalyptic world Brin lays out (in what is now our actual past).
But he claims to be one, just to survive. Then, shit happens.
Brin does an interesting thing in The Postman
because instead of taking us through the apocalypse and the initial
postlude of survival, he drops Gordon (and us) in 16 years after
everything went to hell. That's allowed the world to settle a bit,
although it's settled into a world full of dangers, from mundane bandits
to leftover pre-war survivalists with a philosophy that's very like Ayn
Rand on steroids. It's while escaping from those kinds of bandits that
Krantz comes upon an abandoned USPS truck, complete with dead driver
inside. He nicks the uniform purely for warmth and grabs a bag of mail
for reading (and presumably other) material, no real intent to pull a
scam on anybody.
The scam, such as it is, unfolds slowly and does
require a bit of a stretch, that being that after nearly two decades of
there being no such thing as the United States, much less the United
States Postal Service, people are overwhelmed at the idea of getting
mail service back. Krantz's attempts to slip away from the first small
town he comes to are complicated by people trying to pay him to take
letters for them. From there, Krantz builds an entire facade of being
an official of the Restored United States and begins to forge some
connections between the scattered Oregon settlements.
That's part one, in which Krantz falls into and
embraces his scam. Part two adds a nice twist. He comes to the town of
Corvallis (home of Oregon State University and a prime location for the
post-apocalyptic Dies the Fire series), where society seems to
be holding on pretty well and surging toward a brighter future. It's
precisely the kind of place Krantz has been looking for all these years,
a place to settle down and help rebuild the world, but he's now trapped
by his own lie. He's unable to give up the postman game because of how
much the lie has taken root behind him. Thrown in another nice twist
in the form of a still functional (maybe) super computer and this middle
section of the book is a highlight.
The third part (perhaps not coincidentally, the
part that wasn't originally published in stand alone form)doesn't fare
so well. There's an invading army of Randians threatening the
struggling civilization, which Krantz decides to stay behind and fight,
rather than flee. Which is a shame, because when the big showdown comes
- between genetically enhanced soldiers who have played no real part up
to this point - he's watching from the sidelines. Add in a weird bit
of extremist feminism that seems more like parody than anything else and
the book ends with a bit of a thud.
Naturally, this being Brin, it ends on an uplifting
(ha!) sentiment. He's big on science fiction as an inherently positive
endeavor, showing how mankind will keep on keeping on in the future.
It's a hard fit for a post-apocalyptic tale, so it has to at least
suggest that happy days are on the way to being here again. Having said
that, there's at least enough uncertainty in the world of The Postman
to not make it feel like a cop out.
The Details
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The Postman
by David Brin
Published 1985
Winner Locus Award, Aurthur C. Clarke Award
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