While
perusing the bookstore this weekend, I noticed that Orbit has released a new
edition of David Brin’s The Postman. Since I have been meaning to read the book for years, I figured this was
a good excuse to pick it up.
While I
enjoyed the book, it fell far short of the classic for which I was hoping. The first half of the book is a fun, tense
story of survival, discovery, and the dawning of hope for new future, but the
second half bogs down in a mish-mash of different themes and ideas that don’t completely
seem to fit together. I got the
impression that the author didn’t fully know where the book was going, and
perhaps forced it to its conclusion instead of letting it fully develop.
Still, I
read the book in less than three days, so it certainly pulled me along and kept
me entertained. In the rather thin
sub-genre of post-apocalyptic works, it probably stands as one of the better
ones, but in the larger world of science-fiction and fantasy, it certainly
doesn’t crack the top 100.
