Extended Mediography

You know, I was just thinking about 'lyrical' and 'good' writing and how much I love Cormac McCarthy after reading your post, Hans, and that made me think of one of my other favorite authors: Michael Chabon. All of his stuff is flipping great, but I'd say the book probably the most applicable to AW is "Gentlemen of the Road" which reads kind of like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser but without the sorcery. Seriously though, you have a couple of rough guys who wander into a teeteringly stable city state in a vast nomad/bandit haunted wasteland and seriously screw up the fragile status quo. That's the only story I can recommend for AW specifically, but all of his other stuff will make you a better person, which *might* make you better at AW too.

Michael Chabon is great. I read both Summerland (I would love a Summerland rpg, btw) & Kavalier and Clay like 6 years ago and now I'm wondering why I haven't read more, as both of those were absolutely superb. I think I'm afraid his other stuff can't match those two.

What about AW-appropriate hip-hop? Do you have any? I've been thinking about it but haven't had any good finds yet. I'll keep listening through my stuff.

I MEAN, except for cLOUDDEAD. I have the album "ten" and while I have no clue what it's about, or even what they're saying most of the time, it's weird and chopped-up and I think is good mood music for AW.

Resident Anti-Hero  will give you a AW-Hip Hop Fix. Best of all you can download their albums for free!  Try their latest 2 or 3 albums to get your AW Fix.

http://www.residentantihero.com/

*edited: added link*

I just found the Post-Nuke Comic web comic yesterday, and read through the first 9 issues right away. The main protagonist could fit the A Boy and His Dog character, but maybe a Hocus with very few followers would do as well. He's this guy with definite weird abilities for sure.

The comic is written and drawn by the same person. The art's not fantastic, but better than I could manage, the text contains unfortunate mistakes (misspellings and such), but the story is very interesting to me.

The Apocalypse World in the Post-Nuke Comic is a frozen wasteland, with snowmobiles and walking dead mutants. Great stuff.  :)

Tom Waits reads Bukowski's The Laughing Heart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va1t6a0zCkQ

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

@Charles Bukowski

Raymond Thorp's Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson is stuffed with wildness, community, gangs, murderers, barterers, and people driven mad in different terrible ways. It is pieced together from primary and secondary sources but reads like fiction. Liver-eating Johnson was a piece of work. I guess he'd be a Gunlugger with some Operator moves.

Few minutes of really apocalyptic video of abandoned coal mining towns in the Appalachians.

http://vimeo.com/3624989

Neat blog post about the book Noise by Darin Bradley:

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2010/08/guest-blog-first-time-novelist-darin-bradley-on-noise-the-apocalypse-and-you.html

The Four Cocktail Rings of the Apocalypse:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_justified_sinner/3993649386/
these babies deserve a game of their own.

I am also a fan of the 'nonfiction' sources for Apocalyptica.

Definitely check out The World Without Us:http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html for how the planet, and particularly our urban-industrial centers would respond to suddenly not having us around to maintain them. It's a really fascinating book and a keystone for thinking about this stuff.

One of the things that makes it interesting is that he goes over several places in the world where 'mini-apocalypses' have already happened, forcing people to abandon population centers in a hurry. The aforementioned Appalachia gets some play, and you see a bit of it in the video posted earlier, but the craziest thing there is Centralia, Pennsylvania: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania, a town completely abandoned due to a mine fire that has been burning underneath since 1962(!!!).

They also talk about Cyprus, where the Civil War demilitarized zone necessitated abandoning a fully-functional modern resort community: http://listverse.com/2008/03/10/top-10-interesting-abandoned-places/ (Actually, that last link has a wealth of amazing Apocalyptica... check out that mind-blowing abandoned 'pod village' in Taiwan, and of course, Chernobyl.

Someone mentioned comics, and there's a wealth of good stuff out right now: Wasteland, Y the Last Man, DMZ (particularly well-suited for the vibe of AW), Zero Killer, and classic stuff like Kamandi and Killraven if you want to go really gonzo.

For my money, the most interesting right now are 'Resurrection', an AW set after the invading aliens who destroyed civilization mysteriously up and left, and 'Irredeemable' and 'Incorruptible', which as superhero comics are light on the AW-type stuff, but present a pretty compelling vision of what a world where Superman decided to just be a total dick would look like.

-Jim C.

Definitely second checking out The World Without Us. A tasty read and it gave me a bunch of ideas for AW.

I don't know how this slipped my mind before, but Deus Irae, a flawed but fascinating post-apocalyptic novel by Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny.

I'm really enjoying Don Winslow's The Death and Life of Bobby Z, which has a great line that could be straight from the AW MC's Guide:

"But this is just too fucking confusing for Tim to deal with at the moment... so even as he and the woman and the kid go inside to make some sandwiches, he doesn't get that the world is fucking him in fresh and interesting ways."

Um, this maybe a bit to 'fantasy', but I really liked the imagery of Armageddon's Children by Terry Brooks.
The world, now ravaged by nuclear war and plague, lies in ruins. Demons and their once-men underlings scour the continents, enslaving and experimenting upon what healthy young remain. Mutations from the fallout and poisons have produced offshoots from humanity—Moles (those adapted to living underground), Spiders (named for their agile, long limbs), and the scaly, brutish Lizards. Zombie-like creatures called Croaks roam free as well, searching for bodies to devour. Most humans are walled up in stadiums and arenas in large cities, fortified compounds filled with thousands of frightened refugees. A few, mostly children, live as tribes hidden in buildings on the streets.

AW all the way (minus the demons)

G'day Again,
Is anyone as excited as me about this game?! Both as a inspirational artefact for AW and a game in its own right. Freaking Awesome!
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/73369/51st-state

Static by Godspeed You Black Emperor.

It is the Hocus's anthem.