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(3.5 stars.) Most post-apocalyptic stories can ultimately be traced back to a deep nostalgia for the pre-modern, a self-conscious post-modern Romanticism projected onto the future -- inevitably, the (crucially, now much smaller) post-apocalypse populace reverts back to something like feudalism, or occasionally tribalism (or, often enough, exaggerated evil tribalism), paired with a reversion to pre-modern technology which includes the wisdom of knowing that modernity was, in some sense, a mistake. Accordingly, this nostalgia for a simpler, lost age in these stories is typically expressed in a plot where hubristic modernity/technology has caused the apocalypse in question; frustration and unease with modernity is sublimated onto the cause of the sense of modern/post-modern dislocation, a sort of 'original sin' against God or nature or both, that finally receives its just punishment.

All of this serves as a pretty interesting thematic setting for literature, imo, which makes it somewhat surprising that literary/fine art authors have avoided the genre, for the most part. The list is quite short: 1984 or Handmaid's Tale bear a family resemblance, but don't really qualify; some of Ballard's work is at least adjacent to the genre; Kavan's Ice, sort of; Haushofer's The Wall; James's Children of Men; Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men; Mandel's Station Eleven, maybe; Rand's Anthem, which is surprisingly not terrible; parts 5-6 of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas; Cormac's The Road; and a few others. In the more self-consciously literary versions (Harpman, Cormac, Haushofer), it's interesting that they escape genre/SFF with a simple but clever stratagem, i.e., just not explaining the origin of the apocalypse, which raises the whole thing into the airy heights of metaphor and lyricism; the pulp author's compulsive need to explain the causes of the apocalypse is somehow the key dividing line, there.

In any event, barring these few exceptions, we are then left with, alas, a ton of terrible genre fiction, along with some reasonably good efforts, such as the mildly corny and melodramatic American/British 1950s-1980s guys: Walter Miller, Peter Matheson, Neville Shute, Pat Frank, Chris Priest, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, et al. The Postman is written in the tradition of these authors and is arguably the best of them; charmingly B-movie plot and writing, and very good in what it aims to do, though the final third is not great. Still, Brin's alternate history is cleverly constructed; also, I happen to live in the Willamette Valley, where the story is set, and I was impressed by the accuracy, e.g., two (real) dams break with no one to maintain them, which pushes water/mud through the city of Eugene, and then the correct kinds of tree grow on the mud deposits that now fill the middle of the city, etc.