From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Title The Postman

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	David Brin
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Post-apocalyptic science-fiction
Publisher	Bantam Books
Released	1985
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	294 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-553-05107-5

The Postman (1985) is a post-apocalyptic novel by David Brin. A drifter stumbles across the uniform of an old United States Postal Service letter carrier and gives hope to a community threatened by local warlords with empty promises of aid from the "Restored United States of America." The first two parts were published separately as "The Postman" (1982) and "Cyclops" (1984). Both won Hugo Awards for Best Novella. The completed novel was awarded first prize in the John W. Campbell Awards for the best science fiction novel of the year in 1986. It was also nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel.

In 1997, a film adaption was made of the novel. It was widely panned by critics, and was criticized for straying too far from the source material.^{[citation needed]}

Contents 1 Plot summary 2 Trivia 3 See Also 4 External links

Compared to the film, the book is generally seen to have more substance. Despite the post-apocalyptic scenario, and several action sequences, the book is largely about civilization and symbols. Each of the three sections deals with a different symbol. The first is the Postman himself, who takes the uniform solely for warmth after he loses everything but his sleeping clothes. He wanders without establishing himself anywhere, and exchanges poorly-played scenes of William Shakespeare for supplies. His reputation as a real postman builds not because of a deliberate fraud (at least initially) but because people are desperate to believe. Later, in the second section, he encounters a community (Corvallis, Oregon) led by Cyclops, apparently a sentient artificial intelligence created at Oregon State University which miraculously survived the cataclysm. However, the machine was actually destroyed, and the appearance of it is being maintained by a group of scientists trying to keep hope, order, and knowledge alive.

Eventually, in the third section, as the Postman joins forces with the Cyclops scientists in a war against an influx of "hypersurvivalists" (the concept of survivalists taken to a slave-owning, misogynistic extreme—indeed, Brin has said that the novel was, in a way, an anti-survivalist novel), he begins to find that the survivalists are being pressed from the Rogue River area to the south as well. As the story ends, and he comes close to the survivalist's southern enemy, he begins to find traces of them, primarily in the symbol that they rally behind: the Bear Flag of California. The final scenes give the impression that the three symbols may rally together in an effort to revive civilization.

The hypersurvivalists are more commonly referred to as Holnists, after the founder of their ideal, Nathan Holn. Many times through the book curses are uttered which damn Holn for his actions. Nathan Holn was an author who championed an extreme, violent, misogynistic and survivalist society. Holn is never seen in the novel, but in the time following what should have been a brief period of civil disorder, followers of Holn prevented the United States from recovering from the limited war, and the plagues that followed.

Another message of the plot deals with the backstory of the post-apocalyptic world: specifically, that it was not the electronics-destroying electromagnetic pulses, nor the destruction of major cities, nor the release of various bio-engineered plagues that actually destroyed society: rather, it was the survivalists themselves, those who maintained stockpiles of weapons and ammunition and who preyed on humanitarian workers and other forces of order. The message of this is obviously that what could really destroy civilization is its own members.

• The fictional President of the United States is named "Richard Starkey," after Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.

• List of nuclear holocaust fiction

• The Postman publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• The Postman: The Movie, An Impression by the Author of the Original Novel by David Brin