The Fredösphere

Earlier today I blogged about this sci-fi short story site.  From there it was a hop, skip & jump (minus the skip and the jump) to this best-of site for short stories on-line.  I hunted around for some classic stories and ... heeeeey, that name, Lester Del Rey, that sounds familiar.  Ah, I remember:  he showed up as the author on several sci-fi covers I blogged about here and here.

I recommend you read this Del Rey short story, with a creepy post-apolcalyptic world from a dog's POV.  Now look at these covers from Del Rey novels:  one with "marooned" in the title, one with a wrecked space ship, and, heck, another one with a wrecked space ship.  (He's also got one with a mermaid, but that's not consistent with today's thesis so we'll just declare that one an outlier and move on.)  Looks like we've got an apocalypsist on our hand!

What is it that's so cool about loneliness and being cut off from civilization?  Why do I secretly half crave (well, one-sixteenth crave anyway) a life of wandering from city to city, looking for canned food and signs of survivors?  Can an extrovert possibly share this fantasy?  Am I a bad person?

Mad Max ... The Stand ... guys like Del Rey -- obviously I'm not the only one.