Posthuman Blues

Tonight I wandered to my apartment lobby and perused the "library" -- a few shelves of dusty paperbacks and arcane reference materials. Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's 1984 novel "Warday" was there; I remember plowing through it while riding buses in Florida on the way to the Space Coast. It's a simply told chronicle of life after a "limited" nuclear exchange with the USSR; strangely, it seems as frighteningly topical in the 21st century world of suitcase nukes and fundamentalist political leaders as it was during the actual Cold War.

So I sat on one of the lobby's new chairs, my back facing the entrance, and reread Strieber's uncanny depiction of a nuclear attack on New York City and Washington, D.C. And, quite frankly, found myself deeply afraid . . .