The Postman

"Cole: Kevin Costner was in a bad movie version of this… The themes that underlie the book are reasonably positive: the way the characters deal with their duty to each other, at a community level – in the story of post-apocalyptic survivors eking out a civilised existence – and what technology means to us. It explores questions of how much faith we should put in computers. It has a lot of value for the decades ahead. Singer: I will defend the film! For whatever reason, it’s constantly on cable TV and – for whatever reason – I can’t help myself. “It’s not just war, but how people react to it that determines the fate of society.” But the book is different in lots of ways. It’s not just the war, but how people react to it that determines the fate of society, whether we stick together or collapse. It also puts its finger on something we’re experiencing right now, the danger of some people who welcome the chaos. People who claim to be patriotic, but want to tear everything down. Yet this is a book written in 1982. One of the other powerful messages in it – is that what keeps us together is an idea. What is the US? It’s our belief and faith in it. This is a system that is getting challenged today. Like all great fiction and science fiction, it has the underlying themes that make you think and retain its relevance decades after it was written."