The Guardian Examines The Road's SF Ancestry

Few who have read the winner of the 1961 Hugo award, A Canticle For Leibowitz, will have failed to recognise its influence on Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Yet when that latter book was garnering its ecstatic reviews back in 2006, the fact that it clearly fitted into a long science fiction tradition of post-apocalyptic speculation seemed to cause some discomfort. Rare and brave were the mainstream critics who recognised its SF antecedents without coughing and spluttering about how it somehow transcended the genre.