Behind the Book: Family on Ice
I wanted to write prehistoric people as they were, not as primitives. Here is how the real Toba supervolcano and a single family became Family on Ice.
Tag: Survival (Page 2)
Disaster RecoveryI Climbed Out of That Canyon at Eight at Night
Breathless at the top of a canyon at eight at night, explaining to a fireman named Kurt what had happened and where my father was.
AdaptationEurydice: The Confession of Tom Ayrton
Verne gave Tom Ayrton thirty pages and no interior. This is his confession, taken in sessions after twelve years alone on Tabor Island, including what he did for his wife.
Book ReviewsThe Martian
An astronaut is stranded alone on Mars, presumed dead, with a fraction of the food he needs to survive until rescue. The whole thriller rides on voice: Watney is funny, profane, and practical enough to turn technical problems into a…
Disaster RecoveryThe Fire Jumped the Road Behind Me. I Had Nothing in the Car.
Fire on both sides of the road, and when I looked back it had jumped behind me. Years of camping experience and nothing in the car that helped.
1970sPapillon (1973)
Franklin Schaffner's 1973 Henri Charriere memoir. Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman.
2000sBattle Royale (2000)
Fukasaku's 2000 teen-survival film. Junior high students sent to an island to kill each other.
2000sThe Lost Battalion (2001)
The Lost Battalion is an A&E television movie that punches above its budget. Rick Schroder plays Major Charles Whittlesey, a New York lawyer who took five hundred and fifty-four men of the 77th Infantry Division into the Argonne Forest in…
FictionCloudborn
A shear event kills the flock in forty seconds. Silt is alone in open atmosphere for the first time. Hard science fiction survival told from a genuinely alien point of view.
FamilyFamily on Ice
The Toba eruption cut sunlight across Eurasia seventy-four thousand years ago. A family group tries to stay alive through it, in prose with no quotation marks and no comfort.
AdaptationThe Mysterious Island
Verne's castaway novel retold as the private record of Gideon Spilett, with Neb given his own story and a New Mexican widow the original did not have.
Fantasy FictionDungeon
A deserter enters the dungeon under the white house to fill a trophy case with twenty categories of treasure. Literary fantasy built from the 1977 MIT text adventure.