The End of the World Running Club: A Dystopian Survival Thriller About Endurance and Redemption

by Adrian J. Walker

The line between any two points in your life is liable to be strange and unfathomable, a tangle of chance and tedium. But some points seem to have clearer connections, even ones that are far from each other, as if they have a direct line that bypasses the normal run of time.

“Nine days to make the final three hundred miles.” It felt strange to be saying this with confidence. Even a few weeks before, it would have been with hilarity or despair. But what had changed? My body? Was I fitter? Perhaps a little, but certainly not that much after just less than a fortnight of movement. What had changed was my perspective. The task seemed less impossible the more we pushed on.

I used to dread being asked whether I believed in God. Either answer aligns you with an entirely new set of certainties. Say yes and you’re certain of a myth, you say “God bless you” and mean it quite literally, you commit to a wild insanity of faith. Say no and you’re an atheist: confident, assured, and certain of the scientific method and all of its own twisted ideas—string theory, infinite universes, emergent consciousness, equally strange, equally alien, each requiring its own version of that insane faith. I know now it’s certainty itself I have a problem with. Certainty doesn’t feel like something we’re supposed to have.

It’s hard being a human. Most of the time we’re just blind idiots seeking joy in a world full of fear and pain. We have no idea what we’re doing, and on the rare occasions when we get things right, we’re just lucky.

God is a shape that fits a God-shaped hole. There, will that do?

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and The Last of Us by Rob Ewing)

These were mentioned by the author in his Afterword. I immediately read and loved Station Eleven.