Loyal readers will know that I loves me my sci fi. But I have qualifications. Sci Fi must not be cool and high-tech and edgy just to be all those things. Just as with this blog, where rebellion is not an end in and of itself, the mind-blowing coolness of sci fi must have a purpose. There must be depth.

The examples of this are many in my TV and book favorites. Battlestar Galactica is a show that utilizes and transcends the awe-inspiring concepts of apocalypse, interstellar existence, and a gender-neutral society to draw major parallels to today’s War on Terror. Brave New World doesn’t rest on the strangeness and excitement of a culture doped numb and fed a line of bullshit, but shows how it’s really us, back in the 30s and now. Contact doesn’t just spin a web about First Contact, but asks tough, painful questions about the roles of science, faith, and humanity in today’s world.

That’s how it is with The Stand, Stephen King’s 1978 masterwork on a manmade end of the world. Combining the evils of military research, the “every man for himself” mentality that lies deep within, and the otherworldly battle between devils and angels, it’s a rollicking ride that provides sci fi cool and crossgenre depth.

A military-made virus escapes its confines in the desert and makes its way across the world, killing nearly everyone in its path. It starts as rumors of quarantines, hospitals filling up, military evacuations, piles of burning bodies in the boondocks. The fear is real and pungent, and it kills just as quickly as the actual bug. Within weeks, the world is roads clogged with cars with dead drivers, cities burning by natural and manmade reasons, and a few lone survivors.

Now here’s where it gets trippy. These survivors are devastated, desperate, alone. But they are having visions, dreams so thick they can touch them, filled with an wizened old Black woman and a figure of darkness and crows feathers. What happens next then is a quest, to figure out what the visions mean, to find other survivors, and to determine what happens next in an empty and burned out world.

King works wonders with his highly disparate and fascinating cast of characters, people who feel desperately real, people trusted with the end of the world, and people who point the way to a sense of meaning for the book and the future. It’s a book that is excessively cool, with its sci fi speculation, it’s rock and roll heart, and it’s deep and vast interior. It’s a book I’ve read several times, all 1000+ pages of it, a book I cried at and threw across the room, a book that left a hole in my heart and then filled it again as best it could.

Thirty years after it was published, The Stand is still a powerful and necessary read.

Like The Stand? Like another book you just have to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments! And don’t forget to subscribe for free QRW updates with the link below…

RELATED LINK of the Day: The 1994 miniseries based on King’s novel was a pretty damn good likeness. And it captured some of the weirdness that is the book; this intro to the series uses a bit of rock and roll with the disturbing beginnings of the Captain Tripps plague.