Storyline: 3/5 
 Characters: 3/5 
 Writing Style: 4/5 
 World: 3/5 
 I like surprises. I approach book jackets with trepidation lest the publisher give away a novelty or reveal that the author had carefully placed. So I was torn as to whether or not to read The Postman. On the one hand, I'd already seen the movie and so I guessed that there wouldn't be much to surprise me. On the other hand, it was a highly awarded book, being nominated for the Hugo and winning the Cambell and the Locus. Curiosity and a goal to read all Hugo nominees made me take the plunge. 
 The movie did indeed take away many of the fun surprises. Still, Brin writes with a haunting sparsity that reminded me at times of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. In that way the book carried a bonus inaccessible to the movie. Brin's world - the very air - had a tincture that was missing from its cinematic counterpart as well. If made today the movie would be have to be much heavier on the CGI if it wanted to properly relate the atmosphere. The book did better convey the primary point of the tale(view spoiler)[, the power of ideas (hide spoiler)]. And that's where the heart and merit of the story lies. Brin gave us a tale of the quaint in apocalyptica; of the power for nostalgia and self-delusion amid of time of grim reality. It was light-hearted and fun in a place where you might expect laughter and amusement to have been extinguished with the rest of civilization. 
 I was agreeably riding along with the tale until about the halfway point. That is not only where the movie began to diverge from the book, but where the second began to diverge from the first half of the printed version. Until that time we'd been in a post-apocalyptic land reminiscent of the Wild West and Pony Express (this impression undoubtedly reinforced by the film). Brin's second half, however, took us more into the land of Mad Max, and I never made the transition with the author. I can recognize those books that made a success out of mishmash - books like Babel-17, The Many-Colored Land, Hyperion, and Blindsight. Brin's The Postman leaped, but it didn't clear the gorge; didn't jump the divide between unsuccessful and successful cross-genres. There was a second major point Brin was trying to get across (view spoiler)[ something to do with machismo and feminism, individualism and socialism, the United States and the USSR (hide spoiler)] that muddled in with the mess that was the second half of the book. The reason the second half veered off-course, in my estimation, is due to Brin's failure to fully picture the world. I never had a good idea of the people who inhabited it or their environment. I never understood their feelings about what came before or what they wanted from the future. I would have been okay with science fiction treading on my western if I had been prepared for it. It wasn't even a surprise twist. The second half was simply introduced with an off-handedness that confirmed that I wasn't in the same mindset as the author. Maybe the movie is to blame. 
 The first half alone made this a highly enjoyable book. I think I'm just going to forget the second half so that I can hold on to and justify my favoritism.