A year and a half ago I published an essay in the New York Review of Science Fiction which took literary critics to task for not mentioning the influence of Walter M. Miller Jr's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz on Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road. (You can read a reprinted version of the essay here).

I was severely taken to task for this essay by some critics. But history has a nice way of vindicating simple truths. The proof is over on the Guardian book blog where a short essay states that "Walter M Miller Jr's A Canticle for Leibowitz is a direct ancestor of Cormac McCarthy's The Road" and "Rare and brave were the mainstream critics who recognised its SF antecedents without coughing and spluttering about how it somehow transcended the genre."

It's always nice to get the last word in an argument, especially when someone else echoes what you'd been saying all along.