Post Apocalyptic Books

[Brett E]

For some reason I find this genre particularly fascinating so I thought a thread might be in order to highlight the best of the genre.

 

My Recommendations:

 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

The World Without Us by Alan Wiseman - This one isn't a novel but (educated) speculation on what would happen if people just disappeared.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

 

There is another one that I liked but have totally forgotten the name and cannot find it...

 

Anyway please share any recommendations you may have even if they're pretty obvious like mine

 

[tberton]

The post-apocalyotic section of Cloud Atlas is my favourite part of the book, so there's that.

[nonstopintrospection]

How apocalyptic does it have to be to qualify?  Some of my favorites that I personally put in this genre:

 

The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang - Kate Wilhelm

The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe

 

But all of them veer pretty far from standard post-apocalypse.  In particular Bacigalupi's stuff, including his YA novels and short stories I find really interesting, both as character writing and for the ideas and settings.

 

I've heard a lot of great things about Oryx and Crake, but the writing didn't really click for me.

[malkav11]

It's pre-apocalyptic (which is a lot rarer, and I find slightly more satisfying), but Ben H. Winters' The Last Policeman and two sequels are primo stuff. The idea is that a comet is going to hit the planet, 100% guaranteed, and they know almost exactly when. And when that happens, everyone's going to die. Or as close to it as makes no real difference. The first book is about a year out from doomsday, so society is wobbly and tending towards collapse as people one by one start to bail on day to day life and go work on that bucket list, but it's still making a pretense at normalcy. And the protagonist, newly promoted to detective as his police department starts to thin out, finds himself compelled to investigate a murder (disguised as a suicide), even though no one really cares anymore and it serves no one. Plus his sister has fallen in with folks who think there's a way to avert the catastrophe and although the protagonist is certain they are either lying or crazy, there's some things that are weird about them. It's quite the thing. I didn't initially feel like it needed to be followed up, but the two sequels fill out the rest of the timeline in ways that are actually quite interesting and heartbreaking and bleak in that way that you get when every chapter tells you how much closer the end of the world is, guaranteed.

[rdc]

A Canticle for Liebowitz.

[Brett E]

How apocalyptic does it have to be to qualify?  Some of my favorites that I personally put in this genre:

 

The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang - Kate Wilhelm

The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe

 

But all of them veer pretty far from standard post-apocalypse.  In particular Bacigalupi's stuff, including his YA novels and short stories I find really interesting, both as character writing and for the ideas and settings.

 

I've heard a lot of great things about Oryx and Crake, but the writing didn't really click for me.

 

I don't think there needs to be rules, if it's sorta related to Post Apocalypse then that's fine.

 

In that vein The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke is good one, it's more straight sci-fi than post apocalypse but has elements of it.

[BobbyBesar]

The Earth Abides is one of the grand daddies of the genre.

Book of the New Sun is a "dying earth" book, named after the Jack Vance collection by the same name. I don't have any other specific recommendations on that genre, but it's another keyword if you're looking for more titles.

Theres a pretty good anthology called Wastelands, it also got a more recent follow-up.

[mikemariano]

A Canticle for Liebowitz.

 

This is basically the correct and only answer.  The novel has a much wider scope than it lets on, and has so many unique images.  It is a well-deserved classic.

[Brett E]

Well that's just been moved to the top of my to-read list.

[seamus2389]

City of Bohane is a kinda of post apocalyptic book set in an imaginary city on the west coast of Ireland. 

 

The girl with all the gifts is an interesting take on the zombie genre.

[Dreg]

Wool - Hugh Howey

 

Seveneves - Neal Stephenson 

 

Dies The Fire - SM Stirling   

[Mangela Lansbury]

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson is the only one that's springing to mind. It's a 280 page stream of consciousness rant from the last woman on earth.

[coaxmetal]

Although its not actually a global apocalypse, more of a localized thing, a good scifi story that fits the bill is Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, it's a russian short novel and is what inspired the STALKER games.

 

Also, again not post-apocalyptic, per se, but as others have metioned, the Dying Earth subgenre is also good, and may have a similar appeal.

[namman siggins]

I'm a complete sucker for this genre. I love seeing an author's or authors' visions of what the world would look like if civilization broke down:
Zone One by Colson Whitehead
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell
Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee
The Children of Men by P.D. James
The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch
The Death of Grass by John Christopher
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

 

So many books starting with The

It's pre-apocalyptic (which is a lot rarer, and I find slightly more satisfying), but Ben H. Winters' The Last Policeman and two sequels are primo stuff. The idea is that a comet is going to hit the planet, 100% guaranteed, and they know almost exactly when. And when that happens, everyone's going to die. Or as close to it as makes no real difference. The first book is about a year out from doomsday, so society is wobbly and tending towards collapse as people one by one start to bail on day to day life and go work on that bucket list, but it's still making a pretense at normalcy. And the protagonist, newly promoted to detective as his police department starts to thin out, finds himself compelled to investigate a murder (disguised as a suicide), even though no one really cares anymore and it serves no one. Plus his sister has fallen in with folks who think there's a way to avert the catastrophe and although the protagonist is certain they are either lying or crazy, there's some things that are weird about them. It's quite the thing. I didn't initially feel like it needed to be followed up, but the two sequels fill out the rest of the timeline in ways that are actually quite interesting and heartbreaking and bleak in that way that you get when every chapter tells you how much closer the end of the world is, guaranteed.

Here's a great interview with the author

http://www.onthemedia.org/people/ben-h-winters/

[gregbrown]

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson is the only one that's springing to mind. It's a 280 page stream of consciousness rant from the last woman on earth.

 

I only made it halfway through before I got distracted by another book, but it really is a pretty enrapturing book once you get into it. I need to read some of Markson's other stuff, since it's supposed to be just as batty.

 

As others have said, A Canticle for Leibowitz is excellent and doubles as one of the few sci-fi books to tackle religion in a fascinating manner. Another older, striking sci-fi work is Inverted World by Christopher Priest (who later wrote The Prestige and other critically-acclaimed novels).

 

A more recent one I dug is Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, comprised of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. The first alone is a pretty quick and gripping read, and the others are great as well but shift tonally as they expand the picture of what's happening.

[elvaq]

The post-apocalyotic section of Cloud Atlas is my favourite part of the book, so there's that.

 

There is a significant chunk of The Bone Clocks that features a post-apocalypse that is scarily believable.

[tberton]

Also true, although that section is probably my least favourite part of that book.Not that it's bad, I just like the earlier stuff more.

[bakelite]

I really liked the Southern Reach books. The Roadside Picnic/Stalker influence is very obvious, but Vandermeer took the basic theme in a new direction and the shifts in perspective between books kept it interesting.

[namman siggins]

I highly recommend The Flame Alphabet. It's a weird post-apocalyptic novel in which the sound of children's speech becomes deadly to adults and adults have to leave them and move underground; it goes deep into Jewish mysticism because the contagion was brought forth by an obscure Jewish sect that lives in huts.

 

It's a wild and weird ride and Ben Marcus does a beautiful job bring it all to life; also, Marcus is a sentence technician. 

[Brett E]

On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee

 

I've just finished this one and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It's an odd one for sure.

The world is interesting, it doesn't go into much detail about what happened just that things sort of deteriorated in seemingly the whole world. Then people from China who seemed to still have their act together moved to the US and occupied near abandoned areas. Exactly how the new social dynamic of class based towns arose seems unclear but I guess it's not that important, it just seems like such a strange system that it's hard to imagine it occurring organically.

 

The story is told by an unknown narrator who supposedly is passing on this well known tale but has never met the main character. That's fine but it makes the choice of where to add detail to the story a bit strange, there'll be long sections about the tangentially related things or other details that only the main character would have noticed including her inner thoughts. So maybe the story was originally passed on by the main character but it seems unlikely since it's often mentioned how she has no idea that anyone else cares about her story. I dunno, it's just strange.

 

I struggled with the way it was written, the paragraphs are often very long which means natural breaks infrequent. There's not really any punctuation used to assist in readability, by which I primarily mean quotations for dialogue, I know there's different approaches here but there's almost no attempt to separate it from the general story telling which for me at least created an overall vagueness and made it harder to get immersed in the story.

 

It's always nice to have a female main character but she has almost no personality which is partially attributed to very restrained social upbringing. She also has very little agency beyond the one big initial decision that starts the story, afterwards she is taken from one place to another (almost entirely by men) and even traded as a commodity, the distasteful nature of the arrangement is commented upon and there's an argument that these events are a part of the world she is in but I still find it all a but disappointing.

I'm uneasy about imposing overly liberal/progressive values so normally I would shy away from points like that but in this case it seems too overt to ignore.

 

I also read A Canticle for Liebowitz which was excellent.