I see On the beach is in the list but not the classic by Nevil Shute. Which should be.
Before, during and after. As much as I find Pournelle a political ass, this beats two authors I generally prefer, Brin’s The Postman and Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (both much better than their respective movies).
Oh, and play Wasteland! ;-)
If you’re already including Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”, you’d probably appreciate the whole collection of short stories in his book Martian Chronicles, among which “Soft Rains” is one.
The whole collection isn’t post-apocalyptic (many of the stories focus on the run-up to imminent destruction) so you could skip some of the stories without harm, but you’d really be doing yourself a disservice not including the whole. Probably the last 6-7 stories at least would be a good fit for what you’re looking for.
Besides all of this, you will have read one of the truly great sci-fi books of the 20th century.
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. “Dyou mean to tel me them befor us by the time they done 1997 years they had boats in the air and all them things and here we are weve done 2347 years and mor and stil slogging in the mud?”
You’ve all covered most of the ones I can remember, so I’ll just go and throw Frank Herbert’s The White Plague onto the pile.
The Nature of Balance, by Tim Lebbon.
Iain Banks’ A Song of Stone. While it is not strictly a post-apocalyptic book - it’s set during the aftermath of a civil war in a fictional quasi-historical world - it does explore many of the same themes.
An offbeat take on post-apocalypse - a trilogy of books after Human civilization has passed on… because we’re enslaved by aliens. The Tripod Trilogy:
The White Mountains
The City of Gold and Lead
The Pool of Fire
Another offbeat one: Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. It’s more broadly non-fiction than fiction but doesn’t cleanly fall into either category. It’s a what-if thought experiment exploring how the environment and ecology would respond if humans suddenly disappeared.
Already mentioned here.
I read those as a kid - they are meant as YA fiction - while on a year long SF binge (good thing about our socialist state and brilliant public libraries - everything was available for free to my voracious appetite and once I finished the translated works I just moved to the English section and interlibrary loans).
But I think that series kindled my love for the genre.
If we’re willing to bend the rules then I remember Brian Aldiss writing a number of post apoc stories with a twist. One was set on a generation ship where the inhabitants didn’t know they were living inside a spaceship.
updated and sorted
- Adam, John Joseph - Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
- Atwood, Margaret - Oryx and Crake (dystopian)
- Atwood, Margaret - The Year of the Flood (dystopian)
- Banks, Iain - A Song of Stone (not strictly PA)
- Baxter, Stephen - Evolution
- Bear, Greg - Eon
- Bourne, JL - Day by Day Armageddon (Zombie)
- Bradbury, Ray - Martian Chronicles (collection, non-PA, except 13.)
- Bradbury, Ray - There Will Come Soft Rains
- Brin, David - The Postman
- Brinkley, William - The Last Ship
- Brooks, Max - World War Z (zombie)
- Christopher, John - The Death of Grass (+++)
- Christopher, John - The Tripods
- Daniel, Tony - Earthling
- Frank, Pat - Alas, Babylon
- Frank, Pat - On the Beach
- Golding, William - Lord of the Flies (PA)
- Grant, Mira - Deadline (zombie and probably shit)
- Grant, Mira - Feed (zombie and probably shit)
- Harkaway, Nick - The Gone-Away world
- Herbert, Frank - The White Plague
- Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker
- King, Stephen - The Dark Tower
- King, Stephen - The Stand
- Kirkman, Robert - The Walking Dead (zombie…obviously)
- Lanier, Sterling - Heiro’s Journey
- Lebbon, Tim - The Nature of Balance
- M. Miller Jr., Walter - A Cantical for Leibowitz (+++)
- M. Miller Jr., Walter - Beyond Armageddon
- Matheson, Richard - I Am Legend (vampire-zombie-madness)
- McCammon, Robert - Swan Song
- McCarthy,Cormac - The Road (PA)
- McDevitt, Jack - Eternity Road
- McIntyre, Vonda - Dreamsnake
- Niven, Larry - Inconstant Moon
- Niven, Larry - Lucifer’s Hammer
- Poeltl, Michael - The Judas Syndrome
- R. Boyett, Steffen - Ariel
- R. Boyett, Steffen - Elegy Beach
- R. Forstchen, William - One Second After
- R. Palmer, David - Emergence
- R. Stewart, George - Earth Abides
- Shute, Nevil - On the Beach
- Stirling, S. M. - Dies The Fire (probably shit)
- Strieber, Whitley - Warday
- Tilley, Patrick - The Amtrak
- Varley, John - Steel Beach
- Waldrop, Howard - Heirs of the Perisphere (Disney?)
- Waldrop, Howard - The Texas-Israeli War
- Weisman, Alan - The World Without Us
- Wolfe, Gene - The Book of the New Sun
- Wyndham, John - Day of the Triffids
- Wyndham, John - Out of the Deeps
- Wyndham, John - The Chrysalids
- Wyndham, John - The Kraken Wakes
- Zelazny, Roger - Damnation Alley
- Zelazny, Roger - This Immortal
Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes/Out of the Deeps is also mentioned. Also post-apocalyptic, but after rising sea levels rather than the usual scenarios.
Nice work collecting all - that’s what’s missing from the other threads we’ve had on the subject. There’s a few on there, I haven’t read, now I can start from on end and see what’s on Kindle!
If you’re including comics like The Walking Dead, you really should look up my suggestion Jerimiah. I’m sure it’s available in German. It’s much more traditional post apocalypse, ie no zombies or other supernatural beings.
Sorted the list.
Is walkind dead the only comic I’ve mentioned?
I think everytime they’ve come up in a Book thread on QT3 it’s been in a positive fashion not a negative one, with the one exception I know of being someone that knew Grant personally on some level and deeply disliked her as a person.
Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood should be added to the list as well. It’s brilliant.
That’s more dystopian then post-apocalyptic, IMHO.
A Boy And His Dog by Harlan Ellison. It’s novella length and you can probably only find it in a collection, but it’s a good read.
I don’t know her, but Feed is an awful, awful book. It’s Cory Doctorow-style blogger triumphalism transplanted to an absurd setting (it’s like 2040, bloggers supposedly went big 25 years ago because they called the zombie apocalypse before the mainstream media, and yet it’s still revolutionary that a politician will allow a few hand-selected bloggers to observe his campaign) that’s also absurd (with many people dead in a horrible zombie apocalypse, plus the text says that something like 80% of people are so traumatized they won’t leave their homes, you’d think society would have broken down entirely, and yet there’s a wholly functioning economy with restaurants that give complimentary breadsticks individually plastic-wrapped) and is loaded with absurdity (bloggers who engage in zombie-baiting for kicks are called “irwins” because that was the name of that Crocodile Hunter dude who died a few years ago, which I’m sure is a totally au courant reference in 2040, plus also a 20 year old who was born after the
zombie apocalypse naturally thinks of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a referent for someone dealing with the undead).
Man I’m happy to hear someone else say that. My peer group here almost universally loved it and I keep seeing it pop up on “best of” lists.
I honestly couldn’t finish the thing, mostly for the reasons cited above. Grant starts out with the concept of a post-apocalyptic world that has dragged itself back from the brink with small enclaves of super-paranoid people living hermits’ lives… and then ended up showing everyone as techno-consumerists that somehow have a near-infinite supply of zombie-disease-sniffing gadgets, good roads, and infinite network connectivity. Other plot-holes abound: there is a sub-plot on how the “big ranchers” are supporting or detracting from one politician or another, but earlier in the book they make a point of mentioning that any meat from a mammal is infected with the zombie-virus and no one eats red meat anymore… so what are these ranchers ranching, and how could they be any political force at all?
Other parts of the story are used by the author to hammer-home the inferiority of the (real-world) Right-Wing values by setting up ridiculous straw-men that the oh-so-perfect heroine snarkily tears down. Ugh, pretentious and preachy.
All of that could have been forgiven if the dialog was decent, but gods it was horrific.