The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.

It's out of copyright now, and there's a free version on Gutenberg.

No, but I saw the movie........

My favorite is the oft-overlooked "WOlf and Iron" by Dickson but there are many thousands of Survival / Holocaust / Nuclear War / Natural Disaster books out there. There is probably a book or two that anyone would like.


Here are a few websites I find interesting when looking for a good read :

http://www.sfandf.com/html/scifi-fantasy-books.html?id=4&p1=2015&p2=books&p3=sf
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/nuclear/a.htm
http://www.ibdof.com/IBDOF-genre-booklist.php?genre_id=38
http://www.scifan.com/themes/themes.asp?TH_themeid=9&Items=
http://www.scifan.com/themes/themes.asp?TH_themeid=72&Items=

These are just a couple of sites I use to update my own book database.

Hopefully someone will find a book here that interests them enough to track it down and read it.

- TheDarkOne

The free versions are the old translations which were extensively abridged and edited by their translators. While the Gutenberg text remains a great tale of ingenuity and improvisation, the recent new translation by Sidney Kravitz retains all of Verne's original detail on how the island dwellers use science to survive and thrive. I found it much more readable, and with almost a third more material than the shortened version I'd originally read - it seemed like a whole new book!

(If you're already a Verne fan, read some of the customer comments on Amazon for the Kravitz translation to get a sense of the changes.)

Another interesting read is a sci fi book by Robert A. Heinlin called "Tunnel in the sky". The book is entertaining and although its not one of his best books it reminded me of the importance of community and knowledge of basic grass root political theory in a long term survival situation. It also explored the subject of guns and a psychological aspect I had not considered. Heinlin argues being without a gun makes a person more cautious and less likely to find themselves in situations where they need a gun. I've had similar experiences with folks driving 4 wheel drive in cars. (e.g. "sure it looks muddy and I could get stuck...but I'll go in anyway because I have 4 wheel drive!")

I just finished Butler's "Parable of Sower" and I'm halfway through the sequel "Parable of Talents". Survival fiction has been useful for learning new scenarios and exploring long-term survival ideas I had not thought of prior to reading them. The parable series also emphasizes the community approach to long-term survival but alternatively encourages gun ownership.

Great stuff!

Cheers,
Nemo

I remember Tunnel from my teenage years. I liked that one too. I think it was from Heinlein's juvenile series, but I'm not sure. Another one I always associate with Tunnel (because I read one after the other!) was Andre Norton's "Here Abide Monsters". Another juvenile oriented book (I think that's mostly what Norton wrote). Neither was really an "end of the world" scenario. More like, "people thrown into new worlds where they had to learn to survive". In Tunnel, it was a planned class exercise IIRC, in Monsters it was more of an impromptu, "oops, what happened, where the hell are we now?"

Thanks for that. I read a paid-for version as a child, with the extra third, and I've not reread the free versions to see how they compare.

The best:
Two-way tie between "Alas Babylon" and "Lucifer's Hammer" with "Babylon" being the more realistic and useful at a practical level but "Hammer" being the more exciting.

Not too bad but lacking: "The Keep", which get tiresome because of the protagonists political and economic grumblings, and "Farnham's Freehold" which veers too quickly into sci-fi fantasy.

Low middling but with some merit: "Patriots". Weakly inspired writing made worse by patently false and dangerous assumptions. The book isn't entirely useless but you need to take the assumptions, setting, action and techniques with a large grain of salt. Borderline gun porn with an overweight emphasis on firearms and violence.

The worse: "The Survivalist" series by Jerry Ahern. This series is little more than comic-book heroic action, gun porn and posed self-assumed superiority. The protagonist never pulls a generic gun. He pulls a particular weapon. Often described with pornographic detail including make, model, manufacturer, barrel length, trigger pull, and everything short of the serial number. Violence and degradation of other, lesser survivors, is described in gloating detail. All the better to highlight the assumed nobility of the protagonists I suppose.

Within the course of the individual books and the series, as a whole, the violence and self-righteous posing escalates to wild excess while the plot line and prose largely repeats itself with just a few embellishments and escalation. Pretty much like other forms of pornography.

Unknown to me but highly reviewed: "The Road". It is "on-deck" as my next purchase.

IIRC Wasn't "Lucifer's Hammer" the continuation of "Footfall"?

"Lucifer's Hammer" is about what happens after a huge natural disaster and how mankind struggles to stay alive and reorganize.

As I understand it "Footfall", having picked it up a few times without reading it, but answering entirely from memory is concerned with an alien invasion.