End of the World Fiction

Hello All,
I've mostly read non-fiction disaster/survival/preparedness literature. It's usually about techniques and potential scenarios, often accompanied by historical example. What are some good fictional disaster stories out there? Some that I have read and enjoyed are:
The Stand by Stephen King
After the Plague by T.C. Boyle
Incendiary by Chris Cleave (I found this one disturbing)
Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard (sort of a disaster story)
And I’ve heard that The Road by Cormac McCarthy is good, but I haven’t read it.

What are your favorites?

How about this?

http://afterworld.superchannel.ca/

Al

I should also mention The Cobra Event by Richard Preston

Frugal's Forum has quite a few short stories you might enjoy. Just look under Patriot Fiction.

The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler

When All Hell Breaks Loose by Cody Lundin

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Out Of The Ashes by William H. Johnstone

"The Road" is nothing short of brilliant, Mike. Totally deserving of its Pulitzer, and Cormac McCarthy is a genius. Expect the film adaptation, starring Viggo Mortensen, sometime in Nov. 2009.

Other post apocalyptic and post-disaster books I'm a proud owner of are:

"Alas, Babylon", by Pat Frank (survivors after a nuclear war between the US/USSR)

"I Am Legend", Richard Matheson; No doubt you've seen at least one of the movie adaptations, but the novel goes into great detail how the hero has equipped himself and set up his home to stay alive, and also recounts how he starts to lose it from isolation and alcohol abuse.

"Blood's A Rover", "A Boy and His Dog", and "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison; Basically look for a big collection of Ellison's short stories to find these, these short stories should all be packed in there with many others. "I Must Scream" deals with the last four human beings alive on earth, held hostage against their will by a sentient and vengeful supercomputer.

"Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse" - ed. by John Joseph Adams - This is a collection of short stories in the post-apocalyptic genre, all of which are very well-written. One is tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted, with the last line reading, "Will the last person on the planet please turn out the lights?"

These aren't fitting into the categories you want but I also recommend "No Surrender: My Thirty Year War", by Hiroo Onoda and "An Island to Oneself" by Tom Neale.

Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling
Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Alas Babylon by Pat frank

Lucifer’s Hammer was written in 1977 and Alas Babylon was written in 1956 (I think) both are well written and some of my favorite books but they were written by men who grew up in a different era and there writing reflect attitudes and ethics that are sorely lacking in today’s society and as a result they are IMHO overly optimistic about what would happen. Dies the Fire is the first book on a series but well worth the time.

Not quite a "disaster" story, but "World Made By Hand" by James Howard Kunstler portrays life in a small town in upstate New York after a combination of the collapse of the oil economy and some unnamed nuclear attacks on major cities. Not the best-written book I've read, but enjoyable nonetheless.

I hear it's less bleak than "The Road," but not dissimilar in the setup of the story.

I read this in the mid-80s and had mushroom cloud nightmares.

"Warday: And the Journey Onward" (Hardcover)
by Whitley Strieber (Author), James Kunetka

http://www.amazon.com/Warday-Journey-Onw...3805&sr=1-2

"The Stand" by Stephen King is my all-time fave of this genre. I thought the mini-series was well done, too. Sci-Fi Channel plays it occasionally. After the Lincoln Tunnel scene I was delighted to wake up the next morning in a noisy city crowded with living people.

"Alas Babylon" is still chilling.

I'm not a fan of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" but it did win a Pulitzer and made Oprah's Book Club. That book convinced me that there are disasters you don't want to survive.

There are several genre fan lists on amazon.com Here's one you may want to look at. It reminded me of "On the Beach" which was made into a legendary film starring Gregory Peck:

http://www.amazon.com/Post-Apolcalyptic-...VX1WM6XE6CT4036

I actually enjoyed "The Zombie Survival Guide".

It's written as a training manual, not a novel. Tongue in cheek of course, but the text is dead serious the way it's written. Which is what makes it fun to read. More than once I found myself saying "I need to add one of those to my survival kit". And then I'd realize, "Oh yeah, I guess I don't really need a weapon tailored for dispatching zombies."

I did a rather lengthy review of Parable of The Talents in the Long term prep forum. Its not a bad book, but a rather depressing one.

I would have to say I really enjoyed World War Z, as well as the Zombie Survival guide by Max Brooks. +1 on some usefull tips in the zombie guide, but obviously not everything will translate to real life survival.

-Bill Liptak

Revelations.

or the Left Behind series.

Inspirational maybe, but still fiction (at least until it comes to pass, think about it).

So much for Thursday morning philosophy.

This does not exactly fit in with the literature theme, but what about the TV series Jericho? They seem to be more interested in the drama of the show, but they raise some valid scenarios about the altercations that occur. I rarely watch any TV, but this show had me hooked.

My favorites from this genre are:

Alas Babylon by Pat Frank
Earth Abides by George Stewart
Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle
Out of the Ashes by William H. Johnstone
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (possible the best of the type EVER)

Me too. I hope they pick this one up for a third season.

But, it is a book of Hope...Good wins in the end. Great reading.

That is a matter of perspective; not necessarily if your on the losing side.

Similarly, the stand can also be considered a story of hope. In fact, there's darned few end times or end of the world stories that aren't a happy ending of some sort or another.

The first 5-6 books of "The Survivalist" series by Jerry Ahern are good. While they are essentially "pulp fiction" there are some good lists and brand name dropping going on in there.

The "Ashes" series by Johnstone are also good.

"Lucifer's Hammer" as mentioned is a classic.

"Patriots" by James Wesley, Rawles has some great insights regarding post economic collapse.

I read "Parable of The Sower" (I believer Parable of the Talents is its sequel) a while back and really enjoyed it.

DrmstrSpoodle

Here's something I came across in my newspaper tonight.

Park To Host Major Stars
By Jane Smith

Conneaut Lake Park is an old amusement park that closed two years ago, located in NW Pennsylvania. The cast and crew of the new movie "The Road" including Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall will be filming a portion of the movie at the old park. The Dreamland Ballroom was burnt down not long ago caused by arson and will be in one of the shots, other shots will include the Boardwalk, Conneaut Hotel and the Beach Club. They are currently filming in Pittsburgh where I grew up and the final weeks of filming will be done in New Orleans.

Anybody read the Bible lately?

That's sort of why I like Earth Abides by George Stewart, it bucks the trend to some degree.

Not a "were gonna build it all back" ending!

It is sorta dated though, written in 1958.

Actually re-reading it currently, I found a translation I haven't read before, the "CSB" or "Christian Standard Bible" by Holman Bible Publishers.

Not to bad, sorta between a NIV and NKJV.

See, that's why I mentioned Revelations earlier.

It's for sure an interesting read, very artistically expressive historical book.

I always put that on my fiction shelf.
*ducks*

Don't forget "Farnham's Freehold" by Sci-Fi grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein. IMHO not one of his all-time best efforts, but still fits the genre under discussion.

Another favorite of mine is "Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham. Giant walking flowers from space invade England in the 1950's. Gotta love it.

Oddly enough, that is one of the reasons why I loved that book. I thought it was very powerful and beautifully written, even if it was incredibly bleak.

Thanks for the book recommendations, guys! I think I'll add these to my to-read shelf and the ETS Group on Goodreads.

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.

No, entirely separate story, with no relation other than authors.

It does. It's been about 20 yrs since I read it but IIRC the "foot" is an asteroid used for a dinosaur killer kinetic strike.

Edit:
Posts crossed paths. That cleared it up.

I thought The Road was an excellent read to be sure, but it was insanely bleak... which makes you think that that was part of the author's purpose in writing it, to paint the worst case scenario imaginable for his audience. I won't spoil the ending for anybody, but suffice it to say that there remains a message of hope, or at least a grim recognition of the stubborn will of mankind to suffer and survive no matter what may come.

My offering is NOT "end of the world" fiction by any means.

The novel that really turned me onto the need to know about "survival" techniques and the desire to know more was:

"My Side of the Mountain" by Jean Craighead George

The illustrations are not all that great but they are sufficient where necessary to illustrate a point in the book. I first read this novel at about the 7th or 8th grade. It is written for that student reading level.

Let us not forget the classics of "Swiss Family Robinson" or "Robinson Caruso".

One that kinda bogs down in the middle Is "Ill Wind" I can't remember the Authors, but it's about a bacteria that eats all the plastic.
Another good SF is Stirlings series that starts with "Dies the Fire" The Protector's War" and "Meeting in Corvalis". All good reads. My only problem with Stirling is he writes about how difficult it is to make a longbow but nothing about how hard it is to make straight arrows.

Beleive it or not, "Battlefield Earth" is really a very good book about survival. The movie was OK but the book is really good. The movie is only about the first 1/4 or 1/3 of the book. Keeps getting better and better.

For non-EOTW, and non-fiction, a book I recently read (and recommend) is "Not Without Peril: 150 Years of Misadventure on the Presidential Range of New Hampshire" by Nicholas Howe. It could basically be retitled as "1001 ways to die on Mt. Washington," but it's a fun read.

I have my copy up for swap on paperbackswap.com if anyone here uses PBS.