post apocalyptic

[monkeypooper]

looking for some recomendations ive read a few, Davy, Spiderworld, Eternity road, The darkness and dawn. and a few others

[chrispenycate]

Ah. There are rather a lot of them. Rising to the top of my head without reflecting (which sort of suggests they left some kind of long term impression);- "Deus Irae" (Dick/Zelazny) "The Crysalids" (Wyndam) "The Postman" (Brin) "Earth Abides" (Stewart)… I'll just post this before my computer crashes out, then come back and edit in a few more…

Which it duly did (not chance, I know the symptoms of impending doom)

So, adding:- "A canticle for Lebowitz" (Walter Miller), "Mary's Country" (Harold Mead), "The Death of Grass" (John Christopher) "Level Seven" (Mordecai Roswalt), and "The Tide went out" (Charles Eric Maine) and "A boy and his dog", all (except possibly the Christopher) being genuinely post, and not documenting the nuclear war, plague, or meteor strike that produced the apocalypse itself.

[monkeypooper]

Thankyou read most modern ones which is what google brings up unless you google hard will check these out 4 of them iv'e read cheers

[Finnien]

An interesting twist on the post-apoc genre is S. M. Stirling's series that starts with "Dies the Fire". It describes a world in which electricity and high-energy reactions cease to function, and how a few groups of people adapt to it, reverting to a sort of late-middle-age society, but still salvaging and adapting bits of current tech and material. It's not nearly as dark as most post-apoc, and does a good job giving real thought to what could be salvaged and adapted, what would be useful, what wouldn't.

"Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" by Kate Wilhelm and "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler both describe enclaves within a post-collapse society, not necessarily true apocalypse (depending on how you define it) but pretty darn close.

[Rodders]

Old favourites such as Stephen Kings "The Stand" and Robert McGammon's "Swan Song" are highly recommended.

Something i've been meaning to pick up for a while now is "The Death Of Grass" (I think it's be John Christopher.) I'n not sure if it falls under the category of apocolyptic, but i can't imagine anything more final than the bottom of the food chain getting wiped out.

[Stephen Palmer]

Ah, us Brits do love a good post-apocalypse.

The Death Of Grass is in the fine tradition of Wyndham-esque British SF. Not as good as Day Of The Triffids, but not bad.

[Rodders]

Yeah, it's been on my radar for a while now and it's a pretty unique slant.

[Finnien]

One problem I sometimes run into in post-apoc literature is the impossibility of continued life. Scavenging for cans of food because the world can't grow things may make for a fun plot device, but that would really last about a month before everybody was dead. It would be hard enough to hunt/gather in a living world returned to primitive conditions - in something like Resident Evil or The Road or The Postman (I may be misrepresenting one of these specifics, but the general trend is true of a substantial portion of the genre), the world doesn't work for me because I can't believe there's always this hidden cache of canned goods just around the corner. Realistically, the moment the last page of the book is turned, every last person starves - and the characters never even think about it. You never find people scouring dead cities for books on farming, or wondering how deep you'd have to go to find living soil, or wondering about the shelf-life of seed packets. Then you have the limited genetic pools, the lack of useful knowledge for survival... it seems to be 'find the survivors and all will be well'. It sounds like The Death of Grass is of a different sort - I'll have to look into it.

[Toby Frost]

A lot of the good books cover exactly those questions. Wyndham deals with the problem of knowledge - first generation scholars, second generation farmers, third generation savages - and Earth Abides deals with similar things, IIRC. I suspect there's a strange form of wish-fulfillment in the less good post-apocalypses (No more taxes! Now I can get a rifle and a shack and live like a MAN!).

Of course it depends on what has caused the apocalypse. Once a plague has passed, life might be tolerable. Less so a nuclear war. If you can get hold of it the later portions of the 70's drama Threads deal with survival after atomic war. To put it simply, life is horrible and almost everyone dies, and whatever feeble sort of human civilisation rises from the ashes will not look much like the current one.

[Stephen Palmer]

Check out the BBC documentary Life After People, which I much enjoyed, though not everyone did...

[monkeypooper]

Originally Posted by Finnien

An interesting twist on the post-apoc genre is S. M. Stirling's series that starts with "Dies the Fire". It describes a world in which electricity and high-energy reactions cease to function, and how a few groups of people adapt to it, reverting to a sort of late-middle-age society, but still salvaging and adapting bits of current tech and material. It's not nearly as dark as most post-apoc, and does a good job giving real thought to what could be salvaged and adapted, what would be useful, what wouldn't.

"Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang" by Kate Wilhelm and "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler both describe enclaves within a post-collapse society, not necessarily true apocalypse (depending on how you define it) but pretty darn close.

Iv'e read Stirlings sea of time have'nt got round to Dies the fire will try those cheers mate

[monkeypooper]

really what i like is say 800 to 1000 years later

[Randy M.]

If you enjoyed DAVY I'd strongly urge you to find the Pangborn story collection, STILL I PERSIST IN WONDERING which collects other stories in the world of Davy.


Randy M.

[Alex, The G and T]

Greg Bear has very different sort of apocalypse in Blood Music.

(Many folks prefer the original short over the novelization; but mileage may vary)

[Rodders]

Oh, oh speaking of Greg Bear, how could i forget The Forge of God? One of my favourite novels.