Post-Apocalyptic

[DeepB]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

_Systemic Shock_ is the first book in a trilogy --- the remaining 2/3rds of the story happens after things have fallen apart.

i have now read most of the second book (approx 80%), and i still don't see anything that would put this book in this genre. And unfortunately i think that the second one is not as good as the first one. (the first one was actually not good, but ok)

[carld]

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a classic in the genre. A large print ebook (odd, I know) is available at ebookmall and probably other outlets.

http://ebooks.ebookmall.com/title/ca...ler-ebooks.htm

[RoxyJ]

Thanks for the recommendations, FYI On the Beach is currently $1.02 for Canadian Kindlers on Amazon.

[taosaur]

I can't recommend Terry Brooks in general, but his Genesis of Shannara series, beginning with Armageddon's Children, was a fairly original fantasy/post-apocalypse/contemporary mash-up. You don't need to be familiar with the Shannara books, but the first one was basically as blatant a Tolkien knock-off as one could produce without simply re-typing the text, with the exception that the medieval setting, complete with dwarves, gnomes, trolls and elves, was said to have come about as the result of a Great War fought with technologies that wiped out nearly all life and reshaped the land.

Genesis of Shannara, as you would likely guess, is the story of the apocalypse that turned our world into Middle Earth. It's set 2-3 generations after the fall of civilization, which started in the '90s, apparently There's still some advanced technology sitting around, but most people (and other things) are living on a tribal level, or in armed compounds. If you don't mind some elves and demons getting up in there with your robots, zombies and lizard people, it's a fun ride.

For this series and the preceding Word & Void, he's borrowing heavily from Christian mythology without referencing it explicitly, but not such that I, as a non-Christian, found it remotely preachy, and probably not in a way that would offend most Christians, either. Like pretty much all of Brooks' work I've read, I wouldn't pigeonhole it as YA, but it is predominantly PG-13.

[hartsfieldl1]

Originally Posted by KilgoreTraut

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is sublime; Year of the Flood is a respectable follow up.
The Road is also highly recommended.

Oryx and Crake and the Year of the Flood are both richly detailed visions of a near-future post-apocalyptic world and raise probing questions about issues such as the environmental movement and environmental radicals, science and genetic engineering, and even what it means to be human. Great books.

[hartsfieldl1]

One book that explores a post-apocalyptic world brought on by climate change is T.C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth. Boyle also explores the hypocrisy of the environmental movement. It's a satire directed at a topic that rarely gets treated with humor.

Another book that no one has mentioned yet is Thomas Disch's The Genocides which takes place after alien invaders have turned the Earth into a giant monocultured farm and follows a small group of survivors as they attempt to avoid the aliens' work to eliminate all the "pests" from their plants.

[mcrow24]

Originally Posted by orlok

Which one would you recommend someone (me) should start with?

I would say Day by Day Armageddon. It's written in a first person journal style, pretty interesting.

Plague of the Dead is also very good.

[orlok]

Originally Posted by mcrow24

I would say Day by Day Armageddon. It's written in a first person journal style, pretty interesting.

Plague of the Dead is also very good.

Thanks