Your top 5 Post Apocalyptic Books.

I just read Lucifer's Hammer, and The Stand.

The Road
Logan's Run
Mockingjay
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Galapagos
Twilight

Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon

Carlton Mellick III's Zombies and Shit (I usually don't like zombie novels, but I loved this one. Also, I know this guy personally)

Nearly every novel by Steve Erickson is sort of post-apocalyptic except for Zeroville and he's one of my favorite authors.

Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist

Matthew Derby's Super Flat Times

Neuromancer - William Gibson
In the Country of Last Things - Paul Auster

On the Third Day by Rhys Thomas is great post-apocalyptic stuff. It focuses on the survival of one family for a large part of the book and then zooms out a little and looks at civilisation and how fragile it all is, what makes people stick together and turn on each other. Loved it. You'll be able to get it on Kindle if you have it because it's not yet released in paperback in the states. Ignore the bullshit blurb about it being like 28 Days Later meets The Survivers, it stands alone and its refreshing.

Did they ever do novelizations for those Mad Max movies, anyone know?

Do short stories count? I really love There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

not a top 5, but these are some of my favourites:

A Canticle for Leibowitz - William M. Miller Jr
Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
High Rise - JG Ballard
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Gibbon's Decline and Fall - Sheri S. Tepper

Dystopian =/= Post-apocalyptic

I keep reading the thread title as "Your top 5 Post Apocalyptic Foods."

Because this is the Cult.

I would read that thread.

I forgot about a book that came out recently that I was pretty impressed by - Salvador Plascencia's debut The People of Paper. Really great little book. Definitely reccomended if you're a fan of post-modern, multi-linear kind of stories. I found out about it through Kasey's Mark Z Danielewski interview from a few months back. MZD said he was reading it.

Also an interesting one Tatyana Tolstaya - The Slynx.
Kinda fell apart a little as it went on, but there are certainly some interesting concepts in it.

I think the top 5 post apacopyptic foods would probably all come in a can or be bugs.

That's a good one.

• 1984
• Brave New World
• The Handmaid's Tale
• The Road
• On the Beach (or would that be pre-apocalyptic...or mid-apocalyptic? whatever)

You know what post-apocalyptic book really sucked?

The Road.

"Everything is so GRAY and DESOLATE and ASHY and AWFUL and I'm REALLY, REALLY HUNGRY," for about 250 pages, then it ends.

I don't get how so many people didn't get that book.

I've never met anyone who liked it. They've all either loved it or hated it. Anyway, that's been argued about here six ways to Sunday.

What was it about the term 'post-apocalyptic' that led you to believe that it would be happiness, sunshine and kittens?

The genres are pretty similar, Steve. And I don't see you particularly offering any alternatives. If you're going to nay-say, at least contribute.

They're not that similar.

I haven't read enough to give five. I did read the road, and while it wasn't earth shattering, it didn't suck, either. I'm actually in the middle about it. It wasn't really about the apocalypse, though, so the desolation just served the purpose of making life suck.

But then again, I guess none of them are REALLY about the Apocalypse.

I was expecting more then just 250 pages describing how shitty everything is.

And I'm not even going to go into the "If you didn't like it, you didn't understand it." I understood it, but that didn't make the book any less boring.

I wasn't saying that if you didn't like it you didn't understand it. I'm saying that if one dismisses it as only being about things being gray and and desolate and ashy and awful and hunger, then one doesn't get it.

You can get something and still think it's boring. I got Dune, but it was the most boring thing I've ever read in my life.

Also, an argument could be made that any of the books you highlighted above could be set in a post-apocalyptic society. I noticed you didn't highlight Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but if we're being picky, there's nothing stated in that story that definitively places it in a Post-Apocalyptic society either.

Probably?

I was just thinking about this... For the longest time, I didn't get that, while II & III were postapocalyptic, the first movie was meant to be taking place during the crisis that led to nuclear war.

Wikipedia doesn't think there is.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/600426.Mad_Max_Beyond_Thunderdome

not sure about the other films, though.

I thought Androids was about a post-apocalyptic world where everybody migrated to Mars because of all the radiation / extinction caused by a world war?

Yeah you're right. I don't really recall it being mentioned in too much detail though. I just got annoyed and tried get my thoughts across too quickly.

The point I'm trying to make is, Dystopian fiction may not necessarily be Post-Apocalyptic, but the majority of Post-Apocalyptic fiction is Dystopian in nature. Look at Oryx and Crake, Dhalgren, A Canticle for Leibovitz, Logan's Run, etc.. the societies portrayed are far from idyllic.

i agree with that. most post-apocalyptic fiction do have a dystopian vibe which i suppose is the natural progression to introduce conflict and make the fiction interesting.

there's never a post-apocalytic novel i've read (yet) where an apocalyptic event triggered a heaven-like society since most of these novels deal with survival and rebuilding. they introduce warlords, mutants, personal struggles, to move the plot forward. all of these plot devices don't scream out 'utopian'.

a 'utopian' post-apocalyptic novel would probably be a boring one anyway, unless it had jousting unicorns.

Yeah, exactly. Even the societies that appear to be good or well functioning on the surface eventually end up being revealed as flawed. I haven't come across a utopian post-apocalyptic society in any books I've read either.

Here's a question for you all - what was the first Post-Apocalyptic fiction you read?
For me it was this:

I got my copy from my grandparent's neighbour when I was about 11 or 12. I must have read that book about 20 times as a kid, and I've been searching out post-apocalyptic fiction ever since.

All I'm trying to say is just because a novel is dystopian doesn't mean it is necessarily post-apocalyptic. There is nothing apocalyptic about 1984. And not every bad place is a dystopia. A dystopia is usually an overpowering authoritarian government pretending to be a utopia. Just because a place sucks doesn't mean it is a dystopia.

_kit wrote:

Here's a question for you all - what was the first Post-Apocalyptic fiction you read?
For me it was this:

God, I loved that book. It was the first for me too.

As for recommendations, definitely Brave New World.

Dystopia - from Ancient Greek: δυσ-, "bad", and Ancient Greek: τόπος, "place".
- Dictionaries 'Я' Us

Um...

Shit.

we've all been there. themoreyouknow.jpg and all that.

Anyway, some great ones not mentioned:
Foundation by Isaac Asimov(the end of a galactic empire is an apocalypse, right?)
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

Comic Books:
V for Vendetta
Y: The Last Man
The Walking Dead

I'd totally forgotten that it's both. (edit: I meant dystopian and postapocalyptic, not comic and movie. I knew that.)

Something about a virus, yeah?

Children of Men was a book... Anyone read it? Any good?

Oh, as far as comics, I like Sweet Tooth.

I thought it was post-nuclear war.

EDIT_ this was directed at Tuffy.

Yeah, Children of Men is worth a read. P.D. James. It's only 200 and something pages from what I remember. I don't think it's a virus or a nuclear accident, but something causes the fertility mate of humans to fall to zero. The world just tears itself apart after that. So it's kinda post-apocalyptic, and definitely dystopian.

uh, that's fertility rate, not fertility mate...

Sparkly vampires is definitely dystopian.