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It doesn’t take a meteor or a nuclear missile to destroy civilization; all you need is a surprise epidemic of blindness, and men and women will destroy it themselves. Despite the compelling, experimental prose, parts of this feel like a horror novel, but unlike most of the books on this list, it ends on a note of hope, which makes it a particularly good one to read right now.
Apocalyptic fiction focuses on the end of civilization either through nuclear war, plague, or other global catastrophic risk. A horror novel and an apocalypse novel in one—as if surviving nuclear holocaust wasn’t enough, now there’s a demonic entity known as The Man with the Scarlet Eye, aka Doyle, running around. Typical. This classic, highly influential for its use of invented dialect, is set in England, some two thousand years after the end of civilization as we know it—when what society is left is uncomfortably reliant on “Punch & Pooty” shows. A layered, Joycean masterpiece that is as much about the power of story and myth as it is about the end of the world and everything after. In this novel, a pastor goes to another planet to spread Christianity, leaving his wife at home; what results, among other things, is that the apocalypse in this novel is telegraphed to the protagonist at a distance, through increasingly alarming and unbelievable missives, even as he finds himself drawing further away from the life he used to know and the woman he used to love.
Apropos of . . . Nothing
This is not usually discussed as a post-apocalyptic novel, and indeed it depends on how you read it, but let me present my case: if you take the narrator’s word for it, she is the last woman alive on earth, typing along to keep herself occupied, with no hope of ever encountering another soul again. So something must have happened. The problem is: can you take the narrator’s word for it? Either way, the novel takes up the same themes as many of the others on this list, albeit in its own experimental, literary fashion: what is left when nothing is left? How should the survivors live? What did our art, our science, or civilization mean? Did it mean anything at all? This 1962 novel depicts a postapocalyptic future in which global warming has rendered much of planet uninhabitable. In stark contrast to Station Eleven, it is a dark and depressing tale of survivors forced to reinvent their ethical and moral codes when civilisation collapses. It is widely regarded as one of the first climate-change fiction texts. Of course Cloud Atlas is not entirely a novel about the end of the world, and in fact of its six storylines only one could be considered post-apocalyptic (one other is squarely dystopian). But considering the novel’s insistence on the interconnectedness of time and space (and people) and the centrality of the post-apocalypse it does evoke (located at the pinnacle of the novel’s unique structure), I think it’s only fair to count it here. All right, technically this is a manga series, but I have it as a box set, and I’m counting it. I love Miyazaki’s post-apocalyptic world—most of the world is covered in toxic forest, known as the Sea of Corruption, which is itself overrun by giant, mutant insects, and which is encroaching—and his heroine, a curious princess turned battle captain with a deep respect for the natural world, corrosive as it may be. It is 1963, and a nuclear war has devastated most of the planet. In Melbourne, relatively untouched, a handful of survivors wait for the winds to bring the radiation to their shore, occupying themselves more or less usefully, if such a thing can be said to have any meaning at the end of the world, as others investigate what may be a message from a survivor in Seattle. A moving, if not particularly scientifically sound, classic.
It’s almost winter, and on the reservation of a small Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario, the power has gone out. Not just the power either, but the phones and the internet, resulting in full isolation. And it’s cold. Then the outsiders begin to appear. Fear and chaos reign, as Evan Whitesky, father of two, looks to the past, to tradition, to try to rebuild his community’s future. Chilling in more ways than one. One of the best and biggest contemporary vampire novels is also one of the best and biggest apocalypse novels. It all starts in a lab, in which a virus meant to create super soldiers actually creates a plague of monsters—93 years later, the humans left huddle in colonies, hiding from the hunters outside the walls. But can the world actually be saved after all? A classic, and probably King’s best novel (don’t come for me) is a behemoth (famously inspired by The Lord of the Rings) with many threads and characters, all set in a world ravaged by a pandemic caused by a weaponized strain of influenza that is fatal to 99.4% of those who encounter it. So you may not want to read it right now! You may argue that The Handmaid’s Tale is just as much of an apocalypse novel as Oryx and Crake, and in some ways I’d agree with you—an apocalypse of mind and morality instead of body and planet. But you know and I both know what we’re doing here. Plus, Oryx and Crake, while somewhat less celebrated, is just as good, a frighteningly plausible world destroyed by our relentless pursuit for happiness in a bottle. Oh, and trusting corporations. Of course. Everyone’s favorite metafictional zombie apocalypse novel by Mel Brooks’ son, whose framing device—Brooks as agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission and his own actual/fictional survival guide, interviewing survivors—give it a polyphonic resonance. Don’t judge it by the movie, which takes serious liberties, and is not great.When I looked at the sci-fi collection on my bookshelves before compiling this list, I was surprised by how many of Niven’s books I had. I’d also forgotten what classics s such as Ringworld and The Mote in God’s Eye were. Niven is a master of hard sci-fi and together with Pournelle (another US genius), he wrote this apocalyptic thriller in 1977. A giant comet hits the Earth, creating collossal earthquakes, giant tsunamis and ultimately the beginning of a new ice age. A handful of humans struggle to survive.
This novel includes one of the stranger epidemics in apocalypse fiction: the Forgetting, which has devastated the world by separating those afflicted from their shadows—and their memories, which causes them to behave erratically, even violently. As society breaks down, Ory and Max (one shadowless, one not) try to find answers, and each other.
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We often think of the apocalypse as something that happens to everybody at the same time—but what about those in remote locales that remain untouched at the beginning? In this novel, the world ends while Jon is at a Swiss hotel, far away from everyone he knows and loves. So what does he do? Get busy solving the more immediate problem: the dead body on the premises. Of course. You don’t find out that Planet of the Apes is a post-apocalyptic novel, and not just a science fiction novel about another world, until the end of the book. (Sorry for not warning you about this spoiler, but look, you had almost 60 years.) What was the cause? Oh, laziness, really…
Is it actually a post-apocalypse through which our one-shoed protagonist drifts? Or are we dealing with a different reality entirely? Either way, it has the feeling of a land gone to seed, with bombed-out, disconnected cities, enormous red suns, inexplicable, endless fires. And either way, it is one of the weird greats, a widely influential and difficult—even impenetrable—cult classic. This is a wonderfully imaginative mix of psychology, quantum mechanics and the meaning of human consciousness. It is based on the “ quantum mind” idea developed by the physicist Roger Penrose in the late 80s. The theory is not taken very seriously now by scientists, but is great sci-fi thriller fodder. Parenthood is a kind of apocalypse, yes, but—well, so is an underwater London. No food, no power, no internet; society begins to break down, but even this can barely distract a new mother from the magic of her child. Hunter’s sparse novel asks what to make of the first year of a life (and the first year of motherhood) at the end of the world. In this surreal novel, two characters at the end of a world destroyed switch genders, roles, and relationships to one another as their lives are repeatedly rebooted by a mysterious—and corrupted—atmospheric computer program, which is looking (maybe) for a savior.
In this classic of nuclear holocaust fiction, when much of the United States is destroyed by the Soviet Union, one small Florida town survives, adapting to their new lives in a radioactive wasteland. The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California,” is how this book begins, in slippery Le Guin fashion. The apocalypse in Always Coming Home happened so long that none among the Kesh remember it—not even their songs know what caused it. Mostly, what’s left is styrofoam. This is not a straight narrative, but a realistic anthropological study of a fictional people, the Kesh, compiled and annotated by a researcher named Pandora. In some ways, it is a minor work in Le Guin’s oeuvre, but a fascinating one.
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