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Second Origin Typescript, or how I want to read more post-apocalyptic novels

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R

Rei_Toei

Fclvat sbe Pnanqn, ru?
Late in primary school I read a book called Second origin typescript by the Catalan author Manuel de Pedrolo. While it was written for children/teenagers, it's grim stuff. It tells the story of two children that 'accidentally survive an alien holocaust that eradicates all life on the planet. As Alba and Dídac bravely recover from the catastrophe, they not only insist on living in a post-apocalyptic world, inhabited by myriads of corpses and deranged, psychotic survivors, but they also take up the mission of preserving human culture and repopulating the Earth.' It's supposed to be quite famous in Spain according to Wikipedia, and rightly so. It's well-written and very moving.

It kinda dawned on me that there's probably truckloads of post-apocalyptic novels out there worth reading. For a short while I was very interested in zombie novels, but most of'm are of very poor quality. Comes with the subject, I guess. It's probably the same with PA novels without the undead. The only other PA book I can think of that I have read is McCarthy's The Road and Jose Saramago's Blindness.

First thing I'm pulling out of the library is Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. What does GAF suggest as further reading in the genre?

Edit: Whaddayaknow, it's going to be turned into a movie by Spanish director Bigas Luna next year.
 
B

besada

Banned
Warday by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka. Written as a journal of their experience after a devastating nuclear exchange.

There's also a great collection of PA stories out called Wastelands. It's got work by King, Elizabeth Bear, Orson Scott Card, George R.R. Martin, Octavia Butler, Roger Zelazny, and Paolo Bacigalupi.
 
L

Lombaszko

Member
WastelandsStoriesoftheApocalypse.jpg

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
This is a bunch of great post-apocalyptic short stories collected in one book. It's nice because you get a sample of many authors so you can then pick up other works by the ones you like.

EDIT: Beaten!
 
G

Gozan

Member
George R. Stewart: Earth Abides.







Edit: Wait, Bigas Luna? Something tells me the movie will concentrate on the repopulating bit...
 
R

Rei_Toei

Fclvat sbe Pnanqn, ru?
JodyAnthony said:
that sounds interesting. Is it available in english? Can't find it on Amazon.
Click to expand...

It took me quite a while to find out if there was an Eglish title. I can't really find out much about it, unfortunately. I read it in Dutch. It seems it is not translated :/. Maybe, if the movie comes out and becomes a hit, it'll get translated.

I forgot one book that qualifies as post-apocalytpic and is very good: Blindness by Jose Saramago.

n12997.jpg
 
T

teruterubozu

Member
Of course, everyone's going to recommend The Road without reading your post. It's basically the best one though, post-apocalyptic novels can be really hokey and start bordering on the Left Behind series.
 
R

Rei_Toei

Fclvat sbe Pnanqn, ru?
teruterubozu said:
Of course, everyone's going to recommend The Road without reading your post. It's basically the best one though, post-apocalyptic novels can be really hokey and start bordering on the Left Behind series.
Click to expand...

I was thinking of editting the OP after a couple of recommendations so people can see what has been named already and at the same time it'd be a handy list with titles.
 
R

Rei_Toei

Fclvat sbe Pnanqn, ru?
*Bump* Finished A Canticle for Leibowitz and really liked it. It took a couple pages to get used to Miller's style coming of Mitchell's The Thousands Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Had to look up more words than usual to understand some stuff. Really original way of portraying a post-apocalyptic world.

Library didn't carry Wastelands, so I'm thinking about buying it. I also found a second-hand edition of Second Origin Typescript online for €6 :)
 
R

Rei_Toei

Fclvat sbe Pnanqn, ru?
the-passage-by-justin-cronin.jpg


Got a fantastic title that definitely belongs in the list of awesome post-apocalyptic literature: The Passage by Justin Cronin (Wikipedia, Amazon)

Summary:

he first novel in a proposed trilogy, "The Passage" begins in the near future and details a post-apocalyptic world that is overrun by vampire-like beings that are infected by a highly contagious virus. What begins as a project to develop a new immunity-boosting drug based on a virus carried by an unnamed species of bat in South America eventually becomes the virus that transforms the world. The novel begins in 2018 and spans over ninety years as colonies of humans attempt to live in a world filled with superhuman creatures who are continually on the hunt for fresh blood.
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Starts slow, but it's totally worth it once the pace picks up. It doesn't just deal with the period surrounding the outbreak, but (the first book at least) focuses more on a period about a 100 years later. The only bummer-ish thing about it: it's a trilogy and the second part will not be released untill somewhere in 2012, apparantly.

On the bright side, Ridley Scott picked up the rights for the script so there's actually a chance the world will end up in a movie.
 
J

jason10mm

Gold Member
Swan Song, by Robert McCammon is really good. A bit fantastic, as there is a significant supernatural/divine element (like The Stand), but still really good.

Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven, of course, a classic about a comet strike. One Second After by William Forstchen about a EMP pulse strike on america. Footfall, also by Niven, is about an overwhelming alien invasion.

For a bit more fun, though I have not read it yet, Cthulhu's Reign is a bunch of stories about what happens AFTER the dark old ones finally take over :p
 
K

krioto

Member
Anyone recommending the Stand should have their hands cut off.

great descriptions of human civilisation dying off, but the deus ex machina ending spoils it completely.
 
V

venom2124

Member
krioto said:
Anyone recommending the Stand should have their hands cut off.

great descriptions of human civilisation dying off, but the deus ex machina ending spoils it completely.
Click to expand...
I will keep my hands, thanks. The Stand is excellent except for the climax I agree. Stephen king seems to have a problem with how to end his longer novels. I find his shorter stories have more apt and satisfying endings. The ending does not ruin the whole of the Stand though. Many fans of all things post apocalyptic will love the characters and scenes, especially the tunnel sequence.
 
M

Maklershed

Member
Ohh PA my favorite sub-genre.

I highly recommend
A Canticle for Leibowitz
The World Made by Hand
The Postman

Also good
Lucifer's Hammer
Earth Abides
Alas, Babylon
Oryx and Crake / The Year of the Flood
Parable of the Sower / Parable of the Talents

That's all I have time to list right now but I have more :)
 
R

Rei_Toei

Fclvat sbe Pnanqn, ru?
Currently reading (200 pages in):

metro2033_book_art1.jpg


Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky. Gained fame because of the videogame adaption. After Leibowitz and The Passage, the style of writing feels stiff and a little hammy. The translation might be a problem: there's some obvious errors every now and then. Choice of words is a little weird every now and then: where'd you'd expect the word 'man' in other novels when describing a person (relatively) unknown to the main character, usually the word 'guy' is used. It's hard to describe but the book has a lof these things.

But all that doesn't really matter much, because thanks to the atmosphere this pretty much reads like a book-long equivalent of the scenes covering the passage through Moria in Tokien's The Fellowship of the Ring - which I absolutely loved because of the extremely grim, foreboding, oppressive atmosphere. Metro 2033 does exactly the same.

It's a guilty pleasure for sure but the setting is brilliant: Moscow's Metro system, with a myriad of stations turned into a giant bomb shelter system. There's loads of factions, mutants roaming around, a certain level of mysticism (there's even a sort of post-apo Gandalf clone). Light is scarce and in-between inhabitated stations it's pretty much completely dark. Claustrofobia, fear of the dark, hints of biological/chemical weapons leaking into the system - it's nasty. Hope the book can keep up what it has going right now.
 
R

Rei_Toei

Fclvat sbe Pnanqn, ru?
Bump!

Wasteland was the tits. Just look at the line-up:

1. Introduction by John Joseph Adams
2. The End of the Whole Mess by Stephen King
3. Salvage by Orson Scott Card
4. The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi
5. Bread and Bombs by M. Rickert
6. How We Got In Town and Out Again by Jonathan Lethem
7. Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels by George R. R. Martin
8. Waiting for the Zephyr by Tobias S. Buckell
9. Never Despair by Jack McDevitt
10. When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow
11. The Last of the O-Forms by James Van Pelt
12. Still Life With Apocalypse by Richard Kadrey
13. Artie’s Angels by Catherine Wells
14. Judgment Passed by Jerry Oltion
15. Mute by Gene Wolfe
16. Inertia by Nancy Kress
17. And the Deep Blue Sea by Elizabeth Bear
18. Speech Sounds by Octavia E. Butler
19. Killers by Carol Emshwiller
20. Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus by Neal Barrett, Jr.
21. The End of the World as We Know It by Dale Bailey
22. A Song Before Sunset by David Grigg
23. Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers by John Langan
24. Appendix: For Further Reading by John Joseph Adams

One of my favourites was Artie's Angels by Catherine Wells. Apparantly she as written some other semi post-apocalyptic stuff too. But it's kinda overwhelming really, there's so much good stuff in this collection. I ended up being a little disappointed by the stuff from King, Scott and Martin though.
 
B

BaDJuJu

Neo Member
Alas Babylon written by Pat Frank is an absolute classic, it really influenced a lot of writers in this genre. If you have never read it, please go and pick it up. I read this book when I was 14 and it really inspired to read a lot more novels and to diversify my reading choices.
 
Q

Qwomo

Junior Member
Fnb40.jpg


General synopsis:
The book is written from the perspective of an unnamed character, part of a group of ex special-operatives turned truckers that collectively make up the 'Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company'. The story largely focuses on the lives of the unnamed character and that of Gonzo Lubitsch, one of the members of the company.
Click to expand...

My impressions of the book from another thread:
Basically it's a zany Fallout-meets-Gamma World-meets-Mad Max postapocalyptic Futurama-esque good time.
Click to expand...

I haven't gotten far, but the prose is amazing. I love it. It's a real breath of fresh air form what I've been reading recently.
 
S

Salazar

Member
DJpme.jpg


Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel by David Markson. It is a highly stylized, experimental novel in the tradition of Beckett. The novel is mainly a series of statements made in the first person; the protagonist is a woman who believes herself to be the last human on earth. Though her statements shift quickly from topic to topic, the topics are often recurrent, and often reference Western cultural icons, ranging from Zeno to Beethoven to Willem de Kooning. Readers familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will recognize striking stylistic similarities to that work.

Though Markson's original manuscript was rejected fifty-four times, the book, when finally published in 1988 by Dalkey Archive Press, met with critical acclaim. In particular, the New York Times Book Review praised it for "address[ing] formidable philosophic questions with tremendous wit." A decade later, David Foster Wallace described it as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country" in an article for Salon entitled "Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960."
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Markson was a genius. The book is only obliquely or problematically post-apocalyptic (considering the narrator's unreliability), but it is really, really fucking good.
 
M

mavs

Member
I don't remember if The Miocene Arrow was actually a good book, but it did have a badass premise. It's more post-post-apocalyptic though. Basically, whales became sentient and built a satellite that scans the planet for electrical fields and destroys the devices that create them (I think it caused more serious damage too, don't remember exactly.) Sounds pretty dumb actually, but I remember liking it.
 
DiscoJer

DiscoJer

Member
Back in the early 80s I read a series called "The Pelbar Cycle" by Paul O. Williams.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_O._Williams

I really liked them then. But lost the paperbacks pretty much, and they've only been very expensively printed once by a University, and there are Kindle editions for like $12 each (they were $3 30 years ago, talk about inflation...)
 
TheContact

TheContact

Member
Read this post-apocalyptic short story. Here's an interesting bit about it:

Wiki quote:
Benét wrote the story in response to the April 25, 1937 bombing of Guernica, in which Fascist military forces destroyed the majority of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.[5] This story took place before the public knowledge of nuclear weapons, but Benét's description of "The Great Burning" is similar to later descriptions of the effects of the atomic bombings at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. His "deadly mist", and "fire falling from the mist" seem eerily prescient of the descriptions of the aftermath of nuclear blasts. The story was written in 1937, two years before the Manhattan Project started, and six years before there was widespread public knowledge of the project.
Click to expand...

By the Waters of Babylon
 
A

arts&crafts

Member
So I just read World War Z and it was awesome. Before that i read The Road, it was awesome. I am going to buy Stalker this week because I love the game, are there any other books a long the lines of fallout or stalker? Pretty much a man/ women scrounging for supply's, alone searching for answers? I am going to Wikipedia all the books in this thread as some might have already been posted.
 
M

Maklershed

Member
Fellow PA fans, just wanted to let you all know about this book that came out last week called The Dog Stars ...


The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

It's a great survival PA book in the vein of The Postman or World Made by Hand. The protagonist is a man and his dog who live in and protect an airport with his friend who happens to be a militant survivalist. They fight off random groups of marauders and try to make contact with anyone left that is friendly. I highly recommend this book. Easy, fun read that I'd now put up in my top 5 of all time favorite PA books.
 
J

jason10mm

Gold Member
Hugh Howey's WOOL! Basically a series of connected short stories about a Fallout Vault style bunker hundreds of years after the apocalypse. Very well written, extremely engaging characters, and a very internally consistent world with a well realized survival culture. Not a lot of sci-fi elements, it is mostly just gripping character drama.
 
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