The best books with creation myths at the end of the world

In Octavia Butler’s essential novel, the main character Lauren reveals a belief system she calls Earthseed, which departs from the religions she was taught growing up in an apocalyptic Los Angeles. When I first read Parable of the Sower years ago, I felt terror and grief for the characters as they traveled the landscape of my childhood—most of my stories now are set on the West Coast. I also felt in the Earthseed writings a sort of peace or balance, and only later learned how mythologies reflect their cultures of origin, that the stories can convey, literally or figuratively, shared values and traumas. If so, then amid personal, cultural, economic, and environmental upheaval, Earthseed is a form of bravery, a beginning and embracing of the future.

The term “post-apocalyptic” is a bit of a contradiction, since “apocalypse” traditionally means the end of everything; nothing comes after. Perhaps then “post-apocalyptic” mirrors one of the oldest human impulses, the drive to continuously examine the limits of our existence, or maybe it reveals a newer development in our collective thinking, to better comprehend the social and environmental changes we are experiencing globally. N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season is an intricate example of civilizations recreating themselves anew, after not one but multiple, reoccurring seasons of apocalypses. Each apocalypse impacts the ancient lore of the world as well, illuminating how mythologies can slant societal, historical, and scientific artifacts, and at the same time help communities survive and evolve.

When I read The Plague in my twenties, I was reminded of Dante’s Inferno, a journey through increasingly hellish layers. There are literal layers of suffering in The Plague: a disease forces a city into a strict quarantine, and as resources from the outside dwindle and cases surge, bodies pile up. What has stayed with me all this time, though, is the way the story becomes so tense and pressurized it finally buckles into allegory, as the characters and reader try to make sense of the unrelenting horror. This desperate meaning-making evokes The Black Death, Nazi occupations, but also the book of Genesis. The effect of this constrained story, which must create, if nothing else, room for itself, on or off the page, both fascinates me and haunts me.

Megan Hunter’s debut novel is a strange and poetic journey through the apocalypse. The story begins with a young mother giving birth during a cataclysmic flood, and the story recalls flood mythologies and the idea of water as both a source of creation and destruction. In our conversation at Propeller Magazine, Hunter shared other tales that informed The End We Start From and alluded to pregnancy, such as the myth often referred to as The Earth Diver, in which the world grows from a bit of material in primordial waters. The novel’s lyrical prose also gave me permission to experiment in my own writing, to allow language its acrobatics and convey unique experiences of grief and awe.

I first learned about Penelope Farmer’s Beginnings: Creation Myths of the World while reading Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From. In her short book, Farmer has compiled fragments of myths from around the world, and she organized these brief excerpts into sections that describe the beginning of the world, the origin of the earth and Man, flood and fire mythologies, the origin of death and food plants, and the end of the world. To see such different (and, sometimes, intriguingly similar) mythologies from diverse cultures sharing fundamental interests is inspiring in itself, and for such a quick survey of our world’s origin stories, the book is cosmic in scope and a wonderful jumping off place for additional research.