The best books for epic adventures at the beginning of time, and at the end of the world

All adventures begin with The Odyssey.

Before there was Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, or Bilbo Baggins, there was brave Odysseus. It was Homer who first taught us what it means to desperately desire “to make it there and back again.” For me, The Odyssey struck a personal cord. As a warrior who once answered his nation’s call, it often wasn’t the battles in far distant lands, but the journey home, that was most difficult. Home, that beautiful, powerful word, holds great magic for Odysseus, and for me, too. Many ideas can send a hero on an adventure, but only love of home can bring him back again. These are the greatest adventures of all, and why The Odyssey is foundational for my own novel.

“We are a species with amnesia.” – Graham Hancock. 

There was human history before there was human history, and traces of that lost time can be found in our myths and legends. In his breakout 1996 book, Fingerprints of the Gods author Graham Hancock puts forth the exciting, and highly controversial possibility that, thousands of years before the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, there may have been an advanced, global human civilization. He postulates this civilization was annihilated in a world-shattering catastrophe. Now, a quarter of a century after publication, science is slowly catching up with Hancock’s hypothesis.

What happens after the End of the World? Is the end really the end? Stephen King’s classic masterpiece about the ultimate battle between good and evil following civilization’s collapse wrestles with this very concept. In his timeless epic, King explores the personal toll inflicted on those few who survive Armageddon, and how they react to being pawns of greater powers, both holy and unholy. When I read it the first time, I asked myself how I would react if I were one of King’s characters. Which side would I truly be on? King’s themes of good and evil, and what side we flawed humans would choose, works so well because his characters are so relatable. The Stand deeply impacted my writing style, and my own novel.

“Archeology” is the study of human prehistory through the excavation and analysis of artifacts and other physical remains. Author Jean M. Auel humanized what archeologists coldly classified as the human sub-species Homo Neanderthalensis, and changed literature forever. In her 1980 breakout novel The Clan of the Cave Bear she breathed life into bits of bone, stone chips, and cave art and, in the doing, made Neanderthals real to millions of readers. Jean M. Auel gave Neanderthals real hopes, fears, love and inner darkness. Through the eyes of a Cro-Magnon girl named Ayla, Auel saw Neanderthals not as primitive brutes, but fully realized people. This fictionalized humanity of what previously was only abstract scientific theory profoundly inspired me as a writer, and influenced my novel.

Every myth has an origin, a root. Perhaps the root of all human mythos originated deep in the mountains that lay east of the Black Sea. Nart Sagas from the Caucuses, by John Colarusso, brims with exciting stories of an ancient mythological race of heroic demigods called Narts. These stories were almost lost to history when the Caucus mountain tribes suffered genocide at Russia’s hands. Through “linguistic archeology,” Colarusso rediscovered and breathed new life into this nearly extinct folklore. The author postulates the Nart Sagas not only heavily influenced more familiar European and Asian myths, but may pre-date them and may be the direct link to humanity’s Indo-European roots.