After years of teaching English at alternative schools, I decided to write a book for students who don’t like to read, especially girls. One reason they don’t read is they often don’t see themselves represented in the characters. I wanted to hook them with characters they know. Lizzie, my impulsive, passionate protagonist, is a composite of many students. Sadly, her basic story, a single-parent family, substance abuse issues, poverty, and kids raising their siblings (and sometimes their parents), is tragically common. Turns out, All Is Silence appeals to friends and relatives who know these kids and want to understand them, and adults who were these kids themselves.
What if death forgot you? Lizzie, a suicidal teenager, barely navigates her life. Then everything falls apart. In a land deserted by a bat-virus pandemic eerily like Covid, she lacks reasons to live until a shocking turn of events reveals a phone number. Calling pulls her dangerously cross-country to meet a stranger she thought was dead. There’s plenty of food, gas, space… but fear, anger, and lust for power still control the patterns of human life.
This is a coming-of-age, realistic Young Adult apocaloptimistic novel was written for the angry, sad Children of the Children of the 80s, teenagers who grew up on their parents’ Hair Metal, John Hughes’ movies, and pizza. (And their parents who aren’t too old to recognize themselves as teens…)
Earth Abides is the Grandparent of modern apocalypse novels. I read it for the 1st time in my early teens; it captivated me. I don’t generally reread books, but I reread Earth Abides more than once a decade. Despite its age, 75, it still reads well, it is not a page-turner, but the world building and the story are so strong they will pull you through. Isherwood, the central character, wakes up after barely surviving a snake bite after spending a season doing research in the wilderness. He returns to ‘civilization’ to find that, though many things are still working, most people are dead or walking wounded. A scientist used to just observing, Ish becomes a leader of ‘his tribe,’ people he has encountered and brought together in a community.
The story follows him and his family from a young man as human civilization falls, to an old man where his descendants are returning to a hunter/gatherer society. Throughout the novel, which takes place over many decades, there is a strong theme of the fragile balance between the planet and the beings that live on it, especially humans. Trivia: George R. Stewart also wrote Ordeal By Hunger, a non-fiction about the Donner Party. He also came up with the idea of naming hurricanes.
In this profound ecological fable, a mysterious plague has destroyed the vast majority of the human race. Isherwood Williams, one of the few survivors, returns from a wilderness field trip to discover that civilization has vanished during his absence.
Eventually he returns to San Francisco and encounters a female survivor who becomes his wife. Around them and their children a small community develops, living like their pioneer ancestors, but rebuilding civilization is beyond their resources, and gradually they return to a simpler way of life.
A poignant novel about finding a new normal after the upheaval of a global crisis.
A Canticle for Leibowitz truly has all three aspects of apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian set in a three-part cycle. My middle school English teacher gave it to me to read since I was bored with what she was teaching. I cannot thank her enough. Canticle has a fascinating premise: six centuries before the story begins, a worldwide atomic apocalypse occurred. Blaming the scientists and thinkers, survivors, dubbing themselves “Simpletons,” hunted and killed off academics, scientists, and other people with knowledge.
Leibowitz founded a monastery in the Utah desert to preserve what knowledge they could. He is being considered for sainthood for his efforts 600 years before, when a young monk of his order discovers a trove of ‘relics’ in a bomb shelter which are attributed to Leibowitz. These include a grocery list and blueprints which the monk copies as a medieval illumination. The monks' interpretations of the items found in the shelter illustrate the loss of knowledge in those few intervening centuries. The book is cyclical in three parts, with lots of significant connections with the history of the Catholic church. Each part is separated by hundreds of years, there is a secondary apocalypse after humans have come back from their degradation and they eventually achieve space travel. This book is truly epic. Trivia: Walter M. Miller wrote it in response after having helped destroy an ancient monastery in Europe during WWII. It is also the only novel he finished, though a sequel was eventually finished by a friend, author Terry Bisson and published a year after his death and forty years after Canticle was published.
In the depths of the Utah desert, long after the Flame Deluge has scoured the earth clean, a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: holy relics from the life of the great saint himself, including the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the hallowed shrine of the Fallout Shelter.
In a terrifying age of darkness and decay, these artifacts could be the keys to mankind's salvation. But as the mystery at the core of this groundbreaking novel unfolds, it is the search itself—for meaning, for truth, for love—that offers hope for humanity's rebirth…
Lucifer's Hammer is probably the most realistic apocalypse novel I have read. The authors, also scientists, were very careful to make the entire novel seem possible, probable, and plausible (except maybe for the scene where the surfer rides the tsunami wave into a skyscraper!). It has an immediacy that is lacking in many such novels. When an amateur astronomer discovers a comet headed for Earth, the novel follows him, along with many other different storylines and characters, including astronauts who see the devastation from space. It seemed terrifyingly realistic for me as a 12-year-old, and many scenes still stick in my head though I’ve only reread it once. Would love to see this one turned into a film!
Trivia: Jerry Pournelle was one of the first bloggers, and a tech writer who predicted that hard drives would be replaced by solid-state storage devices. Larry Niven was an advisor to President Reagan on the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars program) to design space-based weapons.
“The first satisfying end-of-the-world novel in years . . . an ultimate one . . . massively entertaining.”—Cleveland Plain-Dealer
The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization.
But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival—a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known.…
I generally don’t like what I call Woo-Woo (supernatural elements) in novels, but The Stand blew me away! In fact, it was so impactful to me (along with the 1st three on this list) I referred to my 1st book as being “The Stand” without paranormal. In these days of the Covid Pandemic, the beginning of the novel seems very realistic. The characters, who the reader gets to know intimately are incredibly real human beings, and as the plot draws the participants together, I couldn’t help but be pulled along with them. I highly recommend the “uncut” version, partly because it allows you to stay in that universe longer! Trivia: It’s been made into two different film adaptations, an expanded edition that is closer to King’s original manuscript with some editing and additions. Amongst these, there are now three different final scenes. Stephen King also played parts in both film versions.
Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by virus and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published.
Soon to be a television series.
'THE STAND is a masterpiece' (Guardian). Set in a virus-decimated US, King's thrilling American fantasy epic, is a Classic.
First come the days of the virus. Then come the dreams.
Dark dreams that warn of the coming of the dark man. The apostate of death, his worn-down boot heels tramping the night roads. The warlord of the charnel house and Prince of…
Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, but I came to it late, not reading it until I had finished my 1st apocalyptic novel. It is a stunning story and the most terrifying for those of us living today. It is set in the 2020s and seems prescient in its representation of rampant capitalism and societal breakdown in a climate-changed United States. Told from the point of view of Lauren, a young black woman growing up afflicted with “The Sharing,” which forces her to feel what others are feeling, especially pain. She has grown up in a former gated community that manages to live slightly above the literal “have nots” living outside their walls, because of their members’ interdependence and support. Eventually, they are attacked by people from outside and she escapes north disguised as a man. Interspersed with the narrative are pieces of poetry that begin to build into a belief system envisioned by Lauren, a better way for humans to live: Earthseed. Despite its darkness, the ending is more optimistic than many dystopian novels.
Trivia: Octavia Butler, also wrote of alien races, historical, futuristic science fiction, and even a modern vampire story that upends many tropes of the genre. Two extrasolar objects bear her name: Asteroid 7052 Octaviabutler and the Perseverance rover landing site on Mars.
The extraordinary, prescient NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling novel.
'If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true. This is what makes Parable of the Sower even more impressive than it was when first published' GLORIA STEINEM
'Unnervingly prescient and wise' YAA GYASI
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We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.
America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to…
The Hunt for the Peggy C is best described as Casablanca meets Das Boot. It is about an American smuggler who struggles to rescue a Jewish family on his rusty cargo ship, outraging his mutinous crew of misfits and provoking a hair-raising chase by a brutal Nazi U-boat captain bent on revenge.
During the nerve-wracking 3,000-mile escape, Rogers falls in love with the family’s eldest daughter, Miriam, a sweet medical student with a militant streak. Everything seems hopeless when Jake is badly wounded, and Miriam must prove she’s as tough as her rhetoric to put down a mutiny by some of Jake’s fed-up crew–just as the U-boat closes in for the kill.
The Hunt for the Peggy C: A World War II Maritime Thriller
John Winn Miller's THE HUNT FOR THE PEGGY C, a semifinalist in the Clive Cussler Adventure Writers Competition, captures the breathless suspense of early World War II in the North Atlantic. Captain Jake Rogers, experienced in running his tramp steamer through U-boat-infested waters to transport vital supplies and contraband to the highest bidder, takes on his most dangerous cargo yet after witnessing the oppression of Jews in Amsterdam: a Jewish family fleeing Nazi persecution.
The normally aloof Rogers finds himself drawn in by the family's warmth and faith, but he can't afford to let his guard down when Oberleutnant Viktor…
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