100 books like On the Beach

Much SF&F literature has explored the concept of what the world might look like with fewer (or no) humans.

Weisman’s well-researched book imagines how our environment would recover; how nature might take back control without humans around to continue wrecking it.

He imagines the primacy of nature in a fascinating way and manages to avoid the normative language that might be off-putting, drawing the reader into a place that might as well be 1000 light years away from Earth.

This is the bible for the Beat generation and a glimpse into the jazz poetry road trip art world of 1950s America.

I read it before travelling to the US on a scholarship to help give me a sense of the Americana and youth culture I hope I would find.

I travelled all around the States excited by motels and road signs and railroad stations and telegraph poles laden with cables running off to disappear over the horizon. And those big old cars…

It’s such a physical story, so full of vigour and sweat.

J.R.R. Tolkien's masterful storytelling is unmatched, and The Lord of the Rings weaves together moral dilemmas and profound philosophical ideas seamlessly, encouraging me to contemplate the nature of power, the importance of preserving the natural world, and the significance of individual choices.

The book's themes of heroism, friendship, sacrifice, and the struggle between good and evil resonate deeply. In addition, each of his characters feels like an aspect of oneself; the introspection it inspires is brilliant!

The Lord of the Rings instills a sense of wonder, ignites the imagination, and imparts timeless wisdom, which heavily transformed my perspective on life, my values, and my understanding of the human condition.

The immersive nature of this book's narrative gripped me from the very start. This is a truly foundational text in the genre, but it nevertheless holds up to this day.

I particularly enjoyed the two-part story’s focus on humanity’s initial resistance to the invading force as well as an exploration of life under Martian control.

It goes without saying that the book is considerably older than the others I read while becoming interested in this topic. I enjoyed reflecting on the similarities and differences in Wells’ contemporary ideas about aliens, which naturally reflect some key Earth-based societal concerns of the time.

At the time, when I read this book, I’d just become a father. Naturally, the story about a father trying to protect his son in a harsh dystopian world was captivating for me and still is to this day.

I loved the book's gritty realism and felt as if I were walking beside the characters during the entire journey. I also found McCarthy’s writing style unique and something new from the best-selling paperbacks I’d often read before picking up his book.

Legends are made of powerful stuff, and nothing has greater power than a total flip in perspective. I still recall the gut-punch end to this book, though it’s been decades since I read it. 

Robert Neville is a vampire hunter by day and a tormented man by night. As seemingly the only living human in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Robert faces depression, isolation, alcoholism, and his undead neighbor, Ben Cortman, who appears outside Robert’s front door each night chanting, "Come out, Neville."

But when Robert is finally captured, and the truth of his situation is revealed, he gets a good look at the world through the eyes of the undead and is forced to ask himself, who am I? What have I become? 

This novel considers what will happen when the Southwest runs out of water, a very real possibility, especially with climate change, and something I care about as a Utah resident.

It pulls you into the action right away and keeps you on your toes until the very end, weaving together the narratives of a few different characters, including a journalist, a refugee from Texas, and a henchman (aka “the water knife”) who’s paid to destroy rival water supplies.

An alum of Oberlin College (like me!), Paolo Bacigalupi is a master of telling engaging stories about possible futures defined by climate change. I highly recommend this thoughtful novel and his other books! 

So, this is a novel about a world in which a global pandemic means that large gatherings are illegal and everyone has adapted to life at home in isolation. It was published in 2019, and I read it summer of 2020. I'm not sure I've ever read anything that was this spookily, horrifyingly prophetic. That said, it's also really punk and ultimately uplifting. One of the characters is the lead singer of the band who it turns out inadvertently gave the last public concert ever, and she's trying to revive live music with underground concerts. Another character is the virtual talent scout who joins her cause. The story is about how you peel yourself out of trauma and disaster to find community again. Be warned, at this historical moment this one's a bit of a kick in the teeth.

When you study the long arc of history you begin to suspect that apocalypses aren't just inevitable, they're common. And so is survival, which is a really heartening thought. Human beings are crazily adaptable, and our ability to come together in communities (ideally, when we're at our best, which granted isn't always and is hard to see sometimes) will aid our survival. Annalee Newitz tells us how this is has happened before, and how it can happen again.

At a whopping 1,152 pages, Stephen King’s The Stand was just too much to capture in a single movie.

That’s why, in 1994, CBS adapted it across four, ninety-minute episodes of a limited run “mini-series” (a fancy way of saying “a really long movie”). In all fairness, it had a great cast and was better than it had any right to be, and was far more enjoyable than CBS’s 2020 attempt at a do-over.

But even with a total six-hour runtime, it couldn’t capture all the story, heart, and nuance that made the book so incredible. It’s a feat to read, one I did to pass the time when bored in school, and one I will surely do again in the future.