You may argue that The Handmaid’s Tale is just as much of an apocalypse novel as Oryx and Crake, and in some ways I’d agree with you-an apocalypse of mind and morality instead of body and planet.
#RAMANICHANDRAN NOVELS SYNOPSIS SERIES#
My favorite Ballard: a heady quasi-adventure novel set in a future in which the entire planet has been transformed into a series of sweltering lagoons, a neo-Triassic landscape that horrifies and also transfixes the survivors, who are plagued by dreams and strange impulses. Until, that is, he meets the Oldeners, whose secret libraries will change everything for him. Benedikt is just glad not to have any major mutations, and a job, which is to transcribe the “speeches” of the wasteland’s leader, which are actually plagiarized from old books, not a single one of which Benedikt has ever read.
It’s two hundred years after “the Blast,” and in Moscow the snow is always falling. The novel spans several thousand years, and the moral is: we’ll always destroy the earth no matter how many precautions our ancestors took. The only people trusted with science are the monks in the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, who have pledged to protect it until humanity is ready for it again. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)Īfter civilization has been mostly wiped out by nuclear war, the few survivors become dedicated Luddites, purging themselves of all knowledge and eliminating any who would share or spread it. But considering the novel’s insistence on the interconnectedness of time and space (and people) and the centrality of the post-apocalypse it does evoke (located at the pinnacle of the novel’s unique structure), I think it’s only fair to count it here. Of course Cloud Atlas is not entirely a novel about the end of the world, and in fact of its six storylines only one could be considered post-apocalyptic (one other is squarely dystopian). Is Shen Fever actually just weaponized nostalgia? Or comfort? Whatever it is, Candace is one of the few who finds herself immune, and documenting New York City as it crumbles around her until even she is forced to flee. The plague that ends the world in Ma’s excellent debut is extra scary because we’re all halfway there: when you catch Shen Fever, you continue going about your routine, doing your rote tasks, not that much more of a zombie than you were in life, until eventually you rot away. Particularly strange and sad reading for a nation in quarantine-and proof that breaking it can bring disastrous effects. A military border is set up along the river to keep the sickness from spreading west, but this is a border that Gary is determined to cross. Wilson Tucker, The Long Loud Silence (1952)Įverything east of the Mississippi has been destroyed by a nuclear attack the scant survivors have been dosed with a bioweapon that has infected them with the plague (just to be safe, I suppose). Of course, there are plenty more great apocalypse and post-apocalypse novels that didn’t fit on this list, and I haven’t read enough books in translation in this genre, so as ever, please add on your own favorites in the comments. We could argue all day about what actually constitutes an “apocalypse”-2020 is checking a lot of boxes, as you may have noticed-so for the most part, I’ve gone with my gut.
I’ve done my best to limit this list to books in which there is-or has been-some kind of literal apocalypse, excluding dystopias (like The Handmaid’s Tale) or simply bleak visions of the future. Humans have been pondering the end of existence for as long as we’ve been aware of it (probably, I mean, I wasn’t there), and as a result we have a rich collection of apocalypse and post-apocalypse literature to read during our planet’s senescence. After all, someone must survive to tell the tale. The end of the world is never really the end of the world-at least not in fiction.
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