I’ll mention one often overlooked, but which had a wide audience in its heyday, ** Daybreak 2250 A.D.** aka Star Man’s Son by André Norton. The hero goes on a rite of passage into a ruined city, some long time after the apocalypse. It originally came out as half of an Ace Double with something from “Lewis Padgett” (Henry Kuttner) and C.L. Moore called “Beyond Earth’s Gates.”
While primarily intended for adolescents, (Most of the heroes are adolescents outcast for some reason or another) this book, like most of Norton’s, is able to instill a strong sense of wonder and excitement.
I think the Harlan Ellison shortstory, The Deathbird should be mentioned. Very strange, very moving story about, essentially, the euthanization of the planet Earth. Not the people, the planet. I remember the night I put my dog, Axel, to sleep. Came home, got drunk, and read the story twice. Made me feel a lot better.
finally came across “Threads”. God, its very depressing but brilliant and moving also. Gave me nightmares.
thanks for your help folks, i’m still tryna find “Alas, Babylon”.
Mogiaw
Since “The Quiet Earth” has come up a couple of times, I’ll just mention that I have the book upon which the film was based–not a novelization of the film, but the original book.
The relatively short lived comic book series Deadenders was great. I’m not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction generally, but this was very smart and well-executed. Only the first five issues are collected in a trade paperback (“book”) form, under the title “Stealing the Sun”, but the remainder of the series is readily available on the secondary market.
Some good descriptions of the series available here:
I saw “The Quiet Earth” in the theater, when it reached Kansas. I thought it was a fine film, but I still can’t figure out if the ending was supposed to make sense. Nobody else I know ever even heard of it, so like KingLupid I’m glad I didn’t hallucinate it.
Word on The Stand. One of my favorite books. I particularly like the sociological aspects dealt with in the book about rebuilding society.
For pure entertainment, nothing’s more fun than The Road Warrior. Its one of those movies great for popping in and chilling with late at night after partying Friday night.
But for me and post-apocalyptic stuff, I love the computer game Fallout. IMO, it doesn’t get better than that (will we ever see Fallout 3?).
On the Beach By Nevile Shute is a classic. Its about the final, inevitable death of humanity after then aftermath of a nuclear exchange. It tells of the desperation and finally resignation of the citizens of Australia as the radioactive cloud slowing winds its way down from the northern hemisphere.
!!! POSSIBLE SPOILER AHEAD !!! The End Of The Whole Mess, by Stephen King.
Though this is only unfortunately only a short story in his Nightmares And Dreamscapes anthology. The reason it’s too bad is because it’s probably the most inventive take on the post-apocalyptic genre I’ve ever seen. What happens is that a former child prodigy happens to have noticed that the violence rate in a particular Texas village is absurdly low, so he puts together a team to concentrate the local groundwater minerals, and rig up a gigantic explosion to spread them worldwide. Unfortunately, it turns out that
I’ll bet you didn’t know that if you clicked on “Submit new reply” while you had something in the automatic reply box, you would post whatever you had typed. I sure didn’t.
The End Of The Whole Mess, by Stephen King.
Though this is only unfortunately only a short story in his Nightmares And Dreamscapes anthology. The reason it’s too bad is because it’s probably the most inventive take on the post-apocalyptic genre I’ve ever seen. What happens is that a former child prodigy happens to have noticed that the violence rate in a particular Texas village is absurdly low, so he puts together a team to concentrate the local groundwater minerals, and rig up a gigantic explosion to spread them worldwide. Unfortunately, it turns out that
that village in Texas also had an abnormally high incidence of Alzheimer’s disease, and through the contamination of the world’s water supply, the virtual destruction of human intellect is brought to pass. The story is written in the voice of the prodigy’s older brother and set at the time when he has just committed suicide by injecting himself with this concentrate. He struggles to finish his account while he is still capable of thinking and writing, but his ability to do both declines rapidly as he proceeds. It’s reminiscent that part of Flowers for Algernon, where Charly realizes that the operation to boost his intelligence was a failure, and he sinks back to his original sub-normal intelligence level. But in the Steven King store the loss of intelligence takes only about an hour.
It sounds like your typical pulpy, very strange post-apocalyptic adventure, and it has no pretensions of meaningfulness, and the science is bad (and the author knows it), but it’s such a FUN book.