Not sure if it counts, but World War Z. One of the best thriller books I’ve read in years and exceptionally intelligent. A pity it’s written by Mel Brooks’s son because many people who haven’t read it automatically assume it’s comedic. (Nothing at all against Mel, it’s just that his paternity of Max is completely coincidental to his very gifted son’s subject and writing style.)
I’ve encountered very few people who are aware that Max Brooks is Mel’s son.
I first heard of him when he spoke at Univ. of Georgia and he was billed as “Mel Brooks’s son the zombie expert”. And his Zombie Survival Guide is actually listed as Humor even though it isn’t- it’s a companion to WWZ.
Systemic Shock, Single Combat and Wild Country by Dean Ing.
Zombie Survival Guide should be under Humor. It’s not meant to be “HAHA” but its place is there the same reason “The Action Hero’s Guide” and that whole series of books is there. The information inside is ‘true’ but the fact that it is being presented at all is the humor.
Well, the whole tone of the film wasn’t like any of those things were happening, it was just a mother’s fretting over the children, it was surreal how normal things remain in the film after all of those things are happening. You could make the same point, tell essentially the same story without the nuclear war scenario. The implications of what’s happened aren’t played through in any realistic way. The worst thing anyone does in the film is when the bully kid breaks into their pantry to try to steal some food then makes off on the kid’s bicycle. I know the local sheriff mentions lawlessness but you don’t see it. Just a neighbourhood going out with a whimper. Oh yeah someone complains about people cutting into the line for food. Anyway, sorry to hijack.
But the story isn’t about the wider effect on the world… It’s about this one family. This one family that knows they are all going to die sooner rather than later. The conversation the mother and daughter have about romantic love and sex is heartbreaking because the daughter KNOWS she’s never going to experience either one of them.
I did like the post-apcolyptic world depicted in the movie. Mostly isolated small towns full of normal people just trying to get by instead of mutants and cyborgs and skinhead bikers wearing football pads living in a barren desert wasteland with no explanation as to what the hell anyone eats or drinks.
That said, I thought the original Mad Max film was great at portraying a civilization that was basically winding down.
Gotta also give props to Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. I found that 1984 and Brave New World had interesting ideas, but were less about plot and more about hitting us over the head with, “Don’t let this happen!”
In terms of my favorite well plotted dystopian novel, I’ll have to say Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day.
I also loved Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (mentioned already in the thread).
World War Z is an excellent read. I had no idea of the Max/Mel Brooks relationship. There’s a movie in the pipeline, I’ve read.
On the movie front, Threads is a grim and cheerless experience, but fascinating nonetheless. There’s something about the grimy, washed-out shades of grey in it that chilled me more than The Day After. On a more recent note, 28 Days Later is good value for the spooky “what happened to everyone?” theme (I’ve not seen 28 Weeks Later yet, but have read the spoilers).
Ayn Rand’s Anthem is entertaining.
I really liked Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents, but don’t know if I could read them again.
All the others I cam into mention (Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, Galapagos) have already been mentioned.
1984, Brave New World, The Day After, Testament.
In The Doomsday Book, a historian from our future travels back in time to a small European village shortly before the Black Death wipes it out. The book cuts back and forth between the medieval apocalypse, and her colleagues in the thriving, modern world, giving a great contrast: even though the reader knows the world survives and goes on, in that village, for all intents and purposes, the world has ended. As the villagers die off one by one, they have to deal with the knowledge that every single person they know on Earth is dead or dying, that they’re being wiped out utterly, and no one is ever going to know or care about who they were or what they did.
I’m trying to remember a book I loved as a kid (though IIRC it wasn’t actually a childrens’ book) about a teacher and a group of schoolchildren who go up in a hot-air-ballon, come back down and realize a poisonous cloud has turned all humans on earth into stone. They rampage the town, accidentally unleash all the zooanimals who eat most of them, then at the end the teacher shoots the last two kids, lights up a cigar and contentedly pronounces himself the last man on earth.
Anyone remember it/ know it?
I recently read Dies the Fire because of recommendations here. It’s definitely a good read. One thing I like about it is that the premise is pretty unusual. How often do we contemplate the importance of explosives in our lives?
I went to pick up the sequel, but for some reason, decided I wasn’t in the mood. I got Island in the Sea of Time by the same author instead. I like that one even better. The premise is that the island of Nantucket is suddenly transported, intact, 3000 years into the past. Using Nantucket is a clever ploy. It happened in the off-season, so there was a ton of excess housing and materials and stuff around because the island population swells so much in the summer. Since there was some abundance, albeit short-term, it spared us the grisly starvation scenarios of Dies the Fire. The other thing that makes it clever is that it allows the townspeople to be somewhat better equipped for life in the pre-industrial age than they might be otherwise because of all the miscellaneous equipment hanging around in the museum or in people’s homes for decorative purposes. A cauldron? A bellows? Got 'em! They haven’t gotten to the point of needing a spinning wheel yet, but you can bet there will be one lying around. Okay, so it’s all a little “convenient,” but it does allow the story to move beyond the nuts-and-bolts matters of survival.
Review snippet from Cine-East:
The trailer on apple.com is much better because it’s longer (2 minutes) and shows much more of the film’s dazzling imagery. The trailer at casshern.com is only about 20 seconds but has subtitles.
There’re a bunch of other novels that use variations on that theme, although they’re not generally apocalyptic in the traditional sense. 1632 by Eric Flint has a small West Virginian mining town transported back to Germany in 1632 (duh) at the height of the worst depredations of the Thirty Years War, where they use their advanced technology and American Spirit ™ to found a coalition of democratic states in Thuringia. The Lost Regiment is about a Civil War regiment that gets transported to a world populated by cultures snatched from disparate periods of human history, who are being used as cattle by the native species, a race of giant, Mongolish humanoids. Lots and lots of killin’ ensues. Niether series is great literature, but they’re fun, light reads.
Back to the OP: On the comic book front, Y: The Last Man is about a disease that sweeps across the world, killing anything with a Y chromosome, and the one guy (and his pet monkey) who is mysteriously immune.
Gojiro was a fun and stimulating read.
From the Amazon Library Journal description:
Green Bean, definitely pick up The Protector’s War sometime soon. Follow that with the other two books in the Islands trilogy, then finish up with A Meeting In Corvallis. That will get you up to speed for the new trilogy that ties the two together. The Sunrise Lands has just been released.