I would suggest *The Triumph of Time *by James Blish, the concluding novel of the “Cities in Flight” series.
Andre Norton wrote several post-apocalyptic novels including Star Man’s Son 2250 A.D. and Sea Seige.
You could watch The Day After. That should get you in a cheery mood. Not much rebuilding of the post-apocalyptic world though.
But it’s available on Netflix!
Yep. Private Site
Centuries after the war that wiped out most of the human race, a walled-off enclave of civilization has kept on keeping on by prizing uniformity and ritual; the narrator is an engineer on the brink of completing a rather impressive rocket capable of space flight, which of course was science fiction in the '20s.
Empty World by John Christopher. God, I loved John Christopher as a kid. It’s a shame that most of his books seem to be falling out of print.
There really should be a stickied thread just for sci-fi identification.
Aha. I thought you were making an acronym out of something upthread and I wasn’t sure what.
I thought Malcolm Jamal Warner was excellent in it too.
There is something post, just not that much. 
Old thread resurrect here, but I really like a book titled “The Last Ship” by David Brinkley. Published in 1988, but still available on Amazon. Gets mixed reviews, but a good read if you prefer someone who really dives deep into characters and concepts rather than a more ADD type read. One of the reviewers likens his style to Melville, and i can see that. He takes a long time to tell a story, but the story is better for it.
That reminds me of Long Voyage Back by Luke Rhinehart (of Diceman fame), which is set on board a big trimaran yacht after a nuclear war. It’s pretty readable, but not great.
And just out (so I’ve not had a chance to read it, but it looks good) is The Great Bay by Dale Pendell, which is centred on the gradually flooding Central Valley in California over the next 10,000 years as people (and the habitat) cope with climate change and recover from a massive collapse following a pandemic.
I just re-read Z for Zachariah, which is a YA novel that I read in Jr High. I liked it as much as a grown up.
I also just read How I live Now, which I really liked, though the end was a little abrupt. Though I suppose it’s a good thing to wish a book is longer. Technically, it’s not post-apocalyptic, but a realistic idea of what might happen if there was a world war and occupying troops in Great Britain.
A few films I don’t think anyone has mentioned (apologies if I missed 'em):
Soylent Green
Blade Runner
Children of Men
Gattaca
Farenheit 451
Logan’s Run
Sleeping Dogs
Rollerball
Brave New World
Lathe of Heaven
Alien (and all subsequent)
Zardoz
Wall-E
'48 by James Herbert. ( Both Post apocalyptic, and alternate history)
On the beach
Mad Max [Road Warrior]
Recent BBC series - Survivors, not too bad at all
Day of the Triffids!
Good list, Fried Dough Ho!
Niven’s Destiny’s Road takes place in a future society that has sustained an apocalyptic collapse.
Warday authors Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka also wrote Nature’s End, well worth checking out just for the depopulationist manifesto stuff.
The Quiet Earth really is worth finding a copy of, as is the NOVEL The Postman, and this wouldn’t be the SDMB if someone didn’t gratuitously mention how great Firefly was…
Firefly isn’t really post-apocalyptic, though. Just a non-utopic/realistic future. Everything still functions relatively well, considering frontier conditions.
I didn’t read every post but if it hasn’t been mentioned yet: Oryx and Crake.
Brilliant, sad, funny… it’s great.
The shadow play in the episode Heart of Gold:
To me, there’s a distinct difference between “the actions of humanity ultimately render Earth itself uninhabitable, but only after we’ve expanded to other regions of space and/or gained the capability to sustain ourselves on a trip to find a new home” and “Earth and/or its governments and/or its capacity to sustain life are destroyed, while it is for all intents and purposes the sole or main viable location for human life, and the survivors try to rebuild amongst the wreckage and/or set off for parts unknown.”
I.e., the destruction of Earth That Was was a catastrophe, but not an apocalypse, because it was no longer the setting for the entire sphere of human existence.
About Alas, Babylon
It does work. I am an example. My mom had no drugs for my delivery, only hypnosis. My doctor was an Osteopath named Dr. Pickering who worked with my mom during her pregnancy implanting the suggestions that she would “feel no pain” and that it would be a “beautiful experience”. It worked so well that he delivered both of my sisters in the same way.
The book does have some elements that might be called “magical,” though not nearly as much as some other things I’ve seen mentioned here.
Kunstler really only describes how things are in one small area. The whole rest of the world is unknown, aside from scraps of rumor.
The electricity is part of that picture. Of course there are various things that might be happening to cause it–but nobody knows. The systems of the outside world can no longer be relied upon, that’s the point.
So within the realm of Kunstler’s town, Union Grove, is it so unrealistic that things fell out thus, with women mainly staying close to home? I’d have to count it shocking if large numbers didn’t adopt such a pattern in the circumstances. I noticed some talk in this thread from women who suggested that being a woman men chose to protect might be relevant to their well-being.
Nobody is saying that’s a good thing, it just might be the practical reality for some. In any event, I didn’t understand Kunstler to mean that society was operating on the same terms everywhere. Indeed, some episodes in the book suggest that it is emphatically different (often worse) in other places. But mostly it’s just unknown. Probably the self-sufficient lesbians are out there somewhere, along with any other scenario you care to imagine. But for the most part, the description of the behavior of the people of Union Grove (which we understand to have been a fairly homogenous place before) strikes me as a reasonable guess at how some people will get by.
The book is probably best understood in conjunction with Kunstler’s non-fiction treatment of similar themes, such as The Long Emergency. Some of the circumstances he describes in World Made by Hand represent guesses, not the aspirations many readers seem to see.