(LitHub article by Emily Temple, full citation at the end of
the post)
John Wyndham, The
Day of the Triffids (1951)
It feels mildly ridiculous now—or maybe just mild—but
Wyndham’s killer-plant-cum-blindness-inducing-meteor-strike apocalypse is a
classic for a reason: it’s terrific fun. Even Arthur C. Clarke called it an
“immortal story.” And it’s not quite as well-known but allow me to slide in his
1955 novel The
Chrysalids here too, as a b-side.
Richard Matheson, I
Am Legend (1954)
At this point, Matheson’s pandemic/vampire/zombie novel is
more famous for being source material than for being actual material, probably
because it is overflowing with ideas. It is sometimes awesome and sometimes
boring; jury’s still out on whether it really works as a novel, but it
absolutely gets points for influence. And verve.
Emily St. John Mandel, Station
Eleven (2014)
Your favorite novel in which a flu pandemic wipes out
civilization in a matter of weeks (yikes) and a band of entertainers wander the
decimated land, putting on Shakespeare plays for the survivors. It’s about as
feel-good as stories about the apocalypse get.
Ling Ma, Severance (2018)
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. 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.
David Mitchell, Cloud
Atlas (2004)
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). 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.
Nevil Shute, On
the Beach (1957)
It is 1963, and a nuclear war has devastated most of the
planet. In Melbourne, relatively untouched, a handful of survivors wait for the
winds to bring the radiation to their shore, occupying themselves more or less
usefully, if such a thing can be said to have any meaning at the end of the
world, as others investigate what may be a message from a survivor in Seattle.
A moving, if not particularly scientifically sound, classic.
Walter M. Miller, Jr., A
Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
After 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. 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. The novel
spans several thousand years, and the moral is: we’ll always destroy the earth
no matter how many precautions our ancestors took. Oh well.
Nnedi Okorafor, Who
Fears Death (2010)
Truly a fantasy novel (if these genre distinctions matter,
which they don’t), but set in a post-apocalyptic Sudan into which Onyesonwu is
born, a child of rape and genocide, and hones her magical powers until she can
strike back against her father. A striking, grand novel that everyone should
read.
Hanna Jameson, The
Last (2019)
We often think of the apocalypse as something that happens
to everybody at the same time—but what about those in remote locales that
remain untouched at the beginning? In this novel, the world ends while Jon is
at a Swiss hotel, far away from everyone he knows and loves. So what does he
do? Get busy solving the more immediate problem: the dead body on the premises.
Of course.
Colson Whitehead, Zone
One (2011)
The preeminent modern literary zombie novel, in which
everyone left in Manhattan is either a zombie, feral skels or morose
stragglers, or a human suffering from PASD (post-apocalyptic stress disorder)
and our mediocre hero is one of the band sent to clear out the stragglers. A
zombie novel for people who don’t read zombie novels and a literary novel for
people who don’t read literary novels.
J. G. Ballard, The
Drowned World (1962)
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.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx
and Crake (2003)
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. But you know and I both know what we’re
doing here. Plus, Oryx and Crake, while somewhat less celebrated,
is just as good, a frighteningly plausible world destroyed by our relentless
pursuit for happiness in a bottle. Oh, and trusting corporations. Of course.
Rumaan Alam, Leave
the World Behind (2020)
Alam’s recent blockbuster hit slash literary darling has what
may be the quietest apocalypse on this list, at least from our viewpoint. We
see almost nothing, get only hints of the destruction that descends on the
world, and instead are focused on the increasing anxiety of two families,
thrown together by chance, as they try to make sense of what is happening.
Which . . . is probably how most of us will experience the apocalypse, when it
comes. Knowing this fact makes the novel all the more chilling.
Stephen King, The
Stand (1978)
A classic, and probably King’s best novel (don’t come for
me) is a behemoth (famously inspired by The Lord of the Rings) with many
threads and characters, all set in a world ravaged by a pandemic caused by a
weaponized strain of influenza that is fatal to 99.4% of those who encounter
it. So you may not want to read it right now!
Cormac
McCarthy, The Road (2006)
The very first novel you (probably) think of when someone
says “post-apocalyptic,” in which a man and his son travel across a blasted-out
country that ever gets explained. Weirdly punctuated, unforgettable, and
something of a departure for McCarthy—except in its unyielding bleakness. Find
the film adaptation here.
Octavia Butler, Parable
of the Sower (1993)
The best and worst thing about this novel is how close it
feels to being possible (it is set four years from now). Unchecked climate
change, wealth inequality, and corrupt leadership have destroyed society for
most people—who now live in guarded settlements or scavenge in roving bands—and
the hot new drug that makes you into an arsonist is just an extra fun detail.
Of course our narrator is afflicted with the worst possible thing you could
have in such a scenario, and also the thing that might save everyone:
hyperempathy, meaning she feels the pain of others. A literary page-turner of
the highest order.
José Saramago, tr. Giovanni Pontiero, Blindness (1995;
English publication 1997)
It doesn’t take a meteor or a nuclear missile to destroy
civilization; all you need is a surprise epidemic of blindness, and men and
women will destroy it themselves. Despite the compelling, experimental prose,
parts of this feel like a horror novel, but unlike most of the books on this
list, it ends on a note of hope, which makes it a particularly good one to read
right now.
N. K. Jemisin, The
Fifth Season (2015)
This is another book not squarely in the post-apocalyptic
genre—there are elements of fantasy in here, and science fiction, though as we
know all of these borders are porous. What is sure, however, is that the events
of the book take place post-apocalypse. Actually, they take place
post multiple apocalypses, each one a devastating turn of weather
that wipes out a healthy chunk of civilization. The characters in this book and
its sequels are trying to survive post-apocalypse, sure, but they’re also
trying to prevent the inevitable next one.
Mary Shelley, The
Last Man (1826)
Shelley’s early novel of a 21st century world scrubbed
nearly clean by bubonic plague was introduced as if it were merely a collection
of prophetic writings that she found and compiled into a novel. Her
contemporaries hated it. “It’s as if the critics were trying to annihilate with
their rhetoric the very possibility of writing a novel on this
subject,” wrote Morton D. Paley. “The author’s gender was of course not
spared.” It was described as “a sickening repetition of horrors,” and “the
offspring of a diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste” . . . which
should make any modern reader excited to pick it up. Good thing time goes on (for
now).
Sandra Newman, The
Country of Ice Cream Star (2014)
In post-pandemic Massachusetts, cabals of children run
wild—children being the only humans left, as everyone now dies from a disease
called “posies” by the age of 20. Unless, that is, our young heroine Ice Cream,
can track down the cure. This is a big, difficult, and ambitious novel told in
an invented apocalyptic language—it may not be for everyone, but for me it
cements Newman’s status as an underrated genius.
Max Brooks, World
War Z (2006)
Everyone’s favorite metafictional zombie apocalypse novel by
Mel Brooks’ son, whose framing device—Brooks as agent of the United Nations
Postwar Commission and his own actual/fictional survival guide, interviewing
survivors—give it a polyphonic resonance. Don’t judge it by the movie, which
takes serious liberties, and is not great.
Russell Hoban, Riddley
Walker (1980)
This classic, highly influential for its use of invented
dialect, is set in England, some two thousand years after the end of
civilization as we know it—when what society is left is uncomfortably reliant
on “Punch & Pooty” shows. A layered, Joycean masterpiece that is as much
about the power of story and myth as it is about the end of the world and
everything after.
Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicaä
of the Valley of the Wind (1994)
I love Miyazaki’s post-apocalyptic world—most of the world
is covered in toxic forest, known as the Sea of Corruption, which is itself
overrun by giant, mutant insects, and which is encroaching—and his heroine, a
curious princess turned battle captain with a deep respect for the natural
world, corrosive as it may be.
Waubgeshig Rice, Moon
of the Crusted Snow (2018)
It’s almost winter, and on the reservation of a small
Anishinaabe community in northern Ontario, the power has gone out. Not just the
power either, but the phones and the internet, resulting in full isolation. And
it’s cold. Then the outsiders begin to appear. Fear and chaos reign, as Evan
Whitesky, father of two, looks to the past, to tradition, to try to rebuild his
community’s future. Chilling in more ways than one.
Edan Lepucki, California (2014)
Lepucki’s debut is probably most famous for being the book
Stephen Colbert made famous, but it’s also a beguiling novel about love at the
end of the world—though we never really learn what exactly tipped our present
into this factionalized and urine-coated future. Could be anything, I guess.
Justin Cronin, The
Passage (2010)
One of the best and biggest contemporary vampire novels is
also one of the best and biggest apocalypse novels. It all starts in a lab, in
which a virus meant to create super soldiers actually creates a plague of
monsters—93 years later, the humans left huddle in colonies, hiding from the
hunters outside the walls. But can the world actually be saved after all?
Anna North, America
Pacifica (2011)
Some 70 years from now, North America is frozen. The
survivors of the latest Ice Age are clustered on a Pacific island; only the
eldest remember life on the mainland. But when her mother goes missing, Darcy
has to uncover the secrets of the old world in order to parse the disruptions
of the new.
Pierre Boulle, tr. Xan Fielding, Planet
of the Apes (1963)
You don’t find out that Planet of the Apes is a
post-apocalyptic novel, and not just a science fiction novel about another
world, until the end of the book. (Sorry for not warning you about this
spoiler, but look, you had almost 60 years.) What was the cause? Oh, laziness,
really…
Megan Hunter, The
End We Start From (2017)
Parenthood is a kind of apocalypse, yes, but—well, so is an
underwater London. No food, no power, no internet; society begins to break
down, but even this can barely distract a new mother from the magic of her
child. Hunter’s sparse novel asks what to make of the first year of a life (and
the first year of motherhood) at the end of the world.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Always
Coming Home (1985)
“The people in this book might be going to have lived a
long, long time from now in Northern California,” is how this book begins, in
slippery Le Guin fashion. The apocalypse in Always Coming
Home happened so long that none among the Kesh remember it—not even their
songs know what caused it. Mostly, what’s left is styrofoam. This is not a
straight narrative, but a realistic anthropological study of a fictional people,
the Kesh, compiled and annotated by a researcher named Pandora. In some ways,
it is a minor work in Le Guin’s oeuvre, but a fascinating one.
David Brin, The
Postman (1985)
The book starts sixteen years after the apocalypse (“It
hardly mattered anymore what had done it—a giant meteorite, a huge volcano, or
a nuclear war. Temperatures and pressures swung out of balance, and great winds
blew.” Much has changed for the survivors, but one thing has not: the authority
conferred by a uniform. Or so discovers Gordon Krantz (aka Kevin Costner, if
you’re one of the 8 people who saw the movie adaptation), a wanderer and
one-time drama student who dons a uniform and mail sack found in an abandoned
Postal Service truck and begins to play the role of an officer of the “Restored
United States of America,” bringing hope to a populace trying to pull itself
back from the brink.
Peter Heller, The
Dog Stars (2012)
In this surprisingly uplifting post-apocalypse novel, a
contagious disease called “The Blood” has wiped out most of civilization and
left those who remain desperate and territorial (not to mention six feet apart
from one another). “”The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice,” says Hig, our
gentle hero. Hig lives in an old airplane hangar with his dog and grunty friend
Bangley, who guards the perimeter, but after hearing a strange dispatch on the
radio, he eventually goes out in search of other survivors, a final grasp at a
better life.
Lidia Yuknavitch, The
Book of Joan (2017)
In 2049, the world has been destroyed by global warming and
war, and what humans are left orbit their one-time home in a colony called
CIEL, led by the tyrannical Jean de Men, drawing whatever they can from the
rock via “invisible technological umbilical cords.” One woman on CIEL, who will
soon turn 50 and therefore be determined unnecessary and euthanized, tells the
story of Joan of Dirt (for this is a riff on the Joan of Arc story), who is
trying to save the world.
Lauren Beukes, Afterland (2020)
In Beukes’ fifth novel, it is 2023, and a pandemic has left
fewer that 1% of the world’s male population alive. One of these is Cole’s
12-year-old son, Miles, whom Cole must protect at all costs—considering what
nefarious minds, like her sister’s, might do with a boy immune to the virus—and
so they go on the lam, Miles going as Mila, hoping to get home to Johannesburg.
Like all of Beukes’ novels, it is fun, smart, and slightly sickening.
George R. Stewart, Earth
Abides (1949)
One of the classics of the genre, in which a student, Ish,
emerges from a period of isolation and illness—he was bitten by a diseased
rattlesnake—and steps back into the world to find almost no one left alive in
it. But humans, like any invasive species, will find a way, and so Ish meets
Em, and they build a community of survivors, new and old—but instead of rebuilding
the world they knew, they must watch as the younger generation adapts and
begins to build a new society based on the world that is left.
Jennifer Marie Brissett, Elysium (2014)
In this surreal novel, two characters at the end of a world
destroyed switch genders, roles, and relationships to one another as their
lives are repeatedly rebooted by a mysterious—and corrupted—atmospheric
computer program, which is looking (maybe) for a savior.
Peng Shepherd, The
Book of M (2018)
This novel includes one of the stranger epidemics in
apocalypse fiction: the Forgetting, which has devastated the world by
separating those afflicted from their shadows—and their memories, which causes
them to behave erratically, even violently. As society breaks down, Ory and Max
(one shadowless, one not) try to find answers, and each other.
Nick Harkaway, The
Gone-Away World (2008)
If you like your post-apocalypses a little ludicrous, you
may enjoy Harkaway’s take, in which the “Go-Away War” has left three-quarters
of the Earth’s population dead—or, more specifically, “gone-away,” i.e. still
there, but stripped of information—until it comes in contact with a survivor’s
mind, that is. Our hero is a kung fu trucker named Gonzo, and of course, he
must save what’s left of the world.
Michel Faber, The
Book of Strange New Things (2014)
In this novel, a pastor goes to another planet to spread
Christianity, leaving his wife at home; what results, among other things, is
that the apocalypse in this novel is telegraphed to the protagonist at a distance,
through increasingly alarming and unbelievable missives, even as he finds
himself drawing further away from the life he used to know and the woman he
used to love.
Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse (2011)
For a little relief from nuclear war and pandemics, enter
the robopocalypse—which, by the way, is exactly what it sounds like. It begins,
of course, with a brilliant scientist and a sentient computer program, Archos,
which kills its creator and decides that its purpose for being is to save the
planet from the human race. Archos spreads to machines around the world, which
kill or enslave humans—until a few begin to fight back. Another breath of fresh
air: this novel is told from the other side of the apocalypse, a reminder that
these things can be reversed, at least sometimes.
Pat Frank, Alas,
Babylon (1959)
In this classic of nuclear holocaust fiction, when much of
the United States is destroyed by the Soviet Union, one small Florida town
survives, adapting to their new lives in a radioactive wasteland.
M. R. Carey, The
Girl with All the Gifts (2014)
When this novel begins, it’s about a decade after the zombie
apocalypse has left only a handful of uninfected humans in Britain—the rest are
dead or infected, “empty houses where people used to live” known as “hungries.”
It’s been long enough, though, for there to be a second generation of hungries:
children who are preternaturally smart, absurdly strong, and capable (maybe) of
human empathy. Unless they smell a human, that is. Then they want to eat it.
The human scientists who are left are torn: try to crack open the eponymous
Melanie’s brain to figure out how it works? Or treat her like a child and hope
she can lead the world back to humanity that way?
Robert R. McCammon, Swan
Song (1987)
A horror novel and an apocalypse novel in one—as if
surviving nuclear holocaust wasn’t enough, now there’s a demonic entity known
as The Man with the Scarlet Eye, aka Doyle, running around. Typical.
Sarah Pinsker, A
Song for a New Day (2019)
Oh, weird, a novel in which a string of terrorist attacks,
mass shootings, bombings, and then a pandemic, has resulted in widespread fear,
consolidation of corporate power, and the end of all public gatherings. So
unrealistic, amirite? Instead of Zoom, though, Luce and her band-mates have to
contend with StageHolo, basically a holographic pay-per-view for concerts, and
their talent scout Rosemary, who never really knew the world Before. Like all
the best apocalyptic fiction, this is actually a book about human
connection—the fact that it’s also a cool, queer rock and roll novel is just a
bonus.
C.A. Fletcher, A
Boy and His Dog at the End of the World (2019)
Just what it says on the tin. The boy (Griz) and the dog
(Jip) are among the survivors after the “soft apocalypse” known as the Gelding,
which neutered most of the world. When Griz’s other dog (Jess) is stolen, Griz
and Jip must make a rescue mission through the ruins of Scotland.
Emily
Temple
Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first
novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in
June 2020. https://www.emilytemple.net/.
https://lithub.com/the-50-greatest-apocalypse-novels/
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