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The End of the World Running Club: The ultimate race against time post-apocalyptic thriller

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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. When I looked at the sci-fi collection on my bookshelves before compiling this list, I was surprised by how many of Niven’s books I had. I’d also forgotten what classics s such as Ringworld and The Mote in God’s Eye were. Niven is a master of hard sci-fi and together with Pournelle (another US genius), he wrote this apocalyptic thriller in 1977. A giant comet hits the Earth, creating collossal earthquakes, giant tsunamis and ultimately the beginning of a new ice age. A handful of humans struggle to survive. Is it actually a post-apocalypse through which our one-shoed protagonist drifts? Or are we dealing with a different reality entirely? Either way, it has the feeling of a land gone to seed, with bombed-out, disconnected cities, enormous red suns, inexplicable, endless fires. And either way, it is one of the weird greats, a widely influential and difficult—even impenetrable—cult classic.

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. 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. 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.This is a wonderfully imaginative mix of psychology, quantum mechanics and the meaning of human consciousness. It is based on the “ quantum mind” idea developed by the physicist Roger Penrose in the late 80s. The theory is not taken very seriously now by scientists, but is great sci-fi thriller fodder. The end of the world is never really the end of the world—at least not in fiction. After all, someone must survive to tell the tale. And what tales they are. 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. 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.

Apocalyptic fiction focuses on the end of civilization either through nuclear war, plague, or other global catastrophic risk. 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. 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. 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. 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?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. Many apocalyptic stories focus on stories that are on the brink of the end of the world of the civilization. Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster. Also called 'Holocaust' 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. 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. This 1962 novel depicts a postapocalyptic future in which global warming has rendered much of planet uninhabitable. In stark contrast to Station Eleven, it is a dark and depressing tale of survivors forced to reinvent their ethical and moral codes when civilisation collapses. It is widely regarded as one of the first climate-change fiction texts.

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. 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! 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.

Apropos of . . . Nothing

But then, I suppose that's part of the point—aren't the point of encyclopedias to record everything, making no distinctions between the mundane and the magnificent? Each entry, no matter its importance, striving to build a larger body of knowledge, much larger than any individual contribution? In The End of the World Book, all of the individual fragments add up to an understanding of its creator, revealing everything and nothing about him. The mystery and myth of some kind of total knowledge remains... 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. 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.

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