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Apocalyptic fiction

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  • March 12, 2020 at 1:34 pm #30545
    brooksby

    So, I was browsing in my LBS (local book shop) at lunchtime, ready for the Govt to announce so-called ‘social distancing’ (c’mon, you can’t say you haven’t been thinking it too!)

    Can’t decide… Do I re-read ‘The Stand’, or read ‘Station Eleven’, or even just Camus’ ‘The Plague’?

    Or do I settle down with ‘The Knowledge – how to rebuild the world’ and a copy of ‘The Zombie Survival Guide’?

    Has anyone got any suitably apocalyptic recommendations?

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  • March 16, 2020 at 7:50 am #956705
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    hawkinspeter

    Looks like The Grauniad has

    Looks like The Grauniad has picked up on this too: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/15/books-to-read-while-quarantined-coronavirus

    March 13, 2020 at 1:23 pm #956703
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    Stpears

    I trust you’ve seen the video

    I trust you’ve seen the video short of the unpublished Wyndham classic ‘The Day the Pole Was Greased’.   Sisyphustic horror! ?

    March 13, 2020 at 1:13 pm #956701
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    Stpears

    Cormac MacCarthy’s ‘The Road’

    Cormac MacCarthy’s ‘The Road’. Better than the movie, so bleak he makes the roads seem almost as dangerous as they currently are!  Margaret Atwood’s ‘Oryx and Crake’ trilogy are worth a butchers and try ‘A Canticle for Leibovitz’ by Walter Miller for a somewhat different take – he explores a regressed society hundreds of years after cataclysm, trying to make sense of the junk and random information left over from our world. 

     

    March 13, 2020 at 8:01 am #956699
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    hawkinspeter

    Most of the stuff by John

    Most of the stuff by John Wyndham is fairly apocalyptic. I’d recommend The Kraken Wakes for a good rising sea level kind of apocalyse or The Chrysalids for a post-apocalyptic world. Of course, Day of the Triffids is a good breakdown of society jaunt.

    March 13, 2020 at 12:42 am #956697
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    ktache

    I got The Knowledge out from

    I got The Knowledge out from my local library, it was alright.

    I would recommend libraries, I was getting a few books out of the main Reading library, I think with the ones I had already had taken out I got up to eleven, I expected the machine to say TOO MANY!, it never happened, apparently I can take out twenty.  That’s a lot of reading and knowledge (I tend to do non-fiction).  Berkshire do 3 weeks, which I have never managed to get my head around (it was definiitely 4 in Hampshire and in Birmingham, I think) but they will email you when almost due (mostly).  You just pick up what might be interesting, give it a go and if not, very little worry and cost.  And providing no one has put a hold/order on a book, you can renew up to 5 times.

    I did do one about Spanish Flu a couple of monts ago, personal experiences and some general stuff.

    Pandemic 1918 : the story of the deadliest influenza in history.

    Catharine Arnold 

    And several years back I read

    Spillover : animal infections and the next human pandemic

    David Quammen

    Which was very interesting and not quite as sensasionalist as The Hot Zone.

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