Post apocolyptic reads

Thank you all

I never actually realised I liked a 'genre' before reading this thread, but I see I do

Will bookmark this, ta

I know we're talking about books but I really loved the TV series Jericho. Watched it last summer, unfortunately they only made one full season and then a 7 episode series 2 to tie it up as stupid American TV company cancelled it.

It does drive me mad that anything vaguely intelligent frequently bombs with American audiences, gets cancelled then trickles over to Europe on TV or DVD and people love it. Very frustrating when you get into the show only for it to stop - but it is quite thought provoking. Might be too 'wholesome' for the cynics :o

There is also the lack of vaccines and the return of diseases that often killed or maimed.
I don't think I would want to be around in worlds like The Death of Grass.
John Wyndham was a more optimistic about human nature than John Christopher

I love post-apocalyptic scenarios - for some utterly perverse reason, it makes me feel cosy. I used to tell myself very long, involved narratives about surviving various disasters and starting again, using technologies that could be sustained when all the infrastructure we've ever known had failed. deep down I'm probably ideal fodder for a nutter American militia group

Could I suggest some novels by Jan Mark? She wrote books aimed at teenagers but most of her teenage novels are extremely intelligent, readable and compelling. The Eclipse of the Century is a disturbing and haunting post-apocalyptic novel and you're never really fully told what's going on, or what's happened. (Not as annoying as it sounds!) Riding Tycho and Useful Idiots are more dystopic, but excellent too. Worth tracking down on Amazon.

Meds useful until they pass their use-by date and become gradually more ineffective. You could raid a pharmacy etc but after a few years the meds would be ineffective or dangerous. Thats if you can work out what should be given for what illness. Then a simple cut could lead to sepsis if you were unlucky. There would be a world of rotting bodies and the rusting and dangerous remains of the modern society we live in, including packs of wild dogs, escaped zoo animals and other possibly hostile communities.

Back to herbal medicine then I suppose but we have lost the skills to find honey, make vinegar, make salt, find helpful herbs (they all look like grass to me). I had a homebirth but I had two trained midwives, a resucitation kit, sterile sutures, medicine to bring the placenta down, a TENs machine and G&A. It is possible to have children safely in a pre-industrial society- the midwife Martha Ballard in 18th century America for example, had a mortality rate of 4 women out of 996, but we have lost those skills (and women who are prepared to ride twenty miles in a blizzard, cross a raging river and stay on site for two days to deliver a baby.)

Sanitary products- rags and other absorbent material like wads of cotton. Some communities don't bother to use sanitary protection like the !Kung tribe.
The Egyptians may have used softened papyrus and the Greeks were supposed to have used lint wrapped around wood. But you'd have fewer periods because of childbirth/breastfeeding/malnutrition and an earlier death .

I haven't thought about this at all..........

Already on my Amazon wishlist skinny , love that series.

I agree about nuclear holocaust, thats not a good situation as you would have all the other drawbacks of a post-apoc situation, but with a devastated world and radiation sickness to add into the equation. Plus birth defects/mutations etc.

Reminded me of another book to add to the list:

Raymond Briggs- 'As the Wind Blows' - an ordinary middle aged couple experience a nuclear holocaust. Graphic novel. Very good, made me cry.

noone- I do the same- I have a history degree with special interest in social history and there is no period of history I would choose to live in. The present it pretty good. I'm shortsighted, have rhesus negative blood and am essentially very lazy. I would make a terrible mother of 15 baking my own bread. I can barely cope with my two children.

R2 it appears that 'Flesh and Bone' is being added to Maberry's 'Rot and Ruin' series.There is also 'Dead of night:A Zombie novel'.

I agree that 'Death of Grass' and 'On the Beach' are very disturbing.

Anything to do with a nuclear holocaust petrifies me - growing up in 'The Protect and Survive' years left many of us with a shadow over our younger years, I think.
It's the one thing,that (on a global scale) is truly something I think I would neither be able to,nor even necessarily want to,survive.

crescentmoon,I'm all for a bit of prepping! A bit of a OFRS does no one any harm ...

R2PeePoo - yes, that ^^ exactly.

Sometimes I spend an unhappy half hour working out what happenings in my life would have killed me/had me killed if I had been born at different times, usually inspired by something I've read in a book.

When I read The Red Tent with my book club I was quite surprised to find out I would have been left outside to die immediately after my birth just for having different coloured eyes.

I also had a birth mark that would have had me burned as a witch at one point in history. The surgeon who was removing it was very cheerful about it as he told me it would have been seen as the devil's mark on a witch and ensured me a very violent death. Several books since then have confirmed my fate, unless I joined the nunnery as in Ken Follett's Worlds Without End.

I suffered from a minor form of pre-adolesent epilepsy that manifested itself as dizzy spells rather than fits, and the doctor who diagnosed that was again quite cheerful when he told me I would have had a hole drilled in my skull to release the demons.

And then there have been various illnesses, accidents and minor (for today's standards) health issues that would probably have killed me off a long time ago had I been born in different times. Being very short sighted is one of them. Pregnancy and childbirth would certainly have killed me at another time in history.

What I would do in a post-apocolptic world I don't know but the thought of being as disaster prone as I am in a world filled with zombies and without any modern conveniences is more scary than whatever it is that caused the end of the world and the rise of the zombies themselves.

I might as well resign myself to covering myself in ketchup and throwing myself to the zombies because I doubt I'd last the year in the world you have described.

crescent 'On the beach' had the same effect on me.

I'm not sure that I would actually want to be a survivor, especially in a zombie scenario with them as an added threat. Once you get over the initial catastrophe its not an appealing prospect.

It would be terrifying to leave a technologically advanced world where you have a great deal of 'help' and a great deal of distance from production of everything.

As a woman you would probably be expected to have as many children as possible as there needs to be a certain population level to enable people to survive (someone worked this out once, wish I could find it), support the vulnerable etc. And there would be no contraception of course and there would be a greater threat of rape/violence. Once the tinned food ran out you would basically be plunged back into subsistence farming, learning from scratch how to make everything we have forgotten how to. A nail= learning how to mine, process and melt metal, how to shape it etc. I have no idea how to manage crop rotation or deliver a baby sheep. How do you weave cloth? How would you travel long distances without cars or planes? And it would be hard work, with little assistance, ploughs drawn by horses if not by humans.. Plus it would be a world with a low life expectancy, with high rates of mortality in children and women of a childbearing age. Throughout history there has been nothing worse than being a peasant and it would be returning to that again.

Just read John Christopher "The Death of Grass" it is often compared to the Day of the Triffids as it was written about the same time. It was very good and does make your think about what could happen.

John Christopher also wrote for teenagers with the trilogies
The Tripods - which is like a sequel to War of The Worlds
The Prince in Waiting series - also a post apocolyptic series

Ooh, this is great stuff!
Please check out The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigaloupi - it is fantastic.
Here's a review that also mentions my other obsession favourite, China Mieville review

Re Frater: I enjoyed the books but I think they could have benefitted from a really good edit, I found loads of spelling/grammar errors and lots of uses of speech that were slightly disjointed/odd. And after the awesome start I guess I was disappointed. They are better than 95% of the current zombie writing though, loved the fact that she focused on women (the opposite of Bourne and Recht) and their experience, whereas it tends to be the other way round in general - usually lots of talk about guns. There is definitely a gap in the market there. The Bourne and Recht books were technically excellent and I really enjoyed the story - read the whole series etc, but I just didn't click with them and the characters.

Maberry on the other hand is awesome. Well-written, exciting, taut and I really felt that deep, pit of the stomach uneasiness that is missing from a lot of zombie books (I'm not feeling it in Monster Nation). The characterisation is excellent too, they feel well fleshed out. I did all the cooking with the books in my hand, read far too late at night etc.

R2,I have the next two Frater books on order so I'm looking forward to them.I see what you mean with it,but if you take that on board,I agree it's worth it.

I loved the Allison Hewitt book,by Roux,and now have the Sadie Walker one on order.

I haven't tried Maberry yet - been on my read list for a while.

I have to say I have Monster Island on order too - I'm curious!

My all time favourites are J L Bourne's books and Z A Recht.....

*Maberry

I'm only thirty or so pages into Monster Nation and I keep putting it down and not picking it up for a while which isn't a good sign. Its seems a bit bitty, I'm finding it hard to remember all the different plot threads as they change so frequently. PLus zombie sheep? WTAF.. Its not very action packed in the way of other novels where the survivors struggle to survive. I suspect I'll finish it but not read the next one.

I love the Walking Dead books, but getting fed up of having to wait for the next one continually. They are gritty and shocking and gruesome but its quite hard to tell the different characters apart sometimes-all in black and white line drawings.

Pleased to hear the other two are worth the effort.

I see you recommended Zombie Britannica, I loved that one but it was far too short, needed to be twice the length!

My all time favourite zombie novels have to be ones by Madeleine Roux and Jonathon Mayberry (and World War Z of course). The beginning of Rhiannon Frater's first book was the best and most shocking beginning to a zombie book so far, that haunted me for weeks. Her female characters are quite well drawn too but I wasn't entirely convinced by the men and the relationships that are formed - the gore was excellent though.

R2ReePoo I found Monster Nation a bit so-so.I think I abandoned it before the end as it got a bit fantastical. I don't like graphic novels,but Flesheaters and The Official Zombie Handbook (uk) are both well worth a read!

crescentmoon I like them as they transport me somewhere exciting and tbh I love a bit of descriptive blood and guts and gore.I do sometimes wonder whether it's a bit odd to like that sort of thing but I was weaned on horror....

crescent I love post-apoc fiction because I find people tiresome and the idea of quiet and clear streets appeals immensely. When I read post-apoc I can I get that feeling for a little while.

Its also fun to imagine what the world would be like, how it would develop and what would be missing from our current world. It reminds me of all the drawbacks of the world collapsing (healthcare, no law and order etc) which makes it easier to deal with the world as it is.

Plus it might happen- not zombies perhaps, but an epidemic would spread fast with our current methods of transport. I have read a lot of books about diseases and how they mutate and post-apoc helps me deal with my fears. I wouldn't want to survive in a world overrun by hostile creatures though.

I'm reading 'Monster Nation' by David Wellington at the moment, its not bad, but I am glad I didn't buy it and borrowed it from the library instead. I also borrowed the most recent Walking Dead graphic novel, 'Flesheaters' by Joe McKinney and 'The Official Zombie Handbook (UK)' waiting so I am going to have a zombiethon.

Zombie Brittanica by Thomas Emson,is rather lovely,I have to say.

Agree re 'The Rapture.' At her best I quite like Liz Jensen (love 'The Ninth Life Of Louis Drax'but the ending of 'The Rapture' was ridiculous.

The Rapture starts off OK but crashes and burns.