Post apocolyptic reads

[BlingLoving]

I love a good post apocolyptic/sci fi read but find it's quite hard to find them so I'm looking for inspiration please from all of you. To give you an idea of what I like I recently read and enjoyed the Hunger Games trilogy. Going further back, I love almost everything John Wyndham ever wrote, but The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids are my favourite.

My Kindle is charged and I am ready to download...!

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 ...

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.

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..........

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.

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 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

Thank you all

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

Will bookmark this, ta

Bit late to this but if nobody's mentioned: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, and This Is The Way The World Ends by James Morrow.

Meg,'This is the way the Earth ends' looks worth a read.

(At the risk of being ridiculed,) I also love to read survival stuff (SAS Survival Guide and the like). Also books on pandemics,self-sufficiency and so forth.

I actually re-watched the first episode of Jericho there after posting the tip :o

It takes the first two to really get sucked in... but then you'll be hooked :o

Skinny No ridicule here, I have borrowed a lot of books from the library about diseases and epidemics.

I got the 'Bay of the Dead' out of the library today. Its a Torchwood book but reviews on Amazon say 'Not enough Torchwood' and 'Too many zombies' so sounds just up my street.

I have somewhere in the house a fabulously awful book from the 1960's where talking giant wasps suddenly appear and kill most of the human population. It is brilliant in a really hideously outdated kind of way.

Remembered some more:

Z for Zachariah
Down to a Sunless Sea
Bloodtide (and also Bloodsong) by Melvin Burgess

Have looked those up and I have to say that 'Down to a sunless sea' looks excellent.

I'm starting to get confused - I can see I'm going to need to do myself a list of books I've read (with comments so I know if they're worth re reading) and a list of those I want to read. That's very anorak,isn't it??? .

I get most of my books from the library and then look for any particularly good ones to buy. My list is long and my purse empty though!

Skinny- have you heard of Librarything? Its a book cataloguing website. You set up an account and search for and add the books to your own online 'library'. You can then tag them and manage them. Each book has a page where you can read reviews, link to current conversations in the Librarything forums and review it yourself. You can also click on other people's tags e.g. post-apoc and get a list of all books tagged by other members as post-apoc. Very dangerous for the bank balance.

There is another site called Goodreads but I haven't really used it as I found Librarything first.

I use the library a lot too,I was stupidly excited when I was told I could search the library catalogue online and reserve that way too. I was always having to quickly race around with a grumpy toddler but now I can just nip in and pick them up and leave.

I love LibraryThing!

Oh, the online library search and reserve facility is great. I've reserved books that haven't even been published yet, so am one of the first in the queue and can stroll in and collect them as soon as the copies hit the library :o Saves a fortune too.

R2 that sounds complicated! (computer dunce).But I can do the online library catalogue reservations and I while away too many a happy hour.... I've even had books sent from the States!!

R2Peepoo: I bet that's The Furies, by Keith Roberts. will you sell me your copy?
I love post apocalypse fiction, too. AM currently tinkering with my own If Zombies Happen, well sort of, novel which focuses on the practical difficulties of trying to cope with the End Of The World when you have a toddler and don';t drive....

My thoughts: The Stand - I have always liked this ever since I was a teen, but on recent re-reading I kept thinking, so what was happening in the rest of the world while the Yanks farted about playing my god's bigger than your god?

The Passage... Well it's not bad. But I did get a bit narked when I got to the end and it, er, wasn't the end and there's two more books to come. FFS mate you;ve had 700 pages already, could you not have got to the point? Cutting out the interminable fucking colonists would have helped.

I recommend, if you can get hold of them, King Blood or Blood Crazy by Simon Clark, there's a bloke with a post-apocalypse obsession.

Also, though it's not quite the same genre, the Bold As Love quintet by Gwyneth Jones: I am obsessed with these books even though they are massively flawed (she's an awful clunky dialogue writer and there seems to be a lot going on that she doesn't actually tell you about...) there is something about them that really touches something in me.

And the one that inspired me to start writing my own but only because it's so shit: Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinsent. Utterly, utterly ludicrous and unpleasant.

I love Librarything, its one of the few places where I feel I am not reading enough! I get a lot of recommendations from there and there are a lot of like minded people.

Solid Yes! The Furies. Thats the one! I looked it up on Amazon and it looks like it has been reprinted. If I can find my copy you can have it, I'll have a look next week. Its a really ratty cheap paperback though, with a B-movie cover so feel free to say no.

Your book sounds interesting, there is a definite gap in the market for books that cover the female experience in a zombie apocalypse. I can only think of Roux and Frater who think about these things. Most of the books have American male characters who know their way around guns.

Remembered another- Reign of the Dead (I didn't like this one much, very generic).

On a sort of genre crossover is 'The Sentinel Mage' which is fantasy but has the characters fighting the reanimated dead half way through. I really enjoyed it, simple story but well executed imo. She also writes quite easy to read and enjoyable trashy romantic fantasy.

Oh I have King Blood already (thank you Librarything). I was racking my brains to remember the title as I read it about six months ago and I wanted to add it to the thread here. There is one scene with the fleeing population and a boat IIRC that was very exciting/moving/thought provoking.

I second Z for zachariah, it caused me a few sleepless nights worrying about nuclear holocaust as a teenager.

Also This time of darkness, HM hoover i think.

Mortal engines by Philip reeve also good.

All the above aimed at teenagers really so not as disturbing as some others mentioned.

I love John wyndam so great to see so many other fans!