Friday afternoon literary thought-provoker - part #3

With Our Glorious Leaders pretty much determined to destroy our health, our social lives and our ability to read, one occasionally dwells upon the thought of apocalypse. Hurray! Who doesn't love a little end-of-the-world to make one grateful for not living here. Or here. Or even here.

My strongest ante-natal cravings were always for Apoco-fiction - or travaux de désastre, as I like to think of it - including The Road (yawn), The Death of Grass (MUST PLANT WINDOW BOXES), The Stand (yeay!), and I Am Legend (double yeay!), and I continue to enjoy this stuff as a misery primer for my doom-empty life.

I finished On the Beach the other day - please, please all read this, as it is simply wonderful - but it's really got under my skin in the most delightful way. I'm viewing everyone rushing around Trafalgar Square and the like in a strange manner, picturing how things would be instead in Shute's Melbourne of the sixties.

So. What's your favourite fictional apocalypse? Do you lean more towards the creatures from outer space (as it were), or are you more of a ka-BOOM fan? Letters to the usual gap below - and I might even throw* some books to the best answer.

Sam the Copywriter

*post. I mean post.

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

Comments

[Priscillia Tan]

Whenever I think of the future in fictional terms I would always think of The Handmaid's Tale. I mean, nobody said that it would be impossible, seeing low birth rates, deteriorating environment, the force of revolutions..

Atwood has never made it more stark and clear, and all the more frightening. What else? Yes, Waiting for the Barbarians, (J.M Coetzee) when all is laid bare and we honestly, do nothing but to wait for Godot.

Gotta make people read, read and read, I'm not really a fan of Fahrenheit 451's world as well.

[susan jordan]

Gary Shteyngart"s Super Sad True Love Story

[Kate]

Hiroshima by John Hersey. Along the same vein as 'On the Beach'. Not explicitly an apocalyptic novel in the strictest sense, but the imagery of the genre certainly draws from this catastrophic event.
5 accounts by civilians who experienced the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and how it affected their lives thereafter. It really moved me. The imagery was striking. It explores how for a few days the world came to an end for these people (how they suffered after/suffer still),and how the rest of the world knew barely anything about it. It's a wonderful insight into a culture away from the western world and how they coped with the bomb personally and collectively.

[Scott Houghton]

George Orwells "Nineteen Eighty Four" or Ayn Rands "Anthem" has got to be the best dystopian works out there!

[Cara Murphy]

I read 'Z for Zachariah' as a teenager and was hooked on post-apocalyptic fiction from then on. I enjoy the "cosy catastrophe" type novels from John Wyndham and John Christopher et al, but my all-time favourite has to be 'The Parable of the Sower' by Octavia E Butler, closely followed by 'The Gate to Women's Country' by Sheri S Tepper

[David McLoughlin]

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse still lurk in the psyche after being drilled in there in my childhood, but when the food runs out and the water runs dry...well!!

[Chuck]

Another Atwood - Oryx and Crake. The pigoons give me the willies. It's only a matter of time...

[Mandi J]

Memoirs of a Survivor, by Doris Lessing is one of my first and favourite post-apocalyptic reads. Imagery is incredibly compelling and the tension is palpable.

I also read 'Z for Zachariah' as a kid, and it was only very recently that I made the connection between this and my subsequent fascination with all things apocalyptic.

[Sasha]

Agh, I enjoyed THE ROAD. Or, well, perhaps "enjoy" isn't the right word for something so gray and bleak and thou hath done bad things thereforeth thou hath to eateth kiddies. Ahem.

FAHRENHEIT 451 counts as post-apocalyptic, methinks. The apocalypse pointing to that moment some nut decided books were good for burning.

Or, well, from another perspective: THE WALKING DEAD graphic novels. Zombies are definitely apocalypse.

[JRSM]

Robert O'Brien's 'Z for Zachariah', 'The Death of Grass' (and Christopher's other end-of-civilisation masterpieces 'The World in Winter' (sudden ice age) and 'A Wrinkle in the Skin' (massive tectonic activity), 'The Day of the Triffids' and 'The Kraken Wakes' by John Wyndham, Ballard's 'The Drought and 'The Drowned World' (self-explanatory titles there), Vonnegut's 'Cat's Cradle', Ian Macpherson's 'Wild Harbour' (a beautiful and sad love story from 1936, about a young married couple trying to survive in the Scottish wilderness after some awful disaster and military invasion of the UK), HRF Keating's 'A Long Walk to Wimbledon' (about a man trying to walk across a devastated London to find his ex-wife), Harold Rein's 'Few Were Left' (from 1955, about the people who survive the nuclear attack on New York because they were in the subway tunnels at the time--the main character was down there trying to commit suicide by throwing himself on the rails), and Jack London's 'The Scarlet Plague' and George Stewart's 'Earth Abides' (both about the few who survive a massive disease outbreak that kills almost everybody).

Then there's Dougal Dixon's 'After Man', a beautifully produced 19th-Century-style illustrated biology book full of the animals the evolve after humans become extinct.

I have more, but that should keep you going for a while!

[Sad Love Qutoes]

Whenever I think about the future, I think of Logan's Run. No good.