Books

Zooey wrote:

I read Dune for the first (and only) time about two years before volume one of the recent film version came out. I also found it better than I expected. Never heard of Station Eleven. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything I would call Post-apocalyptic. I don’t think that describes Dune.

Yeah Dune is not post-apocalyptic.

Post-apocalyptic is a very particular thing. It’s not so much a branch of sci fi as it is a branch of the must bigger category, ie. speculative fiction.

The current gem in post-apocalyptic fiction is McCarthy’s The Road, though it is much darker than most.

Fwiw, I like Station Eleven much more than WV does.

wv wrote:

The Road was great. But it was published around 2006. I cant seem to find anything even remotely as good in the last decade.

Station 11 altered the entire genre. Previously, post-apocalyptic fiction and film tended to depict “human nature” in stark terms drawn from social darwinism (like The Road Warrior). Doing it that way made it an overlap genre with action adventure or horror or both. If you think about it, you cannot write post-acopalyptic stories without basically claiming that you are reducing “universal human nature” to its essence, and mostly that (imagined/imaginary) “essence” was as I said more or less social darwinism. In Station 11, the survivors are heavily defined by cultural traces and memories and practices.

Though of course what makes a post-apocalyptic fiction what it is has to do with whether we see the global collapse of civilization, the collapse and then the after, or if it is set many generations after the collapse. Station 11 by its very nature is set in “the collapse and then the after.” That way the main story is about those who actively try to preserve cultural traces of the recently dead civilization.

There aren’t many great post-apocalyptic novels. If you go back 100 years there are a few more. Actually there may be more good short stories than novels, and then also some films. In the last 20 years, the big 3 novels (IMO) are The Road, Station 11, and Oryx and Crake (though strictly speaking the the 3rd one is a post-apocalyptic/dystopian overlap)

I should add something about The Road. It is so utterly stark partly because it’s set up so that the natural world is completely dead or dying. It sort of hints at a catastrophe that causes that, and the hints tend to point to an asteroid strike like the one that wiped out dinosauts 66 million years ago. However, you can’t take the science of that book seriously. I mean, the 66 million years ago asteroid strike did not wipe out everything. The surviors were small dinosaurs (like birds) or small mammals that could live off of seeds, which were plentiful, or off of the insects that could live off of dead wood. In The Road, it’s all gone. That just means to me that the book is really about setting up the darkest possible end times, and the kind of horrors that would come from that (a world where there’s nothing to eat). So I don’t need The Road to be scientifically realistic–that was never what it was doing. It just deliberately set up a world where there is nothing to eat and no chance of every finding it. I mean the book doesn’t even think about the fact that after many years the sky would clear of ash, and at that point, dormant seeds would grow. That’s because its story is just deliberately set up to be about an utterly dead world that will never be resurrected, and then shows us an innocent boy in that world who keeps the light (or fire) anyway. So really it’s a moral fable.

None of which matters compared to the fact that it’s brilliantly written.

…

wv wrote:

I ordered some dystopian-ish books. Perhaps one will be good.

The History Of Bees, by Maja Lunde.
Juice by Tim Winton.
Terra Nullius, by Claire Coleman.
Anna, by Niccolo Ammaniti

I don’t know those books personally but I know about them. “Juice” and “Anna” are post-apocalyptic, of the Hobbesian “without civilization it’s just everyone against everyone” variety. “Bees” is dystopian. “Anna” is sci-fi though with heavy dystopian overlap.

A book I reccomend very highly is “Song for Night” by Chris Abani. I’m not going to describe it, though it doesn’t really fit any of the genres we’ve been discussing. The less you know about this novel the better–if you’re interested, just grab it and read it cold.

I forgot about The Road. It’s a very good book, and I’m tempted to read more McCarthy. Many of his books have a strong reputation. But, you know, he’s kinda grim.

I watched Paradise, the postapocalyptic tv show and liked it. I’m sure I’ll at least start season 2 when it comes out, but sometimes these things start off well, and the peter out. Like The Matrix series. And Dune, you know, I’ve never been tempted to read the other books because everybody says the same thing about the original Dune being the best.