Books tagged with: post-apocalyptic earth

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post apocalyptic science fiction novel by Walter M Miller. It is a strange story of a post apocalyptic monastery, which tries to save information about the time before the great destruction. The idea is good enough, but I can't say that I like what Miller has done with...

Artificial by Jadah McCoy is the authors debut and the first book in a planned series called The Kepler Chronicles . Set in 2256, the story unfolds on Earth’s first colony amongst the stars, the aforementioned Kepler. As humanity traversed through the deep dark of space, they decided to entrust thei...

Colin F. Barnes’ Artificial Evil, Book One of the Techxorist Series introduces readers to a familiar yet new experience in post-apocalyptic literature. The series is ongoing, the author’s website reveals book four as “in progress” (as of July 2014). Currently, the three part series includes a preque...

Synopsis: Picking up where Artificial Evil concludes, Gerry returns to Earth and discovers that problems have only escalated in spite of everything previously achieved while saving City Earth. Petal’s story unfolds as the mysteries of her past unveil the complexity of our dystopian Earth. Gerry, now...

The future vision in Barricade shows a world torn apart by a war fought against humanity and their own artificially created super-humans, known as "Ficials". In the UK (seemingly along with the rest of the World) the results are pretty catastrophic. As you can probably imagine once humanity has crea...

Bringing forth the end of days is a science fiction novel of post apocalypse survival, and is the debut novel of Simon Law. The year is 2013 and World War 3 has scorched the earth, on top of a biological attack that has destroyed all plant life, leaving a world without life giving oxygen. Civilisati...

Code Name Atlas is a post-apocalyptic science fiction tale told by Tony Evans. A war hero trying to leave his past behind finds himself using his skills to survive after the earth is ravaged by unknown forces. In the midst of this destruction anarchy reins and he finds himself raising an army to fig...

Cronix starts off with the old and rather underplayed question of what happens when we’re able to upload our minds into virtual reality, and everyone wanders off into imaginary fairylands. As I’ve personally spent many days in a gaming induced haze punctuated by sporadic breaks for work or food, I’v...

Damnation Alley is a post-apocalytic tale of survival by the Hugo and Nebula award winner Roger Zelazny. Set in the decades after a devastating nuclear war, the former USA is a very different place. With mass destruction, dangerous mutants, large areas of deadly radiation and a worldwide wind preven...

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the classic novel that became the film Blade Runner. Written by legendary award winning author Philip K Dick. The aftermath of the World War Terminus sees a devastated Earth with severe radioactive fallout and most of nature destroyed. Many of the survivors have...

This is a very interesting book, a sort of post-apocalyptic, post-cyberpunk tale that also weaves in a good dose of historic fantasy and mythology while told in a very confident voice dripping with poetic, imaginative prose. Essentially the story goes that the human race almost wiped itself complete...

One of the reasons I review books is to find stories that impress me and writers I can learn from and certainly there’s a lot of learning to be had in Exit Eleonora – Richard Allan’s debut novel. The story is first person and set in AD 2047. Earth is re-organising itself after a devastating plague t...

Dan Abnett and Nik Vincent have come together to tell a tale of a future that feels and sounds not like what one would envision, resembling more our distant past then our near future. Many readers will know of Dan Abnett and his prolific work with Marvel, Abaddon, Games Workshop, and his most succes...

Originally published in 1964, Greybeard is a post apocalyptic vision by Brian Aldiss, the version reviewed here is for the Gollancz SF Masterworks collection. Greybeard is all about the human ageing process, growing old (and being old) - an idea that reminds me of something a pessimistic friend once...

Continuing where Knee-Deep in the Dead stops, we find our two favorite demon-slaying, zombie-‘sploding action heroes faced with the reality that Earth has been invaded. The story that unfolds on planet Earth is one that could never be guessed and packs a particular charm that I have never seen in a...

Hooded Man collects the three novels Arrowhead, Broken Arrow and Arrowland (along with a short story set between the first and second books), all of which are part of the shared post-apocalyptic universe known as the "Afterbright Chronicles" - which includes this years SF Book of the year School's O...

The arrival of the Jagannath changed everything. Humanity did not have time to reflect on the fact that they were not alone in the Universe. This amorphous blob appears unstoppable, simply absorbing everyone in it's path and assimilating their identity and intellect. Growing stronger and smarter as...

While most post-apocalyptic novels focus on destruction brought on humankind (or occasionally robotkind), the disaster in Moonfall is much more natural. The Moon has indeed fallen and caused widespread destruction across the globe. The book picks up 20 years after this earth-shattering event and fol...

After technologically superior aliens conquer earth, humanity survives very much like mice, living within the walls of the huge homes of the giant aliens. They scurry about under their feet, stealing food and avoiding the ever more devious traps set out for them. As time goes on humanity adapts and...

I've been meaning to grab this series for quite some time — the combination of Atwood's evocative prose and a post-apocalyptic setting is a highly promising one. Oryx and Crake tells the story of an altered world through the eyes of a man once known as Jimmy. Now known as Snowman and clothed in dete...

Prophets of the Ghost Ants is about as different a story as you are ever going to read (and given the sheer breadth of works around nowadays that is saying something). It's already been optioned for a film trilogy and has been lauded by such people as Lawrence Bender - the Oscar winning film produce...

I do so love a post apocalyptic tale and they often seem not very far from the reality in these times of economic turmoil. It therefore gives me great pleasure to inform you dear reader of another tale of survival after a world altering cataclysmic event. Pressia can barely remember a time before th...

Sometimes I feel that reading post-apocalyptic tales are less an escape and more training for the future, after all as a race we aren't doing a great job of preventing this self-destructive outcome. Luckily there is no shortage of literature to teach us about survival in a future wasteland and Schoo...

The year is 2065 and two decades have passed since civilisation in the west was destroyed by economic collapse. In the UK no central government exists and people survive in broken pockets of civility - small communities who have banded together to build some semblance of order amid the chaos. In the...

SOUTH is a dystopian fiction set in an alternate America, set in modern times, where a civil war breaks out between the North and the South. The story follows a variety of five characters, each trying to kill, hide or survive. The book follows Garrett and Dyce, on the run from the South’s law enforc...

Day One - The Georgia flu sweeps the globe, a pandemic on a scale not seen before. Reports put the mortality rate at 99%. Week Two and most of Civilisation lies in ruins. Twenty years after the cataclysm and pockets of humanity have rebuilt settlements across the US. Things seem a lot less dangerous...

Steeple is the sequel to the quite brilliant novel Barricade which we reviewed back in June last year. It describes a post-apocalyptic world torn apart by a war of human against their artificial, super-human constructs, the "fiscials". As you can imagine, fighting against a superior force of artific...

Terminal Earth is a collection of original short stories that all feature the end of the world in some way, edited by Michael Stewart and Neil Thomas. With 23 tales of the apocalypse, Terminal Earth offers a great deal of compelling tales from talented authors. Despite the common theme there are som...

Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes is a tie-in novel by Timothy Zahn, published in hardback by Titan Books in March 2009 and timed to appear roughly two months before the film it prepares the ground for, McG's Terminator Salvation. It is, on the face of it, exactly the kind of book that the hardba...

Gene Wolfe is perhaps one of the most under-rated and criminally overlooked writers in genre fiction. The New Yorker recently called him Sci-Fi's Difficult Genius . Authors Michael Swanwick and Patrick O'Leary have gone so far as to say he is: The best writer alive today. Ursula K LeGuin is frequent...

Hig is a survivor, a lone pilot who's wife, friends and almost all neighbours are long dead. Living in the hanger of a small abandoned airport with only his dog and his gun-toting neighbour for company. He flies his 1956 Cessna around the perimeter looking out for trouble and occasionally sneaks off...

The Exodus Towers is the second volume in the Dire Earth Cycle, picking up right where the cliff-hanger ending left the story. A new Elevator and those strange Black Towers only complicate matters for those survivors of the wasteland that is the Earth. Not all survivors are that friendly either and...

The Genocides is a classic science fiction novel by Thomas M Disch. In this post apocalyptic tale of vegetable domination, the earth has been overtaken by a strain of alpha plants... massive and imposing, they suck up all the resources and wreak major havoc on the ecosystem. In just 7 years these gr...

Over a 100 years have passed since the annihilative events of 2045 and the world is a very different place. With the earths climate raging out of control and ice spread across much of the globe humanity is forced to survive in nomadic pockets around the narrow band of the "Temperate Zone" near the e...

Hood and his army of freedom fighters are ready to start their counter attack against the K'Thraa invaders of Earth. By sabotaging a huge mirror which the aliens have placed in space to raise the temperature on the planet, hood is able to plunge Earth into a mini ice age overnight. Seriously weakene...

The Plague Forge is the dramatic conclusion to the Dire Earth Cycle. With the Builders plans still hidden and time running out, can Skyler and his team recover the four remaining relics before the final Builder event takes place? No-one really knows what will happen when the five artifacts are retur...

Towards the end of the 21st Century Earth appears as a very different place, a post-singularity existence and a fractured future of a billion earthbound souls, preserved at the bottom of a gravity well. Huw is a technophobe and somewhat of a misanthropist - a natural selection for the Tech Jury Serv...

In a future where fossil fuels have dried up, global warming has decimated ecosystems, and governments are culling populations, Antonia Honeywell’s debut sees teenager Lalla escape the ruins of London to live on her father's utopian Ship with 500 others keen to enjoy a 'happy death'. Their destinati...

I must admit that one of the reasons I picked up this novel is that it has my surname on it, the other being that it is of course Philip K Dick who still rates as one of my favourite authors. Written back in 1956 The World Jones Made is one of the authors very early novels and tells the story of Flo...

It's true that I have a soft spot for a good post-apocalyptic story, there is just something about the setting that appeals to me. I'm clearly not alone in this regard either, post-apocalyptic scenarios are dominating the film world this year while in the world of books we have excellent examples li...

A journey into the past that can never be repeated, travelling from 2070 AD all the way back to 12000 BC; a chance for the four passengers of the "time ship" to study the primitive man as no-one could ever do before or will be able to since. None were prepared for what they would discover, or indeed...

Timeshift is a science fiction novel by Philip Ellis Jackson. Sometime in our near future the united states will separate into two different countries, a bit after that we have a small nuclear war and after that some moron releases a new life-form that eats everything in its path and leaves the surf...

Melbourne, Australia - a metropolis that at one time was the biggest and wealthiest city in the world, ranked as one of the top three world's most liveable cities and a mecca for the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, sport and tourism. It also happens to be the only city in the world left st...

Total Recall the film has recently been re-made and updated from the 1990 version that featured Arnold "The Governator" Schwarzenegger. This time Colin Farrell stars as Douglas Quiad, the man who dreams of walking on Mars. I was a big fan of the original but have yet to see this modern adaption so I...

Twiglight Candleflies is a collection of three post apocalyptic short fiction stories, written by Scott Niven. The three stories presented here are told in different styles and set in different worlds but all have a post apocalyptic edge to them. While each is a fairly short and sweet story they all...

USU is a clever, clever book. Set after some cataclysmic event has rendered the Earth free of it's human infestation, the novel follows the stuffed and robotically animated rabbit known as Usu. He searches the broken, twisted wasteland for something, something he will only know when he finds it. The...

The first Wastelands anthology, released back in 2008 was widely regarded as not only a fine collection of apocalyptic tales but one of the finest anthologies full stop. Big shoes to fill then. The Editor John Joseph Adams is clearly up to the task though and has managed to get together some of the...

I missed out commenting about this novel when it was first released. There was such a rush by everyone to say how great it was I felt that I would be adding but a small ripple to a raging Tsunami. Everyone from the big papers to the big authors have commented how magnificent the book is, and they ar...

In the dark future of Defender , the majority of the worlds population have died. Killed by themselves and others who were listening to voices steering their horrific actions. Those who survived live in a hostile environment, unable to trust strangers and fighting over limited resources. On a long d...

‘We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.’ Jeff VandeMeer’s Rachel summarises the theme of his latest book best. The author’s first novel since his acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy, Van de Meer’s Borne is a surreal piece of work that examines the idea of identity in...

While many stories depict the fight between man and machine, Sea of Rust shows a future where the machines have already won. Humankind has been wiped off the face of the Earth by the very robots that were built to serve them. Now the planet is controlled by vast intelligences (known as One World Int...

Hutchinson's writing has, at times, turned out to be worryingly prophetic - he wrote about the break-up of the European Union while Brexit was just a twinkle in David Cameron's eye, in his astounding Fractured Europe series. This time he's writing about life in rural England after an apocalypse. Wor...

A change of pace and approach from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cage of Souls is a first-person past narrative, presented as a journal. This is a collection of writings from Stefan Advani, the chronicler of the last days of the last city of humankind – Shadrapar. Our story begins with Stefan being brought to...

In Cheryl Campbell's vision of the future, humanity finds itself enslaved by a genocidal faction of an alien race known as the Wardens. Decades of war has left much of the planet in ruins and threatens the existence of any human (or alien) who offer any form of resistance. Dani thought she had survi...

As the world tears itself apart in front of us, there is something comforting about reading a good dystopian novel. If we are going to go out, at least it will not be due to zombies, bombs, viruses or all the bees dying out. Then again, it could be all of these together. Once the nuclear fallout has...

In Stephen Baxter's collaboration with the late Terry Pratchett, he imagined that there were a limitless number of parallel dimensions just a small step away, each with a slightly different version of Earth (although none others of which contained indigenous humans). In his latest novel, World Engin...

The Butterfly Effect is a device used to explore alternative  versions of our world. The simple action of a time travellers going back to the time of the dinosaurs and standing on a butterfly would alter everything that followed, ripples expanding from that one point. Robert Ferrigno  decided to exp...

What do we expect from the future?  I consider myself a half glass full type of person, but even my positivity has taken a battering in the past few years. A world buried under a sea of sand sounds like it may be better  in some circumstances. If we do find ourselves roaming a desolate future what w...

Asimov’s ‘Three laws of Robotics’ have become synonymous with any book that contains robots. Nearly all these books will not allow their robots to hurt humans, but what happens if these rules broke? In C. Robert Cargill’s  Day Zero  the millions of robots that exist have full artificial intelligence...

Dystopian fiction has been becoming increasingly popular in recent years, probably because many of us can see the tell-tale signs of it coming along the tracks in real life. This is a depressing thought, but one worth exploring. How will humans continue to survive on a planet they are poisoning? Som...

Science Fiction does not have to be epic. It can tell a small story about a single person or family as they struggle against a strange new world, but sometimes you want to read a stonking great space opera where an individual's actions can alter worlds.  Liege-Killer  by Christopher Hinz is one such...

Space travel is often painted in a glamourous fashion. Sleek ships sail among the stars as the crew members go on daring adventures, but the reality would be much more cramped. The planet Earth may feel a little crowded at times, but compared to being in a space craft, we can walk for miles and brea...

I adore science fiction, but it also frustrates me. I consider myself reasonably well read and clever enough to cope with most books, but occasionally a science fiction book comes along that I just cannot get my head around. Momenticon by Andrew Caldecott is a Bizzaro take on a dystopian future that...

I think the pessimistic among us see a future of raised water levels and the UK losing plenty of its coastal land and anything close to our rivers. However, even the most resigned will not have imagined the world that Martin Mulligan and Jack D. McLean have created in The Drowning Earth . Not only a...

Science fiction is a brilliant tool for pondering what happens after the inevitable fall of humans. There is only so long that the Earth can sustain us, but that does not mean that other civilisations may not develop after. Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley is a Sci Fi mystery told from the persp...

Twins have always had a mystery around them. Two people brought up so closely together that they have their own language. In Michael Ferris Gibson and Imani Josey’s Babylon Twin series, the language that the twins use is called the Twinkling, a speech so intuitive that only they can understand it. I...

The world will not die with a bang, but with a whimper. Similarly, it won’t be the robots that uprise and destroy humans, but our own incompetence when it comes to programming. Build and programme things correctly and everything should be fine, but this is modern life and doing things correctly seem...

When the apocalypse inevitably comes do you want to know about it? Would you like the chance to peer out of the window and see the world burning, perhaps you can make a run for the high ground? Another option is to live in pure ignorance underground, competing with your fellow residents for the perc...