Good Post Apocalyptic Books Wanted

[roddglenn]

Here's a post-apocalyptic book set in northern England - The Killing Moon by (whispering) me (Rod Glenn) ISBN-13: 978-0956211484

It's received a great review in Orion's Child magazine and has been likened to John Wyndham on one of the Amazon reviews.

 

[Firecat]

Nobody ever answered this person:

hi again ive remembered another book, its really bugging me cos i cant remember the name . Cant find it either anyway if anyone knows the book let me know what its called because im annoyed. Lots of people scientists, mathematitions etc are kept in cryosleep in shifts after the nuclear war/comet etc . they are in hidden bunker . they wake in shifts to watch over young civilisation and appear to guide as `gods` . some groups use old technology, some are afraid of tech and call it magic evil etc.something bad is coming down with a glacier as the ice caps melt . Basically , post apocolyptic with magic, superstition good and evil .
to jog anyones memory keywords are ; bottles, observatory, demon, old man in wheelchair ,signs on forhead ,gods.


I've been going insane lately trying to figure out the name of this book so I can get it. I read it a long time ago and have since been doing a search every couple of years with no luck. I was starting to wonder if I was crazy. Please, anyone with information on this book, post!

 

[Elflock]

M.P. Shiel - The Purple Cloud.

Here are some quotes from the cover of the 70's Paperback Library version...

'Colossal...brilliant novel' - H G Wells
'Mad,dazzling' - NY Times
'He tells of a wilder wonderland than Poe ever dreamed of' - Arthur Machen
'He is not to be touched,because there is no one else like him' - Hugh Walpole
'The greatest writer of sensational fiction of his time' - Irish Statesman
'This masterpiece should live as long as the Odyssey' - Jules Claretie
'What a man! What an imagination!' - Carl Van Vechten

and so on...

And it's all true!!

 

[Elflock]

And George Allan England -- haven't seen that name for quite a while, but the Darkness and Dawn stories are classics in the field. Good to see someone bring them up....

Am I allowed to be negative? I haven't seen many negative posts here! But,I'm sorry,'Darkness And Dawn'...this is one of the lamest books I ever struggled to the end of. I read it about a month ago (all three of the books,groan)...I think it's one of the most simplistic,ridiculous,ill conceived,racist,lame things ever!! (ok,there are worse ones,but not many!)

 

[Elflock]

Am I allowed to be negative? I haven't seen many negative posts here! But,I'm sorry,'Darkness And Dawn'...this is one of the lamest books I ever struggled to the end of. I read it about a month ago (all three of the books,groan)...I think it's one of the most simplistic,ridiculous,ill conceived,racist,lame things ever!! (ok,there are worse ones,but not many!)

To be fair,I do agree with one of the earlier posters that the first book in that Darkness and Dawn series was actually quite good...well,until about half way through it anyway..and it does have some excellent ideas and that...the cleft in the world for instance! 500 miles down!!

 

[Elflock]

Speaking of 'Post Apocalyptic'...these forums have a bit of the feel of some desert,post apocalyptic landscape themselves! Is science fiction dead I wonder? Does anyone care? What is popular in sci-fi now? When I go to a regular bookstore these days,the sci-fi/fantasy section always has a strange assortment of things like Harry Potter books,Buffy etc,other silly teenage tv/movie stuff,Merlin,whatever,a small selection of old 'classics' in a new edition for a ridiculous price (95% of the time it's something that has already been published a hundred times and you can still find it for $1 anywhere...hello?...totally boring people like Piers Anthony,Hugh Cook,etc etc) Then there are 3 or 4 new books by people who I've never heard of and after reading the back cover,I don't want to. Then there is the lame 'Gamer' fiction of people like Gary Gygax and that. It's often some sort of parody or sendup or whatever of the old sci-fi and fantasy...I can't help thinking that sci-fi is basically finished. If you ask the bookstore people what is popular these days,they say Crime. As if we haven't got enough of that in real life!!

 

[Elflock]

Anyone out there?

 

[blacknorth]

I just read The Quiet Place by Richard Maynard which I can thoroughly recommend - hopefully I'll get a chance to put a review up in the, er, reviews section within the next couple of days.

 

[dask]

Speaking of 'Post Apocalyptic'...these forums have a bit of the feel of some desert,post apocalyptic landscape themselves! Is science fiction dead I wonder? Does anyone care? What is popular in sci-fi now? When I go to a regular bookstore these days,the sci-fi/fantasy section always has a strange assortment of things like Harry Potter books,Buffy etc,other silly teenage tv/movie stuff,Merlin,whatever,a small selection of old 'classics' in a new edition for a ridiculous price (95% of the time it's something that has already been published a hundred times and you can still find it for $1 anywhere...hello?...totally boring people like Piers Anthony,Hugh Cook,etc etc) Then there are 3 or 4 new books by people who I've never heard of and after reading the back cover,I don't want to. Then there is the lame 'Gamer' fiction of people like Gary Gygax and that. It's often some sort of parody or sendup or whatever of the old sci-fi and fantasy...I can't help thinking that sci-fi is basically finished. If you ask the bookstore people what is popular these days,they say Crime. As if we haven't got enough of that in real life!!

You're probably better off going to a good used book store rather than a "regular" new one. At least I think so. I tend toward the older stuff myself.

 

[blacknorth]

Here's a post-apocalyptic book set in northern England - The Killing Moon by (whispering) me (Rod Glenn) ISBN-13: 978-0956211484

It's received a great review in Orion's Child magazine and has been likened to John Wyndham on one of the Amazon reviews.

Some good reviews for that one, congratulations. I'll see about getting a copy.

 

[alchemist]

Haven't looked at the previous pages but I have enjoyed...
Swan Song - Robert R McCammon
The Stand - Stephen King
Lucifers Hammer - Niven and Pournelle

There's nothing I like to see more than humanity take a whacking.

Edit: and now that I look, they're all together in a post on the first page

 

[blacknorth]

When the Moon Died by Richard Savage - future society find an old tape recording relating events surrounding late 20th century apocalypse.

Fun!

 

[hormone]

For a different take on Post Apocalyptic book try Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds.

 

[kwryry]

Here's a post-apocalyptic book set in northern England - The Killing Moon by (whispering) me (Rod Glenn) ISBN-13: 978-0956211484

It's received a great review in Orion's Child magazine and has been likened to John Wyndham on one of the Amazon reviews.

I read this recently and thoroughly enjoyed it. Good work!

 

[Extollager]

An emphatic second for Emergence by David R Palmer!

The Year of the Quiet Sun by the recently departed Wilson Tucker.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy was mentioned. I found it quite powerful. One has no good reason not to call it SF (except for the publisher, who would not want to damage sales), but it will not appeal to that brand of SF reader who seeks primarily after an intricate or interesting plot. Though I am not out to repeat or endorse the familiar tropes about genre vs. literature, this book would be a good index case for a science fictional premise in a work that would be identified as a "Literature" by the classicists. Moving, austere, almost without plot, it is a walk with a man and his young son through the post-apocalyptic death-remains of the world. The son is the man's only remaining motive or tie, and we learn almost nothing of the events that have led to this hell. Sad and horrible, almost beyond words, except these of McCarthy.

Hear, hear.

I'm not sure I see The Year of the Quiet Sun as post-apocalyptic, but it's very good, one of my favorite sf novels, and one that doesn't seem to be mentioned very often.

 

[Extollager]

some of the books people have mentioned sound interesting. but what i want to know is are any of these newer. books set in the 50's and stuff like that just don't appeal to me.

But for some of us, those are among the best decades to go looking for sf.

 

[antiloquax]

This is a very good thread. Got some great recommends from it. I have read a few post-apocalypse books. I was wondering why they are so popular. There's an interesting comment early on in "The Day of the Triffids":
""My way of life, my plans, ambitions, every expectation I had had, they were all wiped out at a stroke [...] And, curiously, what I found that I did feel - with a consciousness that it was against what I ought to be feeling - was release ..."

There's something very ... liberating about the end of civilization as we know it .
Also, I vote for "The Furies" by Keith Roberts.
a

 

[moondog]

The Judas Syndrome: Find it on Amazon as a kindle or paperback. It is new in the last year and is a trilogy with the third coming out end of this year.

 

[Elflock]

This is a very cool short story from 1901...it's set in the year 13,000,085AD!

http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&s...sg=AFQjCNF_ZFgRRdX2InMWn2TxQhJG4vFUMQ&cad=rja

 

[HighWiredSith]

Am reading A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller. This is good stuff - St. Francis has just left on his pilgrimage to New Rome with the holy relic blueprints and meets a bandit in the mountains....