Tag: Apocalyptic literature
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. World of Trouble: The Last Policeman Book III by Ben H. Winters (2013) In the final installment of The Last Policeman trilogy, former detective Hank Palace travels to Ohio searching for his sister in the last days before an asteroid will…
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: Countdown City by Ben H. Winters
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II by Ben H. Winters (2013) In this follow-up to The Last Policeman, there are only seventy-seven days remaining until an asteroid collides with the Earth; Hank Palace has been let go from the Concord…
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters (2012) In only a few months, an asteroid will crash into the Earth — an extinction-level event — but police detective Hank Palace is determined to solve his first murder case. At heart, The…
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Favorite Books of the 2010s: The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell
This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell (2010) It’s hard to believe that someone could come out with a fresh and different take on the zombie apocalypse novel, but Bell has done it here. He seamlessly combines Southern gothic tropes…
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Reading journal: January wrap-up
Not full reviews or even necessarily recommendations, just some notes on what I’ve been reading. I will never read all the dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction out there, but I keep trying. This month I read a very early apocalypse story by Jack London: The Scarlet Plague (free to read online). This short story feels like an ur-story…
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A Kinder, Gentler Apocalypse: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Originally posted on Sci Femme: This essay also discusses Into the Forest (Jean Hegland; 1996); A Gift Upon the Shore (M.K. Wren; 1990); and Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin; 1985), among various other stalwarts of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre. There will be spoilers for these books. Pop quiz, hotshot. It’s the apocalypse: What do you do?…
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Cli-Fi: Fiction about climate change
I have just discovered a new genre: cli-fi, or climate change fiction. Set in the present or near future, these novels imagine a changed world once the effects of climate change are really beginning to be felt. It’s not such a new genre to me, after all. I read David Brin’s Earth and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs…
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The end of the world as we know it…
On Quora, there are a lot of interesting responses to this question: Pandemics: If society started collapsing due to a global pandemic killing more than half of the world’s population within a year or two, what would you do when you realized what was really happening? – Quora. There are a number of detailed, well-thought-out answers…
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Hell is repetition: The theme of cycles in science fiction
Recently, I have become fascinated with the notion of cycles. We humans tend to regard everything linearly, with a beginning and an end, because that is our individual experience. But taking a wider view, we can see that events tend to happen in cycles, that an end leads inexorably to another beginning. It’s easiest to…
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What is speculative fiction?
The kind of fiction I like to read the most, and that I tend to focus on here, falls under the broad umbrella of “speculative fiction.” I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the traditional genre labels of science fiction, fantasy and horror. The definitions that are most often applied to these genres seem so limiting,…
Shannon Turlington 