Being an inveterate optimist, I have a natural tendency to look on the bright side of even the biggest disasters and feel compelled to inspire similar hope and optimism in the world (or at least, the Twitterverse). We all know that everyone loves an optimist, but for some reason, not everyone seems to find my point of view convincing. Take, for example, a recent discussion1 of possible outcomes of the various crises currently facing the human species in which I made the following points about our ability to endure…
Humans and their close kin managed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years in Stone Age poverty. Has there ever been an example of humans totally dying out on a continental landmass absent ice sheets to force them out of a region?
(On Twitter, someone suggested the Sahara but the Sahara is home to hundreds of thousands of humans)
I don’t see any reason our impoverished descendants could not scratch out a meagre living amid the ruins of our civilization in a sharply depleted ecosystem for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years. The Lystrosaurus of the post-Anthropocene Mass Extinction!
For reasons that escape me, this did not have the inspirational effect on readers that I intended. However, it’s clear that the essential concept must be inspirational, even if the particular arrangement of words I used failed, because authors like the following five have often toyed with overwhelming catastrophe as a story seed.
“There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury (1950)
On August 4th, 2026, history develops not necessarily to the advantage of the McClellan family. Their automated house still stands, nearly untouched by the recent unpleasantness (save for the blackened exterior wall facing the former location of Allendale, California). But of the McClellans themselves nothing remains save some reverse silhouettes on the scorched wall.
The house seems to have survived. Yet it too will experience some dire after-effects.
The natural environment of the house seems to have fared better. Well after the nuclear exchange, birds, foxes, cats and no doubt other species as well survive (despite the nearby radioactive glow). Humans too may have survived in refugia far from ground zeroes. Will all be well, eventually?
Bradbury was inspired by a 1918 poem by Sara Teasdale, also titled “There Will Come Soft Rains.” The poem was published near the end of World War I; it suggests that nature would not miss humans.
Bradbury seems to have been of two minds as to whether or not humans would survive atomic catastrophe. The first version of his story, published in Colliers magazine in 1950, is unrelentingly grim. He later included the story in his collection The Martian Chronicles. There, the story is surrounded by other tales of human survival after the nuclear exchange.
The Devil’s Day by James Blish (1980)
Convinced that medieval accounts of demon summoning are factual, arms dealer Baines hires black magician Theron Ware to prove Baines’ thesis by summoning all the demons of Hell to Earth for one night. Ware succeeds beyond Baines’ wildest nightmares. Having drawn Hell’s legions to Earth, Ware discovers that he cannot send them back. As the demons helpfully inform the humans upon whom they intend to descend, God is dead and the infernal forces have triumphed.
One might well expect the story to end at that point, but Blish continues his narrative past doomsday. The Last Trump has sounded, Armageddon has come and gone. However, even apocalypse leaves something in its wake: consequences. Humans and demonkind may think they know what comes next. As they discover, they are ignorant of certain important facts on which the ultimate outcome depends.
Out of the Mouth of the Dragon by Mark S. Geston (1969)
Amon VanRoarke lives in a glass-half-full world. It has been wracked by many apocalypses. Yet, as terrible as each apocalypse has been, none of them managed to completely expunge either humanity or the world on which humans live. What remains: wastelands in which humanity struggles to survive.
Another apocalypse looms. VanRoarke accepts his part in the great scheme of things, which is to undergo a nasty personal transformation. Will the next apocalypse finally end the miseries of human existence? VanRoarke should be so lucky.
Adventure Time, TV series created by Pendleton Ward (2010–2018)
In retrospect, the harmless-sounding Mushroom War was something of a misstep for humanity. While humanity did not quite manage to exterminate itself, the only human known to live in the Land of Ooo2 is series co-protagonist Finn. Finn’s boisterous pursuit of adventure with his best pal, shapeshifter Jake, casts doubt on how long the boy will elude death.3
However, all is not as grim as it might sound. The Land of Ooo abounds in intelligent life of all forms, from talking candy to musically inclined demon vampires, from giants to malevolent (but adorable) penguins. Humanity may be down to its last survivor (or not), but intelligence and some remnant of our cultures survive.
The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed (2021)
Thanks to decades of hard work, humans have greatly simplified and transformed a needlessly complicated but hospitable world. No more will children have to wonder what they will do as adults; they know that they will scrabble for survival for as long as it takes one of Earth’s increasingly frequent calamities to kill them. If they work hard and are lucky, they may leave behind enough descendants to continue the species.
But there are still a few opportunities for a life that is more than simple survival. Reid Graham is granted a rare chance to attend Howse University, one of the few remaining centers of advanced research. There are, however, some minor catches: Reid will have to demonstrate her ingenuity by crossing the forbidding wilderness between her town and distant Howse, all on her own. Moreover, her community doesn’t want her to leave: they need all their able-bodied members. Nor does her family want to lose her—if Reid leaves, she may never see her mother, her only living relative, again.
Should she stay or should she go now?
***
No doubt many readers have their own favourite example (such as the uplifting final episode of Dinosaurs, which I would have mentioned had I ever seen it). Comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Insofar as Twitter is a discussion. Sometimes it isn’t. In this case, I was the Twitterer whose comment was more of a digression than an attempt at argument. I do me.
[2]Two humans, if you count Simon Petrikov AKA the Ice King. But perhaps you wouldn’t want to count him, as he shows that death is *not* the worst thing that can happen.
[3]You might think a series protagonist would have plot armour. The long-running, popular Scottish TV show “Taggart” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taggart) demonstrated that this is not always the case.
Another example of series protagonists lacking plot armor: for half its length, Blake’s 7 had nobody in the ensemble named Blake.
The Collier’s link repeats the poem Wikipedia entry.
Also, does the story really have two “versions”, or is all the difference in n the context?
Piers Anthony – for all his problems- had a very interesting novella (Battle circle) about a post-apocalyptic society that i found fascinating when i read them decades ago
Davy by Edgar Pangborn. The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett.
Stirling’s Dies the Fire remains one of my fav post-Boom stories.
But the most haunting is The Killing Star by Pelligrino. Earth is destroyed in the first chapter. The reason? Aliens picked up the signal Broadcasted of “We are the World” and interpreted it as signifying that humans were a force to be reckoned with, and so they were eliminated. There is also a ship fleeing earth with the clones of Buddha and the clone of Jesus. Strange damn book, unforgettable!
Blish did originally end his story right where you suggest others might, and it really doesn’t work. The announcement that God is dead makes a great ending for Act 2, something for the audience to discuss over drinks during the intermission, but it really needs more to achieve a satisfying conclusion. “Black Easter” as the original version was titled (or “Faust Aleph-Null” in serial form) was either too short or much, much too long.
Naturally, the 80s provided a surfeit of post-apocalypse stories. You’ve covered many of them here. One that’s largely forgotten is the Pelbar Cycle by Paul O. Williams, in which the disaster is eventually revealed not to be what most readers at the time assumed.
There are a number of versions of the story, if only because Bradbury kept changing the dates.
I believe the radio adaptation was based on the original story. Listening to it revealed to me something I had not known: the appearance of ubiquitous, cheap ballpoints was a lot more recent than I had realized. By the time I got to school, everyone used ball points but my older brother, only a little older than I am, was old enough to remember older style pens.
My fan theory about Adventure Time is that Finn’s dad was Thundarr the Barbarian grown old.
“The Last Trump has sounded, Armageddon has come and gone.” I LOLd.
I think of Bujold’s “Sharing Knife” series as a postapocalyptic fantasy – as long as the magical apocalypse remnants keep up appearing and threatening the whole continent.
Ursula Le Guin wrote two that I know of. Always Coming Home is set thousands of years After the End on Earth, and features a culture that has constructed a pretty good life for just about everybody while still keenly aware that life could be better if their ancestors hadn’t been such screwups. They have to deal with persistent organic pollutants and lingering radiation, but they are also peaceful, cheerful, generous, and free…but on the gripping hand, they tend to die early from the aforementioned POPs in spite of the best efforts of their doctors. “Solitude” depicts a culture set centuries After the End on a different planet. The inhabitants of that planet are also peaceful, cheerful, generous, and free, from a certain point of view. From another they are grim, solitary, morose, and poor, and they also tend to die from things we just go to the doctor for, having deliberately engineered their culture so that it will never be possible to have doctors.
@tess: I wouldn’t call Dies the Fire a post-Boom story so much as a post-Fizzle story. For those who don’t know: S.M. Stirling updated the plot of “The Waveries” by Frederic Brown to encompass the end of high-energy civilization on Earth. In March of 1998, everything just. Turns off. Billions of people die, some quickly, some slowly. The survivors tend to be odd–as one character remarks, “When the going gets weird, the weird get going”–and have a very strong founder effect on succeeding generations. For example, the great powers of the Pacific Northwest include a federation of more or less democratic communities whose state religion and shared culture is a particular flavor of modern witchcraft that has folded the Elks and Lions Clubs into its belief system; a brutal fascist dictatorship in which everybody is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism whether they like it or not; and Washington State University, whose army parades through the streets behind cheerleaders waving pompoms.
How about The Road – book and movie. Or A Boy and His Dog.
In a preceding novel, Lords of the Starship, Geston gives an account of the buildup to a preceding apocalypse.
Strange books. But all of Geston’s novels are strange, but compelling.
Kate Wilhelm is the standout in this category. Where late the sweet birds sang is the spooky apocalypse. Juniper time is the meditative one. Both raise lots of questions about humanity and the point of survival— as does Octavia Butler’s entire body of work. And don’t leave out Joanna Russ whose works (esp shorter than novels) along these lines are scathing on some of the conventions held dear by male writers.
Dreamsnake by Vonda MacIntyre
“A Canticle for Leibowitz”
My oldest brother and I had the same first at experience as seventh graders 13 years apart. Daybreak: 2250 AD, by Andre Norton. Thanks, Mrs DeMoss! Later on I took an AP English course wherein I had to read and compare A Canticle to Leibowitz and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon.
A short story that also seemed to be a staple of middle or high school English was “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benét (first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1937 as “The Place of the Gods”).
There’s also Hiero’s Journey and The Unforsaken Hiero by Sterling Lanier, chock full of mutant animals and humans and taking place about 5 millennia after an event called The Death (presumably a nuclear holocaust).
Linda Bushyager wrote a couple of fantasies (Master of Hawks [1979], The Spellstone of Shaltus [1980]) set in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic Northeast and Great Lakes region.
Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast Chronicles is about the struggle to be free in a post-apocalyptic world. I wish I could say it is no longer relevant, but it is, more than ever. There are four books, very different, and each one levels up and takes on more challenging philosophical questions. Walk to the End of the World is about oppression. Motherlines is about freedom. The Furies is about vengeance. The Conqueror’s Child is about healing.
John Christopher – The Death of Grass
Not reread it in years but struck me as a much more realistic depiction than most. And an interestingly different apocalypse.
@12 RobMRobM
A boy loves his dog.
Well, once again I’m casting my vote for “The Postman”, David Brin’s much under-appreciated post-apocalyptic novel. Then of course there’s “Lucifer’s Hammer”, “The Forge of God”, and “Farnham’s Freehold”.
@21 – LOL; certainly more than the girl.
Also, I really like the Bujold Sharing Knife series (@10 above) as an exemplar for this theme. Post-apocalyptic doesn’t have to mean total wasteland.
Perhaps I missed it….has no one mentioned “Earth Abides” by George Stewart???
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides
One mustn’t forget The Starlost. :-)
Cordwainer Smith’s “Instrumentality of Mankind” story-cycle begins long after the “Ancient Wars” of the late 20th century(?) brought about the collapse of civilization as we know it, which is mostly half-remembered legends.
Don’t forget Alas, Babylon and On the Beach.
I started with old school. ON THE Beach, ALAS BABYLON and Daybreak 2020
There’s A Boy And His Dog At The End Of The World, which is pretty good. It doesn’t seem to have received much attention on this side of the Atlantic.
In John Crowley’s Engine Summer, humanity finds a radical solution to the problem of population pressure. It works extremely well, as long as we maintain the level of technology necessary for reproduction to continue. What could possibly go wrong?
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Not this August
I am Legend
The Stand
Oh, and less we forget. The real world in the next three to five months once the missiles fly.
The Stand by Stephen King
Apocalypse a la Lord of The Rings by way of The Earth Abides – a huge powerhouse of a novel!
(I think this was King’s first book tho Carrie was published first)
Oryx & Crake – Book 1 of the MaddAddamTrilogy by Margaret Atwood
It came out a generation ago – set 23 yrs in the future – in 2025!
A scary and seemingly accurate snapshot of life in post-food scarcity post-biological disaster very warm Canada
With all the not-meat fare being offered in fast food joints these days it’s easy to smell the ChickieNobs
and the SecretBurgers (the secret’s what’s in ’em)
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is lighter fare set in a food-scarce post-war world
It’s an action packed gripping yarn and a good read – even if you’re an adult of literary bent
There’s also Zelazny’s Damnation Alley, though it’s mainly an uncomplicated adventure story set in a postapocalyptic world.
@28 – Yes, Cordwainer Smith.
The “manshonyaggers” (menschenjagers), leftover killing machines that seem to bear a resemblance to Saberhagen’s berserkers. The vom Acht sisters, later Vomact family, a descendant of which appears in the very first Instrumentality story published. The huge spaceport and government complex at Meeya Meefla.
Sam Youd/John Christopher’s YA Sword of the Spirits trilogy, set in a post-apocalyptic England at a medieval level of technology, where Seers make the remains of the old technology anathema (but a subset of them are secretly working on reviving it).
Glad to see other people bringing up Bujold’s Sharing Knife works, which are excellent.
I would also, for a turn into games, suggest Phantasy Star IV, a classic JRPG that is set following a world-ending apocalypse and concerns itself with ensuring there will never be another. :)
I’ll second The Stand, The Postman, Farnham’s Freehold, and the Dies the Fire series. Also, I’ll add The Horseclans series by Robert Adams.
And a shout out to comment #18 markvolund for mentioning the Linda Bushyager books Master of Hawks and The Spellstone of Shaltus. Good reads. I wish I could find if she wrote anything else, or if Linda Bushyager was a pen name for another author.
Bushyager also co-wrote Pacifica with Betancourt.
Considering Bujold, think about Barrayar.
First the apocalypse of the wormhole closing which caused a collapse to a feudal society.
Then when the larger galaxy was reconnected, it brought the Cetagandans with it and their nuclear weapons. Could have been worse since later books go into depth about the bioweapons some Cetagandans wanted to use to wipe the planet clean of humans before recolonizing it.
Having started reading science fiction in the early ’50s I got totally burned out on post apocalypse stories by 1960 or so. People rediscover technology or discover that life is better without it. Mutants are the enemy or mutants turn out to be really cool. A microcosm of survivors repeats all of the mistakes of the pre-apocalypse society. I have fond memories of hardly any of the stories I read and they tend to blur together.
Some of my favorites of this area:
1. A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter Miller Jr.
2. Wool (whole series) – Hugh Howey
3. Skyward – Brandon Sanderson
@17. A Canticle for Leibowitz and Alas, Babylon are the two that first sprang to mind. How cool that you got to compare them for AP English. I’d love an assignment like that.
@39 I second those, too,
There was a Gordon R. Dixson short story In Iron Years later turned into the novel Wolf and Iron, notable because the world as we know it ends in economic collapse and the hero heads off into the wilderness to find a safe place to live where he won’t be enslaved by one of the surviving factions. He’s an amateur blacksmith. He goes to one town, loses most of his supplies, but escapes with someone’s wolf.
There was a story in Analog years ago whose title and author I can’t remember but was based on the premise that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in a nuclear exchange. The protagonist grows up and wonders what the world would have been like on the day when the Apollo moon landing happened in our world when civilization is finally starting to recover somewhat.
I would also like to add the Niven and Pournelle novel Hammerfall where an Asteroid hits the Earth and nearly wipes out civilization. I may have the title wrong.
Then there’s the William F. Johnstone Ashes series that starts with From the Ashes. I’ve only read the first book.
Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star. A third of it is set in 3012, where the population has suffered a natural and gradual collapse down to about 8 million worldwide, after massive societal and ecological changes.
Catherynne M. Valente’s The Past Is Red. The protagonist lives her life on a large subcontinent of floating garbage from our own time. Taught me what “magical realism” was.
@3 re: Battle Circle: 544 pages. A bit more than a novella. :)
@44 re: “Hammerfall” — you’re thinking of Lucifer’s Hammer, mentioned earlier. “Hammerfall” was a slang term for the comet actually hitting the Earth that was used extensively in the story, so it’s understandable that you remember it that way. :)
There is an apocalyptic event in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos, and we find out what happens to humanity, though IIRC that doesn’t comprise the majority of the novel.
There’s also The Second Sleep by Robert Harris.
”second variety” by philip k. dick (space science fiction vol.1 #6, 5/1953; space science fiction bre vol. 1 #5, ?/1953) (frequently anthologised; in a variety of pkd collections)
world war III (?) is over – possibly – but the troops on the ground are pretty much out of contact, not just with the enemy – if the russians are any better off than they are – but almost, with their own tactical commander(s), and all-but with the merkin government, which has retreated off-planet – not just for safety, but for survival in a war that seems still to be continuing, but fought as much by pretty damned convincing and extremely deadly androids, that were initially developed as ”claws”, cheap robotic weapons by the russians, but have since been further developed into self-re-programming, self-modifying, possibly human-level artificial intelligences…
one small group of increasingly worried merkin soldier survivors (well, so far) captures(?) rescues(?) a russian soldier seemingly even worse off than they, who reports that the intelligent claws have wiped out her unit and their command –
– but is everything quite as it seems?
William Gibson’s not-yet-complete Jackpot trilogy. The Peripheral and Agency are very wonderful, in each book moving between (as I read it) early apocalypse and post apocalypse state-of-humanity. https://twitter.com/greatdismal/status/1288318396249944064 shows that the third book may be in progress by now. Each of the first two is among my (okay, many) all-time favourites. So timely that I’m currently rereading them.
One of my faves was The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. I haven’t read it in years and need to see how it stands the test of time. I also really enjoyed This time of Darkness by HM Hoover when I reread it recently.
Seven Eves by Neal Stephenson is a page turner.
+1 for both Seveneves and Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy.
N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series is set in a world still affected by a catastrophic event thousands of years in the past.
I was thrilled to see George O. Stewart’s brilliant Earth Abides show up in the comments. I can’t recall any other treatment that so brilliantly describes the enormity of loss and impossibility of rebuilding following the breakdown of a complex modern infrastructure. Understanding this difficulty was, to me, one of the two great failures of Lucifer’s Hammer. First, Niven and Pournelle assumed sparking recovery would be a matter of restarting a scattering of technological facilities (examples shown are a nuclear plant and NORAD), nut they gave little thought to the logistical complexities of supporting those technologies. The second flaw was the Hammerfall’s relatively minimal atmospheric after-effects.
A great example describing the overwhelming environmental consequences of a thermonuclear holocaust (a comet strike would have similar consequences) comes from Nicholas Meyer’s1983 television movie The Day After, a truly nightmarish glimpse into the devastation wrought by nuclear winter.
I love that so many commenters listed Edgar Pangborn’s novel Davy. Pangborn also wrote several short stories set in the same future—all beautiful, moving, and painfully human works. I’ve long entertained the thought that The American Heritage Dictionary definition of poignant should include “cf. Edgar Pangborn.”
Several in the comments list Harlan Ellison’s remarkably dark A Boy and His Dog. In truth, post-apocalyptic fiction was long a mainstay of Ellison’s works. In the early 60s, he wrote two such treatments for the original Outer Limits series: “Soldier” and his award-winning “Demon with a Glass Hand.” Ellison’s oeuvre also includes two of my personal favorites, “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream,” and the playful, slightly more fantastical, far-future post-apocalyptic “The Deathbird.” I know, throughout his life, Ellison pissed off a lot of people, but he was a great writer.
Technically the Shannara books are Post-apocalyptic, if you read before and after Armageddon’s Children.
Definitely The Stand, the Broken Earth trilogy, there’s Station Eleven, The Book of Koli, The Walking Dead, love SevenEves so much, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Bird Box, Snowpiercer, The Girl with All the Gifts, Wool +, The Dog Stars, Zone One, The Passage, Ariel and Elegy Beach, Swan Song, Blindness, The Road …
Might be my favorite genre, just maybe :)
“Dr Who in an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks” (and afterwards with a shorter title). Landing in an alien post apocalyptic petrified forest, Dr Who contends with mutants and, also, other mutants. It is, in fact, all mutants, but some mutants are more mutant than others.
I don’t think that the other thing I was going to mention was that “A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World” is different from the Harlan Ellison story (as far as I can tell from reviews), but it is (I think). One review says that this boy’s hobby – besides dog rearing – is reading post-apocalyptic books from the Before, so I guess he thanks you for the recommendations. I’d advise him not to rush to pick up the Ellison.
The Nitrogen Fix by Hal Clement. A bacterium has removed all the oxygen from Earth’s atmosphere, and yet humans hang on.
Joe Abercrombie’s Shattered Sea trilogy (Half a King, Half the World, Half a War) takes place in a post-apocalyptic Scandinavia and surrounding lands. Remnants of the pre-disaster cities are referred to as “elf-ruins.”
Roald Dahl wrote one, Sometime Never, back in 1948. Gremlins inherit the Earth after humankind destroys itself.
I’m not sure Poul Anderson’s After Doomsday fits this theme.
Spacefarers return to find Earth an uninhabitable wasteland. Zapped by aliens.
The rest of the story is off-planet.
On the other hand, Fritz Leiber’s A Pail of Air certainly qualifies.
No one’s mentioned the Bannerless Saga by Carrie Vaughn? It’s set in a culture that almost-religiously adheres to the concept of sustainability in scattered communities along the west coast of North America, two or three generations after a perfect storm of treatment-resistant diseases, natural disasters, man-made (or at least triggered) disasters, lead to society breaking down, which just makes everything worse – the specifics are kept deliberately vague and passed down in oral tradition. There’s a few artefacts of technology that people understand (like a solar-powered electric car and power tools) that remain, but the infrastructure to repair and replace them is gone, so possession of them is recognised as power and therefore a heavy responsibility. Great stories.
I can’t believe it took 50 comments for anyone to mention N. K. Jemisin’s three-for-three Hugo-award-winning Broken Earth trilogy, set on a world that has lived one long string of apocalypse after apocalypse, where everything from their societies to the flora and fauna has been shaped by that reality. (If you’re a fan of the Dragon Age video games, you might be interested to know that Jemisin was inspired to build one aspect of the world as a result of her frustration with how the Circles were written, and how they didn’t match up with how oppression and enslavement function in the real world.) (Ugh, now I just want to reread the Broken Earth books again!)
It’s particularly disappointing when the massively racist Farnham’s Freehold got brought up TWICE, along with other mediocre, clearly written by under-imaginative white men examples like Seveneves. (Which I actually desperately want my girlfriend to read, just so I can talk to her about the massive misogyny; the embarrassing, barely disguised imports of real-world people; the ableism against autistics; the “scientific” racism/sexism; ad infinitum ad nauseam. There’s a core of a great story in Seveneves, but that honestly just makes the offensive execution all the worse.)
Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series starts with a massive meteorite striking the United States in 1952, wiping out the capital and instigating a climate catastrophe that is predicted to render the planet uninhabitable, making the space program necessary for human survival. The protagonist is a white Jewish woman; the series deals realistically with the anti-Semitism, sexism, racism (including and especially anti-Blackness), etc. of the era, in a divergent history where the urgency forces the inclusion of women astronauts as “calculators,” since computers aren’t advanced enough yet to reliably handle the math when vessels are out of contact with Earth.
The Seep by Chana Porter is a novella where Earth has undergone a slow invasion from an alien species, fundamentally changing how people live and interact. Not to oversell it, but it’s frankly the most beautiful story I’ve read in years. I Cried a Lot.
The novellas A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers imagine a society that has grown out of collaboration, rather than collapse, after apocalypse.
Ammonite by Nicole Griffith takes place on a colony where something in the environment kills every man exposed to it. (IIRC, “man” is defined purely by Y chromosomes, and trans and/or intersex people just don’t seem to exist.)
River Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts is set on a generation ship whose society has become extremely oppressive. (Among other realistic things about the diversity of the population, trans and/or intersex people exist in it.)
Severance by Ling Ma follows a young woman who’s one of the few immune people navigating the aftermath of a global plague.
Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series is set on a planet where deadly spores rain from the sky at predictable intervals, which has shaped the entire culture. At the time of the first book, hundreds of years have passed since the last occurrence, and the riders of the fire-breathing dragons that are the only defense have fallen out of favor. While at first glance Pern is a fantasy setting, it’s gradually revealed that this is actually a human colony that lost touch with Earth and forgot its colonist origin. NB: The series is very, uh, Of Its Time in terms of cultural politics. (I would also say the books start dropping in quality by the mid/late ’90s.)
Octavia Butler’s Earthseed duology (aka the Parable books) takes place at a time when American society is collapsing. Written in the ’90s, it features Butler’s typical prescience for modern conditions (including a right-wing government campaigning to, verbatim, “Make America Great Again”).
(There’s no particular order to these, other than the Broken Earth being the first thing I thought of–everything else is just in the order they came up as I scrolled through my e-reader TOC.)
@60/ShotFromGuns – I think I disagree with how you define “apocalypse.”
An Unkindness of Ghosts is set on a generation ship. The society has devolved into a racist caste system, but I don’t recall that it was triggered by something apocalyptic happening to the ship, or that the ship was sent out to escape a pending apocalypse. I might be forgetting something, though.
Some of your recommendations definitely don’t have something I’d call an apocalypse in the history of their setting. The Monk and Robot stories by Becky Chambers isn’t set on Earth, but on a world settled by humans from Earth (“colony” carries imperial connotations, so trying to avoid that). The impression I got was that the settlement was already sustainable, but based on robotic labour, and when the robots became sentient then humans had to adapt. Not exactly the large-scale death and destruction I’d associate with an apocalypse.
The same goes for Pern. I’m interested in whether the versions you read had the prologue? That makes it clear all the stories are science fiction, set in a society that was descended from high-tech humans that settled the planet centuries ago, modified the local fauna to combat the threat of “thread”, and deliberately regressed to an agrarian culture. It’s true it takes a few books for the characters to discover this, though. Again, no large-scale death and destruction I’d associate with an apocalypse. Totally agree with it being “of its time”. What gets me is how people seem to equate “dragons” with “for children”. I love those books, but… The amount of times someone’s asked (in some of the online groups I’m in) for recommendations for their 11 year old and I’ve had to point out the sex scenes with really questionable attitudes to consent, like the way F’lar practically rapes Lessa, under the impression that, since she’s been masquerading as a servant for ten years, not only would she not be a virgin (which she is) but also promiscuous, and so totally up for it. Yes, it’s under the psychic backlash of a dragon mating flight, and it’s the first time she’s experienced that, but he’s an experienced dragonrider, so would have had the control required to resist. Really not suitable for most 11 year olds.