top twenty fiction

TOP TWENTY FICTION


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Every one of us has a different top ten or twenty in survival fiction. Most of you simply love “Earth Abides”. I put it at the bottom of my list, as one of my bad pet peeves in survival fiction is the Judgment Day effect of everybody dying off and leaving the survivors a sea of plenty. An otherwise great book is spat upon and ridiculed if it has this feature. I also have a different set of priorities than most of you. You- guns blazing in orgasmic semi auto delight. Me- logistics. My selection will reflect both of these. Militia porn is not included, although I’ll allow fantasy if it suits my purposes. To each his own.

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One- Lucifer’s Hammer by Niven and Pournelle. My first apocalypse read, what got me interested in The End Of The World. In my opinion it is still the best. Yes, it meanders at the beginning. It is called character development and plot sketching. You want to buy into an alternate universe with fiction, not just have a printed version of a TV episode of A-Team. It balanced a fine line between Too Optimistic and Too Paranoid. Most books just go one way or another.

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Two-Dies The Fire by SM Stirling. I can’t help it, I simply love this book. All the rest in the series blew bloody chunks, being little more than contemporary fantasy. But this one just seemed to have its finger on the pulse of a collapse. When you run across those sections were the characters start orgasmic worshipping of trees and tree deities, don’t despair. It is usually over in a page or three. And they don’t happen too often. There were plenty of Idiotic Foreigner Lawyer Liberal Puke Author moments, such as when females are unrealistically given the equal physical powers of males ( or more, if they are processed by magical tree deity powers ), but after those 1% distractions, overall the book simply kicks ass.

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Three-One Second After by W Forstchen. Possibly the most realistic and least fantastic of the bunch. After all, comets rarely hit but a solar flare melted telegraph lines only about 150 years ago. And we won’t even go into the Space Bats in the last book. Also, a very talented author.

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Four-Retrieved From The Future by John Seymour. A pick from the other side of the pond, and notable for its realistic story of the fight of the survivors over functional farm land. Not for the minions who think an AR and a stern look will save their gardens from the mass migration of city folk. Very well written by the guy most known for back to the land books.

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Five- As Wind In Dry Grass by G Llewellyn. Perhaps this is more of a militia book than a survivalist/doomer/post-apocalypse book, but I include it here because it is such a rare realistic look at how true human nature is to our primitive ancestors, tooth and claw, rather than a moralistic, simplistic, love thy neighbor crap that is only realistic in times of plenty. Most doomer books are Little House On The Prairie. This is Little Indian Scalping War Party On The Prairie.

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Six-The Mist by Stephen King. I think King’s The Stand should never be included in doomer book lists, but this novella is one of the best of the genre. The only reason it isn’t closer to the top is because of its strong fantasy/horror elements. But is paints such a vivid feel of doom and gloom that I don’t think I’ve ever seen its equal ( to possibly include The Road ). This is King at the top of his form, suspending reality for you and putting you into another universe.

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Seven-Afterlight by Alex Scarrow. Better than its prequel. Surviving on a bit of salvage and a lot of manual labor and by abandoning most luxuries. And of course, hiding out helped a lot. A more realistic look at survival than the fools in their Escape Pods with ten thousand rounds of ammo and a warehouse of MRE’s.

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Eight- Last Light by Alex Scarrow. At first glance you wouldn’t think this to be a very good tale. Middle east oil stops, society collapses. But it just focuses on one family rather than society as a whole being impacted. But somehow it works as no other Peak Oil fiction has, and it is a companion to number seven.

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Nine- The Road by C McCarthy. This book is really irritating with its droning on and on about feelings and other fem crap by the dad of a surviving father and son. But few other books spell out the realistic conditions of a mass die off aftermath. This is what Rome must have been like, without the nuclear winter.

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Ten-Survivors by T Nation. The British book they based two BBC series on. Perhaps it should have been a bit farther down the list, but since this is MY list, the top ten had to have the “Oh My God, I will simply die if I don’t read this book at least once more, and possibly several times” factor going for it. And I surprised myself with this one. Not greatly realistic or even all that special, it had something to prompt you to reread.

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Eleven-Alas, Babylon by P Frank. A bit dated, or it might have been a bit up the list. Nuclear war just isn’t as much of a probability as it used to be ( yes, yes, I know Dies The Fire is totally improbable ). A classic, and a reread, but sorry, it is still #11 due to the Leave It To Beaver tone that seriously dates it.

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Twelve-Wolf And Iron by G Dickson. A realistic Quest Story. Also a reread, but something kept it from the top ten. I’m not sure what.

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Thirteen-Islands In The Sea Of Time by SM Stirling. One of his first books I ran across, and his peculiarities threw me off and forced me to say bad things about his writing. That whole Linda Hamilton female warrior that is plausible with firearms but not muscle weapons. But I grew to overlook that and went on to enjoy this book and Fire.

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Fourteen-The Folk Of The Fringe by OS Card. I don’t like much of his other writing, but I keep coming back to this collection of short post apocalypse stories. Most don’t even meet my ideal, being placed in a time after the collapse and once order is reestablished. But this book works nonetheless.

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Fifteen-Faraday’s Orphans by N L Wood. Just like the above, in a settled post collapse environment, but gritty enough in its living conditions of the survivors I had to include it.

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Sixteen-The Things That Keep Us Here by C Buckley. Normally I can’t stand female authors. When one impresses me with her story, and better yet a prepper/collapse story, I pay attention. You can share the fear and angst.

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Seventeen-The Cross Time Engineer Series by L Frankowski. OK, not a doomer series in the slightest. Engineer dude goes back through time to battle the forces of evil. But it nicely depicts simple technology, a must for reestablishing a civilization.

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Eighteen-The Lost Regiment Series by W Forstchen. Again, fantasy rather than post-apoc. But the group must build a Civil-War era army from scratch. Useful for small glimpses of primitive tech and pre-modern logistics.

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Nineteen-The Aftermath by S Florman. A cruise ship full of engineers survives a comet strike and must totally rebuild from scratch. Weak writing but great subject matter.

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Twenty-Patriots by JW Rawles. I know, a book by my main nemesis. But I can’t stop rereading this book, for whatever reason. Something about it. Sure, the new one is better, but for me it isn’t a reread. This one is, at least up to about page 300.

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Okay, that’s it. I have about sixty six others, but these made the top of the list. Perhaps not the best, but the most striking, memorable, or compelling rereads.

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