The plague that ends the world in Ma’s excellent debut is extra scary because we’re all halfway there: when you catch Shen Fever, you continue going about your routine, doing your rote tasks, not that much more of a zombie than you were in life, until eventually you rot away. Particularly strange and sad reading for a nation in quarantine-and proof that breaking it can bring disastrous effects. A military border is set up along the river to keep the sickness from spreading west, but this is a border that Gary is determined to cross. Wilson Tucker, The Long Loud Silence (1952)Įverything east of the Mississippi has been destroyed by a nuclear attack the scant survivors have been dosed with a bioweapon that has infected them with the plague (just to be safe, I suppose).
Of course, there are plenty more great apocalypse and post-apocalypse novels that didn’t fit on this list, and I haven’t read enough books in translation in this genre, so as ever, please add on your own favorites in the comments. We could argue all day about what actually constitutes an “apocalypse”-2020 is checking a lot of boxes, as you may have noticed-so for the most part, I’ve gone with my gut. I’ve done my best to limit this list to books in which there is-or has been-some kind of literal apocalypse, excluding dystopias (like The Handmaid’s Tale) or simply bleak visions of the future. Humans have been pondering the end of existence for as long as we’ve been aware of it (probably, I mean, I wasn’t there), and as a result we have a rich collection of apocalypse and post-apocalypse literature to read during our planet’s senescence. After all, someone must survive to tell the tale. The end of the world is never really the end of the world-at least not in fiction.
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