The Best In Apocalyptic Fiction
Explore the best apocalyptic fiction books that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Discover thrilling tales of survival, dystopia, and the end of the world in our top picks.
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Lucifer's Hammer
by Larry Niven
The trade paper re-launch of a classic sci-fi bestseller from the authors of the acclaimed alien invasion epic "Footfall". For millionaire Tim Hamner, the comet he helped discover is a ticket to immortality. For filmmaker Harvey Randall, it's a chance to redeem a flagging career. And for astronauts John Baker and Rick Delanty, it's a second chance for glory in outer space.
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The Sleep of the Gods
by MR James Sperl
What would you do if you--and only you--learned the end of the world was about to occur? Unfortunately for Catherine Hayesly, she's about to find out. It had been six long years since Catherine Hayesly's last vacation. In another few weeks she and her family would finally commence their dream trip of a lifetime. But then came the call. The one her high-ranking military husband, Warren, had warned might someday arrive. With a fateful string of cryptic words, and violating every security protocol, Warren informs Catherine of an impending world-altering event. With the clock ticking and her mind reeling, Catherine finds herself suddenly thrust into a nightmare of global proportions. Left to fend for herself and her three children in the wake of Warren's information, Catherine must abandon any semblance of her former life and commit to the only thing that now matters: survival. But confronting her at every turn is the event itself and the enigmatic origins surrounding it and all that it has wrought.
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The Conqueror Worms
by Brian Keene
Non-stop torrential rains have flooded most of the United States, destroying coastal cities. In West Virginia, the floods have forced mammoth carnivorous earthworms above ground to find food. Original.
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Plague Year
by Jeff Carlson
When the nanotechnology designed to fight cancer evolves into a machine plague, killing nearly five billion people, a group of survivors, struggling to stay alive, places their faith in a top nanotech researcher who has discovered the plague's one weakness. Original.
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The Last Jihad
by Joel C. Rosenberg
Jon Bennett and Erin McCoy are two of the shrewdest strategists on Wall Street and close friends of the president of the United States. Their secret project: a billion-dollar oil deal off the coast of Tel Aviv and Gaza that could form the basis of a historic peace treaty and bring enormous wealth to every Israeli and Palestinian. But nothing has prepared Jon or Erin for the terror that lies ahead. The book that started it all, The Last Jihad is the first of Joel C. Rosenberg's New York Times best-selling series, with 500,000 in print. The first page puts readers in the cockpit of a hijacked jet on a kamikaze mission into an American city—but it was written nine months before 9/11/01. As the plot unfolds, White House advisors Jon Bennett and Erin McCoy are under attack in Jerusalem as the U.S. goes to war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction—but The Last Jihad was published four months before the actual Iraq war began.
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Swan Song
by Robert McCammon
In a nightmarish, post-holocaust world, an ancient evil roams a devastated America, gathering the forces of human greed and madness, searching for a child named Swan who possesses the gift of life.
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Aftermath
by Charles Sheffield
An exploding star causes electromagnetic storms which destroy most of the world's computers. The novel traces the effect of this on various people, from patients undergoing cancer treatment to astronauts stranded in space.
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The Postman
by David Brin
Gordon is a wanderer who trades tales for food and shelter. When someone gives him an old postal worker's jacket, he gains strength from it, and the inspiration for another tale. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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Footfall
by Larry Niven
"NOBODY DOES IT BETTER THAN NIVEN AND POURNELLE. --Tom Clancy They first appear as a series of dots on astronomical plates, heading from Saturn directly toward Earth. Since the ringed planet carries no life, scientists deduce the mysterious ship to be a visitor from another star. The world's frantic efforts to signal the aliens go unanswered. The first contact is hostile: the invaders blast a Soviet space station, seize the survivors, and then destroy every dam and installation on Earth with a hail of asteriods. Now the conquerors are descending on the American heartland, demanding servile surrender--or death for all humans. "ROUSING . . . THE BEST OF THE GENRE." --The New York Times Book Review "From the Paperback edition.
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Final Impact
by Yvonne Navarro
Life As the World Knows It "New York, Early October... [fade to Marti Nunciata] "From the middle segment of the seven o'clock Cable News Network" broadcast: "Excitement continues to build as astronomers around the world prepare to record the impact of the rogue planet Millennium on the far side of Jupiter in late November. The rogue planet was dubbed Millennium because when discovered by the Kin Peak National Observatory in Arizona, it was originally estimated to strike Jupiter early in the year 2000. Now, however, astronomers estimate the impact will occur on November twenty-sixth, the Friday after Thanksgiving. This is what Professor Frank Gelasias had to say when asked about the more than one month discrepancy between the originally projected date of impact and when scientists now believe the rogue planet will actually strike the gas giant." [cut to window and expand to fill, Professor Frank Gelasias] "There are many factors which can affect the date we calculate that a body in space will strike another one, or pass close by, so much changing information on an object of this size and speed, that exact projections early on are chancy at best. But we're fairly certain that this one will strike the day after Thanksgiving, and when it does, the impact on Jupiter will dwarf what Shoemaker-Levy did to the planet in 1994. Millennium is "huge by comparison, and the resulting damage to Jupiter's atmosphere could change the way we see the planet--its gas atmosphere--for decades."
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Wastelands
by John Joseph Adams
With stories from George R.R. Martin (author of Game of Thrones), Gene Wolf, Carol Emshwiller, Stephen King, and more! "I can't help but give this collection the highest recommendation. I think this will be a cornerstone for most reader's shelves."—SFF World From the Book of Revelation to ''The Road Warrior'', from ''A Canticle for Leibowitz'' to ''The Road'', storytellers have long imagined the end of the world, weaving eschatological tales of catastrophe, chaos, and calamity. In doing so, these visionary authors have addressed one of the most challenging and enduring themes of imaginative fiction: the nature of life in the aftermath of total societal collapse. Gathering together the best postapocalyptic literature of the last two decades from many of today's most renowned authors of speculative fiction - including George R. R. Martin, Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card, Carol Emshwiller, Jonathan Lethem, Octavia E. Butler, and Stephen King - Wastelands explores the scientific, psychological, and philosophical questions of what it means to remain human in the wake of Armageddon. Whether the end of the world comes through nuclear war, ecological disaster, or cosmological cataclysm, these are tales of survivors, in some cases struggling to rebuild the society that was, in others, merely surviving, scrounging for food in depopulated ruins and defending themselves against monsters, mutants, and marauders. Wastelands delves into this bleak landscape, uncovering the raw human emotion and heart-pounding thrills at the genre's core.
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World War Z
by Max Brooks
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Prepare to be entranced by this addictively readable oral history of the great war between humans and zombies.”—Entertainment Weekly We survived the zombie apocalypse, but how many of us are still haunted by that terrible time? We have (temporarily?) defeated the living dead, but at what cost? Told in the haunting and riveting voices of the men and women who witnessed the horror firsthand, World War Z is the only record of the pandemic. The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE “Will spook you for real.”—The New York Times Book Review “Possesses more creativity and zip than entire crates of other new fiction titles. Think Mad Max meets The Hot Zone. . . . It’s Apocalypse Now, pandemic-style. Creepy but fascinating.”—USA Today “Will grab you as tightly as a dead man’s fist. A.”—Entertainment Weekly, EW Pick “Probably the most topical and literate scare since Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast . . . This is action-packed social-political satire with a global view.”—Dallas Morning News
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Earth Winter
by Richard Moran
When the northern hemisphere is plunged into a new Ice Age by a mid-Atlantic volcano, Ben Meade applies his genius to rediverting the Gulf Stream - but profiteers in the southern hemisphere will do anything to stop him.
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Richter Ten
by Arthur C. Clarke
The only surviving member of his family after the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake, young Lewis Crane devotes his life to seismology and is terrified when he predicts "the big one"
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The Empire of Ice
by Richard Moran
In the year 2000, an active volcano emerges from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, threatening to plunge the British Isles into a new ice age.
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Icefire
by Judith Reeves-Stevens
Once lovers, now enemies, Navy SEAL Captain Mitch Webber and oceanographer Cory Rey must join forces to stop a cabal of Chinese officials from devastating the Pacific Rim nations using nuclear weapons to create gigantic tidal waves. Reprint.
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In His Image
by James Beauseigneur
Based on events surrounding efforts to authenticate the Shroud of Turin, BeauSeigneur takes readers on a brilliantly researched and vividly imagined journey to find whether a forbidden experiment will lead to the Triumph of Man--or the Wrath of God.
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Black Monday
by Bob Reiss
In the wake of a globally disastrous plague involving a microbe that consumes oil while destroying all gas-operated machinery, the survival of the world's governments and markets falls on the shoulders of a single individual.