I love novels like On the Beach by Nevil Shute and The End by Mats Strandberg. There is something sad and thought provoking about humanity preparing to meet its end.
Unfortunately I can't find many of those. Authors keep cancelling the end of the world at the last moment. It's very annoying.
Could you please suggest some? Thanks.
by TarikeNimeshab
11 Comments
Not a novel, per se, but Junji Ito’s manga *Remina* is about this.
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, the full length story rather than the short story by just Asimov.
On the beach was the single most depressing thing I’ve ever read. It’s stuck with me even though it’s been 10 years since I’ve read it, it was really an experience
It’s not ‘end of the world’ in the sense of on the beach, but the road by Cormac McCarthy has a similar depressing tone and doesn’t lift even at the end of the book
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Anne Jacobsen.
Non-fiction, but it’s a hypothetical situation in which Nuclear War breaks out, and what happens to people on the ground, what the government is doing, what the military is doing, etc.
And yes, the world absolutely does (and would) end.
Well, about humanity preparing to meet its end (not necessarily humanity ending – that would’ve been a big spoiler), Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixin Liu (the Three Body Problem is the first) is one of my favorite all time reads and re-reads (even with all its shortcomings). If interested in realistic Scifi (hard SciFi) the trilogy is an absolute must.
If you really ponder it, there’s no salvation at the end of The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Cats cradle
A canticle for leibowitz
The Age of Miracles
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I threw it across the room when I finished it…
*The Killing Star* by Charles Pellegrino; it’s quite a bleak read, humanity is annihilated by a number of asteroids hurled at Earth by aliens, for no other reason than to eliminate us before we’re in any position to potentially eliminate them.
‘When the Wind Blows’ – graphic novel by Raymond Briggs.
‘Last and First Men’ by Olaf Stapledon – with the twist that the ‘world’ is Neptune (Earth being long since abandoned) and there’s nowhere else to go.