If you think of old fables and stories that we can look back on now and draw lessons from (fairy/folk tales, religious texts, legends), you can see how their themes and allegories influenced human societies. But they weren't perfect, sometimes the lessons are open to interpretation for better or worse.
Wipe all of that away. If you could decide which books were going to be the new Foundational Myths of a post apocalyptic world, which would you choose?
by Vesinh51
26 Comments
The wheel of time shaped my teenage sense of self without realizing it myself so I’ll go there?
Clan of the Cave Bear
East of Eden
The lord of the rings
Pierce Brown and Brandon Sanderson
LOTR, Narnia
The Discworld novels of Sir Terry Pratchett.
‘Sin begins when you treat people as things’
I would choose the ancient myths, but since your question disallows that, Shakespeare, Borges, and Proust spring to mind.
Anything Madeline Miller
Pratchett.
Stormlight archives
Because you are preserving not just the set of books but another set of books within the books
The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness would be a good start.Â
The Collected Works of Chuck Tingle
The Master of Mankind by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
The Foundation books
The Dark Tower
Accounts of the Holocaust
Book of the new sun
The Road, Blood Meridian, East of Eden
Les Misérables, without a doubt. It has all, mercy, redemption, justice, and the persistence of hope in the face of cruelty.
The Thomas the Tank Engine books and the American Girl books
Berserk
I think *Star Wars* and *The Empire Strikes Back* will survive. Lists of the titles of the other works in that universe will survive, and people will imagine what the rest of that Epic Cycle actually looked like.
The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Harry Potter.
The Hunger Games trilogy
Shakespeare.
The Stand would probably make people think this happens all the time.