Recently started reading instead of Tiktok at night. I haphasardly yet naturally got into Sci-Fi/Post-Apoc book and would love some recommendations.

I enjoyed The Dog Stars, The Last, and Severance. A great genre!

If you want to read more Arthur C Clarke, I would recommend ‘2001’ (and its sequels) over the Rama sequels: Clarke really wasn’t at his best trying to write women unfortunately.

**American War** by Omar Al Akkad. Set in a near-ish future where the world has been pretty ruined by climate change. America is mired in a yearslong second Civil War, this time over fossil fuels. The story follows a young Southern black girl (it’s still North v South and the South is basically like a third world country by the time the book starts) as she grows up in this stalemated conflict.

**Andromeda Strain** by Michael Chrichton. A microscopic alien life form basically works as a super virus threatening all of humanity.

**Chain Gang All Stars** by Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah. Kind of like Hunger Games, fight to the death, but the contestants are death row inmates from a private prison, and the company has found that this fight reality series is a lucrative additional revenue stream. Not really dystopian except for the inmates, as most other life continues like normal for free people.

**Down to a Sunless Sea** by David Graham. The world has pretty much already gone to shit, but there’s enough trade left that there are still a few airplanes shuttling uber-rich around. While on a transatlantic flight, a small group of passengers and the crew receive a message from the ground that the nuclear apocalypse had begun and soon there will be nowhere safe to land on earth. Kind of an “every plane for himself” warning.

**Otherlife** series by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller. Not really apocalypse, more Ready-Player-One-Meets-Westworld. There is a full-immersion virtual reality world where anything is possible (like Ready Player One), but the main characters discover that all the NPCs have souls or whatever (like Westworld) and are being horrifically abused by the human players.

**Nuclear War: A Scenario** by Annie Jacobson. This is speculative nonfiction. The author is a Pulitzer finalist who spent a decade reporting for this book. She takes the imagined scenario of North Korea launching a nuclear attack on the US, then describes, minute-by-minute, the technology, human intelligence and military response that would actually happen based on her reporting. It’s a harrowing read that only covers the first 72 minutes after the first bomb leaves NK (because it also happens to be the last 72 minutes of human civilization as we know it).

**The Next Civil War** by Stephen Marche. Another speculative nonfiction in which the author, a historian, explores five ways America might find itself in some sort of hot or cold Civil War. Each scenario is a short story, then he takes some time explaining how/why similar events have happened around the world.

**Robobocalypse** by Daniel Wilson. Hopefully the title is pretty self explanatory.

**Run** by Blake Crouch. This one is new and I’ve only gotten through a couple chapters, but it’s pretty good. Basically, much of humanity all of a sudden turns feral and tries to murder other people. Not sure why yet but I’m intrigued.

**Wayward Pines** trilogy is another good one by Crouch. Kind of reminds me of *Silo* in that it’s a big mystery about what is actually happening, and you think you should be able to figure it out, but can’t until the end when the book tells you. In this book series, a secret agent is sent to a small, idyllic town in Idaho to investigate the disappearance of two colleagues. He gets in a car accident almost as soon as he arrives and wakes up in the town hospital. But the more he tries to insist who he is and why he needs to start the investigation, the less anyone believes anything he says.

**The Stand** by Stephen King. Loooooong but good. A lab leak releases a virus that kills like 99% of humanity within a couple of weeks, and then the remaining people realize they are sort of the final soldiers in a spiritual war. I like this book because it spends a long time on the actual virus spreading and what happens to people. It seems like a lot of books like that sort of skip over the actual event of the apocalypse.

**The Apocalypse Tryptich** trilogy by various authors. Basically it’s three books – one covers right before an apocalypse, one is during the event, one is right after the apocalypse. Most of the authors are up-and-comers I wasn’t familiar with, but they all bring their own stories with their own apocalypses. Hugh Howey is one of the authors, and his storyline basically ties into the Silo series so you might enjoy that.

**World War Z** by Max Brooks. Written as a nonfiction oral history of the zombie plague that almost wiped out humanity. Not a comedy by any means, but doesn’t take itself too seriously either. It’s a really well-written, creative piece that I often read before bed because each chapter is kind of its own short story.

**The Zombie Autopsies** by Stephen Schlozman. Also written as a nonfiction bulletin sent out by the WHO to all remaining world governments that still might be standing. Most of the packet the an annotated journal of a doctor who was sent with a team to a remote island to try to find a cure or vaccine for the zombie plague before it took out humanity. The team is presumed dead but they were able to recover the journal, which includes detailed descriptions and sketches of the autopsies (their power went out so they couldn’t take pics), as well as just the harrowing descriptions of life as things continue to devolve. The cool part is that the *real* author, Schlozman, is an MD and trained medical sketch artist (like for the diagrams of skeletons and muscles you see in textbooks), so it’s really authentic and pretty creepy.

The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman

Eternity Road by Jack McDevitt

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

The Passage by Justin Cronin