By creative, I mean something unlike the typical zombies, supervolcanoes, asteroids, etc. Something that felt innovative or which had never crossed your mind/path before!
Lots of stories out there about an apocalypse ALMOST happening/being prevented, but very few (that I'm aware of, which I'm hoping to change) where the apocalypse actually DOES happen. The only one I've already read (and adored) which I can think of that fits the criteria is Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle.
I mostly have something Earth-based in mind, but if you have a great recommendation that doesn't take place on this planet then I'm at least curious enough to know what it is!
by PsyferRL
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It’s kind of reminiscent of World War Z (great book if you haven’t read it), but I’m in the middle of Sleep Over by HG Bells right now and it might by up your alley. It’s an oral history of a global insomnia pandemic that’s killing everyone.
Severance by Ling Ma was interesting as well. Post-apocalyptic, after a pandemic that wiped out most of humanity.
I really couldn’t get into it, but Mary Shelley’s The Last Man might be worth looking at just for the heck of it.
Those are all pandemic-related. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer is about a woman living after an apocalypse, but we don’t know what happened.
If you like the idea of 1960s surrealistic feminist climate-change winter apocalypse, look at Ice by Anna Kavan. It’s weird AF.
_Parable of the Sower_ by Octavia Butler
While the cause of the apocalypse, global warming, isn’t all that unique, the way the story is told is different than any other book I’ve read. I think of it as a ‘slow apocalypse’, there are some people who still seem to have a somewhat normal existence, but unemployment is super high and a lot of people are struggling hard to survive. It’s unique in that it isn’t some singular cataclysmic event that caused the fall of civilization, but you get to observe the apocalypse happening in real time, humanity going out with a whimper instead of a bang.
The apocalypse in Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandell is just a very fast moving virus, but the post apocalyptic story focuses on a group of actors and musicians who travel around a decade or two after the apocalypse performing Shakespeare for survivors, so it’s a unique concept.
Oryx and Crake series.
*The Age Of Miracles* by Karen Thompson Walker — pre-apocalyptic/apocalyptic novel about the earth’s rotation slowing incrementally
American War by Omar El Akkad
The MaddAddam Triology by Margaret Atwood (mentioned below – Oryx and Crake is the first book)
Silo Trilogy by Hugh Howey