100 books like Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

Much SF&F literature has explored the concept of what the world might look like with fewer (or no) humans.

Weisman’s well-researched book imagines how our environment would recover; how nature might take back control without humans around to continue wrecking it.

He imagines the primacy of nature in a fascinating way and manages to avoid the normative language that might be off-putting, drawing the reader into a place that might as well be 1000 light years away from Earth.

This novel considers what will happen when the Southwest runs out of water, a very real possibility, especially with climate change, and something I care about as a Utah resident.

It pulls you into the action right away and keeps you on your toes until the very end, weaving together the narratives of a few different characters, including a journalist, a refugee from Texas, and a henchman (aka “the water knife”) who’s paid to destroy rival water supplies.

An alum of Oberlin College (like me!), Paolo Bacigalupi is a master of telling engaging stories about possible futures defined by climate change. I highly recommend this thoughtful novel and his other books! 

So, this is a novel about a world in which a global pandemic means that large gatherings are illegal and everyone has adapted to life at home in isolation. It was published in 2019, and I read it summer of 2020. I'm not sure I've ever read anything that was this spookily, horrifyingly prophetic. That said, it's also really punk and ultimately uplifting. One of the characters is the lead singer of the band who it turns out inadvertently gave the last public concert ever, and she's trying to revive live music with underground concerts. Another character is the virtual talent scout who joins her cause. The story is about how you peel yourself out of trauma and disaster to find community again. Be warned, at this historical moment this one's a bit of a kick in the teeth.

As dark and depressing as this Cold War cautionary tale is, the author’s use of creeping ecological doom in the aftermath of a world-shattering war was profound to me. The story is told from several points of view by characters who have different motivations. I found their choices to be just as understandable as they were heartbreaking. This isn’t a “happily ever after” story. Even so, I found myself appreciating the whole story, from start to end.

Can continental drift lead to mass extinctions of life? In this book, Wignall expounds his provoking hypothesis that gigantic volcanic eruptions, triggered by the arrangement of the world’s landmasses in a single super-continent, led to eighty million years of episodic environmental crises that devastated life again and again. He describes the latest scientific evidence for this volcano-extinction connection and takes us with him on his own exciting field experiences studying these volcanic events in remote corners of the world.

Brannen examines the major mass extinctions in earth’s past and concurrent times of eruptions of massive floods of lava. He introduces us to the front-line researchers who are using the forensic tools of modern geology to uncover the connection between these titanic eruptions and the release of volcanic gases, severe greenhouse warming, ocean stagnation and eventual mass extinctions of life. This leads to the possibility that catastrophes can come from inside as well as outside the earth.

This novel takes place thirty years after a disease has reduced most of the human population to a primitive state. A thriller with exceptional action scenes and tension, the novel features two converging plotlines that are quests through South America and the southern United States when it is almost devoid of uninfected humans. As with a lot of post-apocalyptic novels the real villains of the story are other humans—their greed and need for control. While this book came out two years after mine, it resonated with me. The themes of trust run strong in both our novels, as well as lengthy stretches of landscape without any humans. 

Adrian J. Walker takes you on a scenic adventure across England as his characters struggle to survive a world-ending meteor strike. I love this story as it hits all the elements of a great story: love, struggle, adventure, survival, humor, horror, and drama!

Why would I recommend this book? Because you can’t help but wonder if you’d do the same thing as the protagonist. You can’t help but empathize with him. I mean, what would you do if a meteor was about to destroy everything? How would you save your family? What would you do to keep alive? What if you and your family got separated? Would you run across the country to find them?

Call me an end-of-days junkie; I won’t deny it. 

I have a twelve-story climbing rope in my storeroom in case the building catches fire. There’s a fire blanket in there and a go-bag, too. Talking about bomb shelters does something to my blood. Preparations excite me; maybe it’s a competitive streak. When I come face-to-face with disaster, I want the groundwork taken care of so I can focus on what’s important, like grabbing my children, our passports, and snacks for the road.

Reading this book was like living through the nightmare of my dreams. Communities came together, scrounging for food and water. Disaster after disaster was ingeniously avoided with other people’s refuse, raw brain power, and the occasional bullet. Man was pitted against man, and the only prize was survival. It was everything I needed to get a true appreciation of the bricks and mortar surrounding me and the covers… show more.

In 1968 I was a seventeen-year-old kid working in Manhattan. Getting off work each evening, I’d wander around the city. Can you imagine how much fun that would be for a young boy? One night, on 42nd Street, I found a movie theater showing an obscure, black-and-white movie called, Night of the Living Dead. The first thirty minutes, the audience laughed at the film, but as the movie rolled on, and the sense of dread about this group of strangers trapped together in a farmhouse, zombies outside trying to get inside, increased, the theater went silent. The director, George Romero, admitted in interviews his movie was inspired by I Am Legend. Near the end of his life, Romero, with Krauss, wrote this comprehensive history of the zombie apocalypse.