Sometimes when the unexpected happens, you have to turn to fiction. The only thing bringing me even brief consolation just now is picking through some of my favourite fictional apocalypses. Since my discovery of John Wyndham as a child – when Sophie’s six-toed footprint from The Chrysalids first burned itself into my mind – it has been (probably, I don’t really want to have to choose anything at this point) my favourite genre. Here are five that have perked me up just a little – let me know where else I should be looking.
Flood by Stephen Baxter
One of my other top images in fiction: Mount Everest vanishing beneath the waves after seismic activity breaks open underground reservoirs and floods the world. My first introduction to the excellent Baxter; Ark, the follow-up, was so good I could hardly bear it finishing.
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
Winner this week of the Arthur C Clarke award, I’ve already said a few times how much I love this Canadian author’s dystopian future, where a flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, and where her protagonists are wandering Shakespeare actors with a Star Trek motto: “Because survival is insufficient”.
The Stand by Stephen King
Lots of post-apocalyptic possibilities from my favourite (again, probably, because I don’t want to choose) author, but the sprawling, epic terror of The Stand, in which the world is devastated by a flu pandemic, has to win out. And I am now in love with this brilliantly disturbing first edition cover: wish they’d kept it.
Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien
I read this story of a girl living in a valley alone in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, as a child. I loved it then; and rereading it as an adult, it was even more disturbing. First time round, I didn’t understand the intentions of the man who joins her, so I was just as shaken by it, if not more.
When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs
I saw the adaptation of Briggs’s graphic novel about an elderly couple eking out a nuclear winter when I was still at school – and it was one of those moments which leaves me shivering still. The drawing style was so recognisable from Briggs’s children’s books; the story, which I didn’t know before, so utterly disturbing, as we slowly understood what was going on. That comment on the smell of burning meat … And the graphic novel is even better.
