Dystopia…it’s what I love!

Our whole family loves to read.  We read all of the time and are pretty diverse in what we read.  Emily and the kids, in particular, like sci-fi and fantasy.  They all read the same books and truly love to get away into the lands and places their imaginations take them.  I like sci-fi and fantasy too, but my real love is reading about the end of the world.  Of course, there are all sorts of zombie shows on right now and with global tensions and economic craziness, I think many more people have a particular view of what that vision of the future might be, even without zombies.

The first book I read about a bleak future and the poop hitting the fan (SHTF), was the Grapes of Wrath.  If you search of apocalypse or dystopia on amazon, you will not see Grapes of Wrath, but life as depicted in that book was about as tough as it gets.  It has no discussions on zombies or mercenaries gone wild or killer plagues, but it demonstrates the strength of humanity and the willingness to endure and survive anything life can dish out. Lots of people also get their first exposure to the genre (sort of) in school.  Lord of the Flies introduces 8th graders all over the country to the end of the world (at least for the characters) and the struggle to survive each year.

After The Grapes of Wrath and Lord of the Flies, I was hooked.  I read 1984 and Animal Farm, Years of the City and Neuromancer, The Stand and Thomas More’s Utopia.  I read Walden and Walden II and Huxley’s Brave New World.  I love these books.  They are a few of the classic books about other futures, some good, most bad.  The Hunger Games series is, of course, an international dystopic hit that everyone knows.

I also like to read about more contemporary scenarios tied to specific modern subjects. One can ponder the future after global economic meltdown, killer asteroids, nuclear war,  pandemics and volcanic destruction by reading among Lucifer’s Hammer, Alas Babylon, The Postman,  Thomas Sherry’s Deep Winter series, One Second After, Rawles’ Patriot  and American Apocalypse.  I think the real possibility of most of the scenarios are slim, but I enjoy reading about the strength of human character and the will to fix what is broken and preserve what we hold dear.  I looked over my kindle and I have over 100 similar dystopian future books and that future looks bright!

Does anyone else share my love of books about the end of the world as we know it (EOTWAWKI)?  Do you know of any other books similar in subject?