M.R. Carey is the author of The Girl with All the Gifts and The Boy on The Bridge. One of his favorite apocalyptic novels, as shared at the Waterstones blog:The Children Of Men by P.D.James.Read about another entry on the list.
It’s hard to believe that this astonishing novel is almost thirty years old. It still has a contemporary feel, with its vision of a society turned inside out by an irrevocable shift in the way the world works. As in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, written seven years earlier, the declining fertility of humankind changes everything. Society folds in on itself like an origami sculpture and opens out in a different shape entirely, terrifyingly alien and familiar at the same time. As with [The Chrysalids author John] Wyndham, we’re looking at people and civilisationsunder existential threat, with the ever-present awareness that the cure can be worse than the disease.
The Children of Men is on Jeff Somers's top ten list of books with plausible fictional apocalypses, Justin Cronin's list of ten top world-ending novels, Anita Singh's list of five P.D. James novels you should read, Torie Bosch's top twelve list of great pandemic novels, Joel Cunningham's list of eleven scary fictional diseases, John Mullan's list of the ten most notable New Years in literature, Amanda Yesilbas and Charlie Jane Anders's list of the twelve most unfaithful movie versions of science fiction and fantasy books, Ben H. Winters' list of three books to read before the end of the world, and John Sutherland's list of the five best books about the end of England.
--Marshal Zeringue
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