Friday, November 20, 2015

Five top books that give heroines their apocalyptic due

Jackie Hatton is the author of Flesh and Wires, a post-apocalyptic, post-alien novel that imagines women as the agents of their own destiny. One of her five books that give women their apocalyptic due, as shared at Tor.com:
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale is the one that really got things rolling in the women-of-the-apocalypse literary stakes, a feminist classic that’s hard to see past both as a reader and a writer. However, it presents an older vision of women facing imminent doom, one born of 1970s feminism. We’ve changed—and so has Margaret Atwood. In The Year of the Flood, the groundbreaking author takes a new and admirable second run at her own theme. The female protagonists of The Year of the Flood are still the victims of the sexual derangement of men (always worse in end times) but in this new scenario they survive (mostly) by looking out for each other. There are no good men in vans coming to save the day: sisters are doing it for themselves. First they do a good job of simply surviving some kind of devastating man-made plague. Then, armed with little more than a foolhardy amount of grit and character, they go out of their apocalyptic way to find and save their friend from a couple of raging man-beasts. Female camaraderie and gender loyalty may not be the only themes of The Year of the Flood (environmental destruction, insatiable consumerism, quack religion and demeaning sexual politics all vie for our attention), but they are most certainly the lights in the dark that make this second book in the MaddAddam trilogy really shine.
Read about another entry on the list.

The Year of the Flood is among Diana Biller's top 22 great science fiction and fantasy stories that can help you make sense of economics and Annalee Newitz's top ten works of fiction that might change the way you look at nature.

--Marshal Zeringue