If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking “honestly, maybe the apocalypse wouldn’t be so bad” — this list is for you.
I am, at my core, a person who finds existential dread deeply entertaining. The end of the world, the last human alive, a civilisation reduced to rubble and the handful of people stubborn enough to do something about it — yes please, more of that. There’s something almost meditative about fiction that strips everything back to the one question that actually matters: are you going to survive this or not?
What I love most in this genre is a character with absolute focus. Not a hero, necessarily. Just someone who has decided, with zero ambiguity, that they are not done yet. Fuck the grief, figure out the problem, stay alive. Whether that’s a midwife disguised as a man crossing a ruined America, or a lone astronaut doing physics problems to save the sun, or a Jesuit priest on another planet — the instinct is the same. Push through. Keep going.
These are the ten books in this genre that I loved most. No ranking. Just the ones I’d hand to someone and say: start here.
The Post-Apocalyptic and Sci-Fi Books
These are not ranked. Every book on this list earned its place. Whether you want brain-melting cosmology, feminist fury, first contact grief, or plain beautiful prose at the end of the world — there’s something here for you.
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
Meg Elison
47North · 2014
A fever kills nearly every woman on earth. The unnamed midwife wakes into a world where she must disguise herself as a man to survive, travelling across a ruined America and quietly helping the women she finds along the way. Fast-paced, dark, and gritty. This was, interestingly, a ChatGPT recommendation for me. I read it on Kindle, as I couldn't find it as my library.
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
Picador · 2014
A flu pandemic collapses the world in days. Twenty years later, a travelling Shakespeare troupe moves between scattered settlements. Mandel is less interested in the collapse than in what survives it -- art, memory, connection. I read this at the height of its popularity and befriended another reader on holiday over our love of this book. We're still Goodreads friends!
Contact
Carl Sagan
Simon & Schuster · 1985
Astronomer Ellie Arroway detects a signal from deep space -- a blueprint for a machine. What follows is a battle between science, faith, politics, and the question of whether humanity is ready to meet what's out there. Sagan at his most visionary. Written in the 80s, this book is an underhyped gem. I listened to the Unspooled podcast ep about this and they mentioned how fantastic the book was. I found it in an opshop for $2, battered and loved. It was incredible.
I Who Have Never Known Men
Jacqueline Harpman
Vintage (English translation) · Originally 1995, this edition 2019
Forty women are held in a cage underground, watched over by silent guards. When they escape, the world above is empty. Told by the youngest, the only one who has never known anything else. Short, spare, and one of the most haunting books you'll read. I never recovered from this book and still recommend it above almost all others, if the reader is looking for something dystopian.
The Three-Body Problem
Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu)
Tor Books · 2014 (English translation; originally published 2008)
Beginning during China's Cultural Revolution, a scientist makes contact with an alien civilisation -- and sets in motion an existential crisis for humanity that will unfold over centuries. Hugo Award-winning and gripping like nothing I've ever read. I watched the first season on Netflix and needing a resolution ended up reading the ginormous trilogy. It has some problems, it's not perfect, but MY GOD, is it a hell of a story.
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
McClelland & Stewart · 2003
The last man alive picks through the ruins of a world destroyed by an engineered plague, recalling the brilliant, dangerous friend who made it happen. Atwood at her darkest and sharpest. First in the MaddAddam trilogy, though it stands alone beautifully. I've also read MadAddam, but this I enjoyed more.
The Sparrow
Mary Doria Russell
Villard Books · 1996
In 2019, humanity detects music from another star system. The Jesuits get there first. By 2059, only one man returns -- broken in ways the novel reveals slowly and devastatingly. First contact as tragedy. Another underhyped sci-fi book, I've not stopped thinking about it. If you like anthropology, this overlaps.
Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
Ballantine Books · 2021
A man wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he's there. What he pieces together: the sun is dying, earth sent him as a last resort, and he has no way home. I've read The Martian, and his short story - The Egg, and love Weir's stories. This was page-turning, and fantastic, and I read it years before the movie.
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
Harcourt · 1966
Charlie Gordon has an IQ of 68. An experimental surgery makes him a genius. Told entirely through his progress reports as his intelligence rises -- and then begins to fall. Won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Oh, Charlie... sigh. A beautiful book that is timeless in its relevancy.
Dark Matter
Blake Crouch
Crown Publishing · 2016
A Chicago physics professor is kidnapped, drugged, and wakes up in a life that isn't his. The multiverse as a thriller. Crouch moves fast and the science is genuinely interesting. I read long before the TV series, and thought it was great. It does not need another season, though. I've also read and enjoyed Recursion, which was also great. But, Upgrade I DNF'd at 70% so Crouch itsn't faultless, for me.
A note on the books you’ll find on other lists
Any post-apocalyptic reading list worth taking seriously will include names like Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Kazuo Ishiguro, and David Mitchell. Parable of the Sower, The Fifth Season, Never Let Me Go, and Cloud Atlas are all genuinely significant works, and they appear on lists like this one for good reason. I’ve read them all. Some I admired more than I loved — The Power and Tender is the Flesh both left me cold despite their ideas — and The Fifth Season didn’t make it to the end with me. That’s not a verdict on their quality. It’s just that five stars means something specific here: books I’d read again, press into someone’s hands, think about years later. These didn’t quite get there.
