The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl is a biopunk science fiction novel by Paolo Bacigalupi and published in 2009. It's about Emiko, the "Windup Girl" an engineered human used as a sex slave in a dystopian future, where global warming has raised the levels of the world's oceans, carbon fuel sources have run out and mankind is harassed by deadly  plagues and pests, caused by genetically modified modified plants and animals.
Probably the best post apocalyptic or dystopian novel I read this year.

Post-Apocalyptic Novel

Two covers of the novel "Vault of the Ages" (1952) by Poul Anderson,


500 years in the future after a nuclear holocaust, there is Carl, a young man the son of the Chief of the Dalesmen, a community of peaceful farmers. This community is threatened by the Lann, a tribe of warriors from the north who are fleeing their increasingly cold homeland. On their way they are conquering and subjugating all other communities. Looking for help, Carl enters the ruins of one of America's ancient cities, which are inhabited by ragtag groups of people whom everybody calls witchmen or worse.
All in all a good old post-apocalyptic action novel, where people has fallen back on a kind of sword and sorcery.

The Girl Who Owned A City

"The Girl Who Owned a City" is a post apocalyptic novel for children by O. T. Nelson, first published in 1975.

A virus has killed all people over an the age of twelve. The surviving children are forming gangs and small armies to fight for the remaining resources. And there is Lisa organizing her neighborhood in a better way…
Yeah, it’s a nice book and I loved it once, but the real interesting thing is, that nobody (neither the authot nor the children) seems to miss the adults, the dead parents. Sure, there are a lot of problems because they are gone. But this makes the world only more interesting. Finally children are on their own!

All Fools’ Day

"All Fools' Day" is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by the English writer Edmund Cooper. It was already published in 1966, meaning in the good old days of post-apocalyptic fiction. There was no atomic blast and Cooper is really enjoying the scenery when great parts of humanity have vanished.
It has happened in a nearly comfortable manner. Because of the strange radiation from sun-spots suicide became endemic. Nearly all normal people decided happily to end their lives, only the psychopaths and eccentrics were imune and left.
So it’s a kind of Road Warrior in Great Britain, nice to read at least for all, who are interested in the roots of the genre.

The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower is a series of books by Stephen King. Despite the novels are set in a post apocalyptic world ruins and the decay of our civilization isn’t that important. King prefers obviously the scenery of the American Old West, the wastelands, the deserts. And their wandering heroes, like the gunslinger.

But anyway I like King’s language his descriptions: "The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all directions. White; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway and coaches had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied."

Deathlands Ruins

In the 1980s Gold Eagle Books started a series of post-apocalyptic novels which were written by various authors but published under the artificial name of James Axler. After a nuclear winter the United States came to be known as the Deathlands, where everybody has to fight for his freedom and his survival.


But above all I like the covers of the books which are normally showing a similar mixture of mutated beasts, survival gear and post-apocalyptic ruins. The ruins are here the symbol of a lost civilization that has returned to wild primitive levels.