(no subject)

[camwyn]

When I was in late grade school and early high school, one of the themes in Terribly Earnest Books For Young Adults was that of the teenage runaway. Any urges I might ever have had to run away from home as a kid had been driven out of me by reading one of the Beezus and Ramona books long before; the girls had wanted to run away from home, only to realize that they had no idea where to sleep or where to go or how to pay for food or anything. I was maybe eight at the time I read this, and I thought to myself that if I ran away from home because something upset me, I'd be in the same boat. I could run away to Grandma and Grandpa's, but they'd just call Mom and Dad. Not, you understand, that my home life was anything that really deserved to be run away from- I'm just saying that when TV or movies or whatever left me thinking about running away from home as a means of either escaping a problem or making my parents sorry for whatever decision they'd made, I wound up saying no because it just wasn't practical.

Come late grade school/early high school, and the Terribly Earnest Novels began. These were the books written about teenagers who ran away and had miserable times of it and wound up crawling home, or attempting to. Anybody who stayed away wound up looking at a future full of ick, if they had a future at all. Mostly they didn't. You occasionally got cases like the story I remember in one of our literature textbooks, where the girl ran away at fourteen or fifteen and her parents mounted a search and broadcast messages to her on her birthday and when she finally decided she'd had enough of Being Miserable, she approached someone to help her get back in touch with them... and when they met her they decided she was yet another impostor claiming to be their daughter, and sent her away. That story ended on the girl listening to yet another 'come hooooooooome' message on her birthday and thinking she'd never been the daughter they thought they had in the first place, but basically, it was yet another Person Who Runs Away Has A Future Full Of Ick story.

That annoyed me. That annoyed me so much. The stories were all predicated on the fundamental assumption that Your Parents Are Right. Or if Your Parents somehow happened to be wrong, then Running Away Still Wasn't The Answer. You were supposed to find some kind of assistance in the form of an Understanding and Compassionate Adult, or a Social Service Agency Tailored For You, or something- but Running Away was one of those things that Could Never End Well. If the runaway was to have any kind of a future, they had to come crawling back and acknowledge that they were wrong, whether to their parents or someone else. Otherwise? Future Full of Ick.

I realize now that these Terribly Earnest Stories and Books were deliberately being aimed at adolescents in danger of embarking upon lives of homelessness, drugs, prostitution, etc. in the hopes of stopping them before they started, but even so, there is something unspeakably annoying about hitting the same damn basic story element AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. Just once, just once, I wanted the runaway to run off and stay away and have it wind up being good. I wanted someone to flee an untenable home situation and have adventures. I wanted them to have the kind of life post-running-away where, when they finally saw their parents again, they could honestly say, "I'm not sorry." And then I wanted a damn ass dance of victory in their faces, even if I didn't know the phrase at the time. It was one of the things I liked about Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion books- the books start with Paks running away from home to escape what she sees as an intolerable situation, and end with her kicking more ass than anyone else in the whole damn chronicle. She did feel a little sorry for her parents and admitted that the situation wasn't as bad as she had thought before the end of the trilogy, but ultimately, it was Teen Runaway Does The Right Thing And Makes Good On An Epic Scale.

That being said: I am tired, very tired, of stories/movies/whatever where human civilization falls and Plucky Bands of Shaggy-Haired Survivors (because scissors don't make it through the apocalypse) struggle valiantly to put things back together, but there are Bad People and/or Monsters who make it hard. There's always straggling bands of Bad People, and they're nearly always so much better prepared for life after civilization falls than the Shaggy-Haired Survivors that you kind of have to wonder how the Shaggy-Haired Survivors lasted long enough to make it to the movie. Reign of Fire had Van Zant and his gunmen; David Brin's novel The Postman had the white supremacists (I didn't see the movie); the Mad Max movies have... well, anybody bad, really. In zombie apocalypse movies there's the zombies, who don't need to look after any of the normal body functions and who can't be killed without rolling a 19 or higher on a called shot to the head (or whatever). Or there's the OMGNOOOOO Pandemic, whether it turns you into a zombie or just wipes out most of civilization at a single pass. Sometimes it's just a setup for the Bad People versus the Shaggy-Haired Survivors, but sometimes it has a reservoir and continues to be a danger.

The point is that when you get an apocalypse scenario like this, the writers never seem to think that the lack of civilization is enough of a challenge for their heroes. Possibly because there isn't a writer in Hollywood willing to admit that if everybody in industrial Pennsylvania was wiped out by the OMGNOOOO Pandemic, they wouldn't have a clue how to make their own metal or get their own oil out of the ground and refine it. So there's always the damned Extra Threat. And honestly, that's nearly as annoying as the fact that no runaway can ever be allowed to be right in their choice of actions. At least the Running Away Is Bad brigade has the excuse of actual dangers to actual people on their side. It always comes out the same with the post-apoc stuff. Either the Shaggy-Haired Survivors manage to outlast the Bad People/the OMGNOOOO Pandemic that turns the Bad People loose/the Devouring Monster (dragons, zombies, whatever) through Pluck and Wit, or they lose horribly and Everybody Gets Eaten- but they never really do civilization putting itself back together. The implication is sort of that if you're capable of surviving the Bad People, you're capable of reviving the glories of the Time Before.

That was one of the things I appreciated about The Postman- the patchy, complicated attempts to revive cultural elements of the Time Before. That was why I bought the book in the first place, for that whole 'hi, I'm a symbol of a structure we lost- how about we try and put it back together?'. Brin showed it trying to happen. Then, of course, the Bad People showed up and we had to deal with them, but eh, at least there was that gleam of the other to start with...

As for as the ending horribly goes, I blame that on Lord of the Flies. I know that Lord of the Flies was written in response to some horrendously annoying fiction (might be Victorian, might be later- I don't know) that plunked a bunch of shipwrecked young people down on an island and assumed that in the absence of authority they'd nevertheless pretty much replicate English society and have a Thoroughly Decent Setup going despite the fact that a lot of people really are jerks at that age, but still... Lord of the Flies kind of tainted us with the assumption that if civilization goes away and we have no reason to assume we'll ever get back to it, we're going to wind up being Very Bad People. It's a nasty view of human nature that I don't think ought to be assumed to apply across the board.

I think it's also responsible for one of the most aggravating trends in post-apoc entertainment, namely: We Did It, It's Our Fault. The end of the world is always humanity's fault. Either we created the OMGNOOOO Virus, or we dropped the Bomb, or we Ran Out Of Oil And Overheated The Planet, or we poisoned ourselves- whatever. It's assumed that if human civilization falls, it's because of something we did. (I'm told that there's a mention of a flu pandemic the year before the end of human childbearing in Children Of Men; that might be an exception. Wouldn't know. Haven't read. Haven't seen.) It's the same trope as the slasher flick: did you have sex? DIE. did you use bad words/chemicals? DIE. did you play with Mr. Atom? DIE DIE DIE. Even in Reign of Fire it was pretty clearly implied that human overenthusiasm was as responsible for the end of the world as the dragons were; Creedy starts yelling about rogue marines. "Yeah, they killed a lot of dragons, but they took half the world with them!" Not to mention that nuclear weapons get deployed against dragon nests- so it's humanity's own damn fault that everyone's dead. (Asteroids Fall Everyone Dies movies like Deep Impact don't count. Those are movies about responding to impending danger, not living in the aftermath.)

I suppose the problem is that post-apoc stuff tends to be written as a means of indicting humanity for its faults and failings, or as a Warning Before It's Too Late, when it's written for any reason other than 'let's put our leading man in ruggedly insufficient clothing and have women be promiscuous'. So when it comes right down to it, it's the same *!(&)!&*) problem as the Terribly Earnest Books For Young Adults: it's all about Aren't You Lucky The Writers Are Here To Warn You, GET THE MESSAGE YOU IGNORANT FOOL. I think that's why I liked Fido so much: it postulated a society where life as we know it ended and another world had to begin, one in which zombies were just as much a fact of life as anything else and it was considered perfectly normal for an eleven-year-old to have to shoot his father between the eyes because of attempted devouring. It was an examination of a society that was, by our standards, royally screwed up- but perfectly adapted to its circumstances. Yes, everyone lives in conditions that Ward and June Cleaver would envy, but it's still technically post-fall-of-civilization. Everything that we ever knew passed away, and then got up again in a very different guise, and society changed on a fundamental level because of it. (Not to mention that we see no hint whatsoever of anything existing outside of one community, when it comes right down to it.)

I can deal with that.

Comments

[crispengray.livejournal.com]

1) The first part of this reminded me of the most terrifying Little Golden Book I ever read, whose moral was, "Co-Dependency Is A GOOD Thing!" The book was called "Polly's Pet," and it was about a girl named Polly and her younger brother, and they kept being cruel to their cat. So Polly's Pet (he never was given another name) ran away and had a great time! But then he realized he missed Polly, so he came back home. Polly and her brother promised never to do anything bad to Polly's Pet ever again. But sure enough, after a while... it happened again. But THIS time, Polly's Pet was okay with it. Because in the end... he really was "Polly's Pet."

The book terrified me on a deep and profound level.

2) Check out "Y: The Last Man." It's a comic I really think you'd dig. All about what would happen if every mammal with a Y chromosome died all at once across the planet (except for one man and his monkey). It covers a period of several years, so there's the initial confusion, the attempt to recover society, and then confusion about "what do we do next?" There are several theories as to "why all the guys died," and it's eventually shown what it is -- I don't want to give it away, but I will say that most of the theories early on involve something mankind did, so that aspect remains, and yes, there are bad men (or in this case, women), but they aren't a serious threat to reviving society.

There's only a single issue left to come out, so you'd want to get it in trade paperback, but I think it nicely addresses many of the issues you have. There are still armies functioning (the Australians have the best Navy, since they actually have women on their subs; the Israeli army is f'ing SCARY still), some places still have power, other places have scary little communes, the governments are trying to continue to operate, there are angry women riding around on motorcycles cutting off one tit calling themselves Amazons and claiming that men deserved it for what they did to womankind, Japan is working hard to make male androids that will ask how your day was and massage your feet... All in all, I found it to be a very thoughtful look at what would happen "if".

[camwyn]

I adored Y: The Last Man when I started reading it. I think I got up through issue 12 when my comic book store moved locations and I couldn't be arsed to look for a new one within lunch-break walking distance. By the time I found out that Y was still running, I also found out that it was going to end within a certain number of issues, so I figured I'd just wait until the series ended and get the TPBs instead of trying to scramble to catch up.

I'm familiar with the initial theories being floated about what happened. I can still deal with it. I've also seen a chunk of the later plot, from like around issue 40 or so- we had a couple of characters from the series in Milliways, and even though I don't normally do spoilers for series I'm interested in finishing, I was sufficiently fascinated by Hero Brown as to read all her OOMs and find out what was going on.

[gramarye1971]

The only Teenage Runaway type book I can think of that shows a kid who actually managed to pull it off was My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. A competent young man who put a bit of thought into his running away and survival skills -- and, IIRC, didn't do it because he was abused or neglected but rather because he wanted to see if he could do it. It was sort of like Walden for kids. And in the end, Sam's family ends up coming to HIM, moving out of the city and building a house up in the Catskills. Realistic or not, it was still a damned good story.

[camwyn]

What really and truly annoyed me about the Oh Boo My Parents Don't Think I'm Me girl's story was that, at roughly the same time, I read a book of Irish folktales. One of the stories featured a young man rescuing a girl from the Fairy Folk and bringing her back to her family after they hadn't seen each other in years. "Who are you?" said the family.

"I'm your daughter," said the girl.

"Prove it," said the family.

"Birthmark," said the girl, and pulled her dress aside to show a distinctive birthmark on her shoulder.

"Oh! Well, all right then!" said the family, and that was the end of that.

If Oh Boo My Parents Don't Think I'm Me was anything at all like a normal human being, then she had birthmarks somewhere, and if she'd had even the slightest element of being serious about reuniting with her family, then she'd have said, "Let's see somebody coach THIS into existence" and parted her hair to reveal the strawberry blotch on her scalp (or whatever). Jeez, girl, I wasn't even out of eighth grade at the time and I knew that there were ways of proving who you were that didn't rely on memories of childhood parties!

[jothra]

I love that book so much. That was my dream as a kid, not to run away because of cruel parents (I liked my parents! I didn't want them to be mean!) but to learn how to be viciously competent.

[newredshoes]

Lord of the Flies kind of tainted us with the assumption that if civilization goes away and we have no reason to assume we'll ever get back to it, we're going to wind up being Very Bad People.

Can we also blame some of those crappy Enlightenment philosophers I can never keep straight, for assuming basic human nature is base and savage? Was that Hobbes? Can I also give zombie!Rousseau a bullet between the eyes for making generations of starry-eyed students believe in the concept of the noble savage?

(Can I also ask if you might consider writing something for Unlined, whose theme for this issue is American Apocalyptic?)

[camwyn]

Yeah, it was Hobbes- I remember that because of the mnemonic concept of "Human life is, on average, nasty, brutish, and short. You know. Like Calvin."

And, yes, go ahead and plug Rousseau. Noble savages my nonexistent left testicle. It's all his fault that Werewolf: The Apocalypse was such an overblown piece of Tribal Ppl Are Wonderful, First Nations Ppl Are Pure, Yay Gaia Boo Civilization tripe. I really like my werewolves and he didn't make it any easier to swallow.

And, yeah, I think I can do that- got a preference as to what?

[unmisha.livejournal.com]

Huh. I'm glad I missed all those Terribly Earnest books. Instead between Jim Kjelgaard's books in my dog and pony phase, and the Boxcar Children, running away (or living alone, with the dog books) was all about self-sufficiency and figuring out how well or spartan one can live on one's own.

So my big kink with post-apoc stories is not whatever disaster of the week incurred the loss of civilization, but the struggle to find the resources and manpower and whatever to build it back up again. And maybe find ways of Getting it Right this time around.

What I'm loving to death is Eric Flint's 1632 series, not technically post-apoc, but there's definitely 'ohshit, life as we know it has ended' for one little American town transplanted into Germany 300+ years ago.

[camwyn]

Hm. Haven't read the 1632 books yet, although I've glanced at them in the bookshop. As far as Flint in general goes, though, I read Mother of Demons. That was good, for a first book.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Out of pure curiosity, and because it's been nagging at me the whole time I've been reading this:

How does the premise/play of shatterverse hold up to all this? Have I/we succeeded in creating a post-ap setting in which, for the most part at least, people survive realistically without the need for Further Villainy Besides? I admit right off the bat that the apocalypse was the fault of a human, but I wouldn't call that the fault of humanity; one mad scientist who can't resist the urge to poke the fabric of spacetime until it goes "sproing" isn't, I hope, a moral indictment of the human race.

[camwyn]

I think it seems a pretty sound premise so far. I haven't really had the time to dig into reading the play of it in depth, but so far it seems like you've got it down pretty good.

[nextian.livejournal.com]

newredshoes linked me, and that's a massive HELL YES to this. The apocalypse is enough of a fucking problem. That said, you should definitely see Children of Men. While there are villains, you can definitely understand where they came from, and the focus of the movie is more the quiet desperation of life, after, than the actual plot. I hear the book's rubbish, though.

[camwyn]

From what I've been told the book is more about what children are like when there's nobody to come after them, and how thoroughly awful they get when they realize they've got everybody's undivided attention. Friend of mine saw the movie and went berserk over the change in message.

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

The only Asteroids Fall Everyone Dies story that's worth a damn is Lucifer's Hammer, because it includes the aftermath. (And Niven later retconned it into being the past of the original Buck Rogers storyline, which is made of awesome and silly.) Of course, that aftermath does include Bad People...

On the other hand, I'm predisposed to think that post-apoc stuff will include Bad People. Not necessarily competent Bads, but I think I'd be disinclined to believe a story that had a certain threshold of survivors and didn't have them.

...Contemplating post-apocalypse anime now. Fist of the North Star, for one, which is clearly inspired by Mad Max and postulates that the good people will outnumber the bad people but the bad people have martial arts superpowers and can only be stopped by the one or two superpowered Good People, which I used to find cool but now annoys me.

Macross did it better with its "okay, let's pick ourselves up and start over" vibe. There wasn't much in the way of Bad People other than the few poorly-socialized Zentradi, and they weren't a significant obstacle to the reconstruction.

And then there's "A Wind named Amnesia," in which the apocalypse is the fault of some aliens who've decided to study humanity at its core by... wait for it... erasing all our memories and reverting the species to apes wearing clothes they don't remember how to remove. I mean, what?!

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Some people are just jerks; like the boat owner in 'Dawn of the Dead'.

[innerbrat]

The thing is, I agree that mankind is basically and naturally selfish and assholish and downright mean. I mean, look at history. Even recent history. I strongly believe that the only thing keeping us 'good' is constant feeback from ourselves. I read LotF in school, and I believe it and I still believe it - if we don't remind ourselves that killing Piggy is wrong, we're going to kill Piggy.

As far as I'm concerned, the only thing we need to stop us from turning on each other is not a lack of - what is it, three meals? It's satellite communication.

Post Apocalyptic stories exaggerate this badness to make the good guys good. Because post apocalyptic stories aren't actually about the apocalypse, most of teh time, they're about good vs bad, and we need bad to be very bad for the good to be good.

Aaaaaand I started writing this comment a long time ago and I forgot my point.

[crispengray.livejournal.com]

Mankind has the potential to be completely evil. Mankind also has the potential to be extraordinarily good.

In the end, people as a whole can't be painted with a single brush. I can say, having lived through a massive crisis involving a lot of loss all over one area (the 1989 quake in the San Francisco area), I saw a lot of people banding together and trying to help. Sure, there were a few assholes here and there, but that wasn't the majority.

I've also studied the Holocaust, which, despite not having the biggest numbers in any single act of genocide, is still one of the darkest chapters in human history if only for the cold methodical process of dehumanization that went along with the slaughter. But even then... when a lot of people were going along because it was easier... some people risked everything to save who they could. Some died for their efforts. Some saw it through to the end.

Every person has it in them to do evil things; to do good things; or to just go along with the flow. Most people will just go along with the flow. And often times... when there's no flow to go along with (such as just after a major disaster, or in a post-Apocalyptic setting)... the rise of being good to each other or being nasty to each other will really depend on which side acts first. I think humanity has a tendency to look out for each other -- we're social creatures, after all -- but the tendency to go with the flow is greater than that... again, because we are social creatures.

Does that make sense?

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

First let me join you in your disgust for moral and boring books. I hated them all. And the ones in my school also had fugly covers

I'm having fun reading a book by S.M. Stirling (even though it's first in the second trilogy and the first trilogy is some sideology to some other series...) because it's about a post-post-apocalyptical world. Basically, the big scramble for resources is pretty much done with. We have neo-pagan semi-scottish knights (some of which speak Elvish, because the one who lead them out of the apocalypse was a re-enacting fantasy nerd), fighting catholic monks, cowboys, crazy fundies that make the mormons look sane, man-eating savages which grew from abandoned child gangs and the saying "Dead like LA"... So, it's kind of interesting to see the new medievalism and yet, people still remember combustion engines and computers and whatnot (they just don't work, due to Plot Reasons).

That's one of my big problems with the end of the world scenario, how people seem to forget some things even exist. I mean, yes, we may have a sketchy knowledge of how stuff works but we know it can be done. Reinventing the wheel is simpler when you have broken wheels and images of wheels all around you

[lots42.livejournal.com]

I've read too many post-apocalypse books that turn into westerns. One promising book was focused on some biodomes and then a family wandering abandonded cities. I loved both plots, then it turned into Magic Woman Of The Noble Savages.

[daniidebrabant.livejournal.com]

Re: that first bit with kids leaving home *waves in a Truly Earnest Kind of Way*

Re: that second bit with the apocolypse... you REALLY need to get to World War Z at some point. And I know you were talking about writers putting in zombies, but it's a completely different game going on in that book with a very different and varied sort of look at the human condition all around.

[akawil]

Re: teenage runaways: Jumper by Steven Gould features a runaway who runs away for a good reason (an abusive father) by dint of his discovering his teleport powers, and definitely comes out okay by it. I think the hero may technically be a young adult, though.

Re: post-apoc: S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire et. seq. isn't humans did it to themselves -- all post medieval technology (gunpowder, explosives, electricity, heat engines, etc.) stops working, for unexplained reasons (Alien Space Bats and/or God), and humanity has to deal with it. There are still Bad People, but they're Bad People with comprehensible motivations, and anyway most people who weren't more-or-less bugfuck crazy to start out with ended up dead when the food ran out.

[blackswanevent.livejournal.com]

I submit to you that a good portion of the authors (and particularly the movie adaptations) might see things from your point of view but might simply be concerned with good visuals.

Stark space scares the hell out of most people. It doesn't play well at the box office or in the literary format. Yes it makes a point and yes it's important, but additional villany (as someone put it) could also be a way of "Lessening the blow?"

I'm taking a rather pessimistic view of the idea that "People are too dumb to not be afraid of empty spaces, but there is something unsettling about it. There's an entire series of Calvin and Hobbes devoted to this premise, now if only I could find them...

[camwyn]

*wry face* I've read a lot of Arthur C. Clarke's work. Short stories, mostly. The only novels of his I've read and liked are the 2001/2010/2063/3001 series, which I was more interested in for the scale of the weird introduced via the Monolith than anything else, and Rendezvous With Rama, which is essentially 'Whoa, very big very weird thing passing through our space and being fascinating and incomprehensible and big and strange and oh it's gone'. I liked the empty-space aspect of it, the sense of being in so far over our heads that we were looking up at submarines, so to speak. It has the feel of being the lone tiny human figure in one of those mainly empty-space Chinese landscape paintings: everything around you is huge, now how do you react to that?

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Another potential book recommendation: Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine. The Apocalypse happened several hundred years ago, and people are about to where they can do the Industrial Revolution again, only there is this annoying problem where any sort of heat engine or electrical device explodes ten seconds after you turn it on.

McMullen does setting much better than he does anything else, unfortunately - the plot is pretty thin, as are the characters, and there are major problems with incluing and management of dramatic tension. I'm not sure I'll bother with the next two books in the trilogy.

Postapoc What Doesn't Suck That Way

[lwood.livejournal.com]

May I recommend S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire trilogy?

1. Dies the Fire


2. The Protector's War


3. A Meeting at Corvallis

Within the first few pages, entity or entities unknown cause modern society to magically stop working: all known forms of electrical generation, internal combustion, hydraulics, fail. Airplanes fall out of the sky and all the lights go out, all in conjunction with some craziness over Nantucket that would tie it in with his earlier series (Island in the Sea of Time et seq.) but doesn't really.

None of the characters get to know why, or who, because what is really Quite Enough to Deal With.

The rest of the book is dealing with the aftermath, especially as regards the inhabitants of the Willamette Valley and environs, from Portland to Corvallis. Occasionally, point of view characters drop in from really foreign places, like England. As one might expect when the technological level is suddenly cranked back several centuries, people with survival training and/or re-enactment skills do disproportionately well, but also there are your roving cannibal gangs to keep things lively.

These three, together, are all out in paperback and tell a discrete story.
Stirling has also published the first of a planned sequel tetralogy, The Sunrise Lands, but it's set twenty years later, and thus less immediately postapoc--still a helluva book, but read the first trilogy first.

It was only after eagerly devouring these that we found out that dpaxson's Westria series had been one of joatsimeon's inspirations--which was differently cool than what we had thought to be wholly independent convegent evolution, but still way cool.

-- Lorrie

Re: Postapoc What Doesn't Suck That Way

[valles-uf.livejournal.com]

My issue with the Willamette books is that I find Stirling's assumptions about order and cannibalism to be immensely irritating and insulting.

There will be social breakdowns - OK.
There will not be enough food - OK, at least short-term. Pretty sure that you -could- support modern-grade agricultural yields with horses, though, given enough manpower.
People will be eaten - OK.
Everyone who survives the initial riots will be turned into a foaming rabid zombie - WHAT THE FLYING FUCK?

Dude, there are LEGAL PRECEDENTS for settling WHO GETS EATEN FIRST. For real.

I can buy that many, even most cities around the world would burn themselves out. But ALL OF THEM? The fuck? Oh, yeah, except for the Lone Sole Except, Portland fucking Oregon.

Shyearight.

[the_croupier]

I'm a little amazed to be the first person to mention him after all these posts, but long after ALL of those Terribly Earnest Stories and Books are throughly pulped, gone, and forgotten, there will still be one towering giant of a kid who ran away from home and Did Good.

Huckleberry Finn.


'Nuff said.

[camwyn]

Yes. Yes, that's true, isn't it? Thank you.

[batyatoon]

Children's and young adults' fantasy is full of kids running away from home and making good. I wonder if that's part of what I liked about the genre at that age.

On the subject of ISN'T THE APOCALYPSE ENOUGH??: I really liked the movie I Am Legend, but the best bits were all ones without the zombies. (...Except one.) Seriously, being the only human in the city is much more interesting.

On the subject of Why Do We Always Do It To Ourselves?: Have you read Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer or Footfall?

[camwyn]

I think I stopped reading the young adult genre in general fairly early on in favor of the just plain SF/fantasy section of the library. Most YA stuff had a sort of trainwreck fascination to it, because it was chock full of Issues and Important Things and very few of them actually applied to my life (no divorced parents, no weird diseases, no interest in drugs or booze or sex, not much interest in dating).

And no, I meant to read Footfall once but never got around to it.

[kyrielle]

Emergence, by David Palmer. I admit, mankind is the downfall of the world in that one (it's pretty clear from the get-go, that's not a spoiler), but the world after is a big antagonist for a large part of the novel.

Plus you will find yourself typing and speaking without articles for days after reading it, if you're as easily infected by speech patterns as I am. :P

[camwyn]

Read it in college. I remember the adult guy who showed up at one point... and thinking "holy crap, it's Piers Anthony."

[terrie01.livejournal.com]

One interesting twist on the Apocolypse stuff is Simon Hawke's Wizard of 4th Street series. All tech stops working, but then Merlin comes back and tech is replaced by magic. Cheesy as all heck, but fun.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

You'd like Y The Last Man. The writer really does make an effort to explain how civilization got back on it's feet. Hell, by year 4 they're making really shitty movies again.

And the protoganist doens't suck it up and get on with heroics. After the apocalypse he hides in his apartment for three days, then contemplates blowing his brains out all over the sidewalk.

[camwyn]

Oh, yes, Yorick. I remember that. He was fun.

Soon as the TPBs are out for the series I'm getting them all.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

School stories never worked out. Catcher in the Rye was just never appropiate at all for hormonal 13 year olds (I'm not advocating censorship, just common sense). And I still remember one story where a bus gets stranded in the snow and the teenaged teacher assistant wanders off and is never seen again. So traumatizing.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Just remembered...there's this bizarrely fascinating movie about the last guy on Earth. He rocks out for a while, who wouldn't? But then he goes nuts. Soon after he delivers a rousing speech to a crowd of cardboard people, a mchottie shows up.

And then another dude shows up. I wish I remembered the name of the movie.

Horrific tension. YAY!

[midnightlurker.livejournal.com]

And then of course there's the manga The Drifting Classroom, which combines Young Adult Novels with post-apocalyptical goings on as a Japanese elementary school is mysteriously transported to a blasted lifeless future.

Since it's Japan, of course, the default assumption is that a lack of strict order will IMMEDIATELY lead to complete horrific social collapse. Yeesh.