After reading dozens and dozens of scientific papers about societal collapse, I wanted a new perspective on the topic. So, I read a lot of novels about societal collapse, as stories shape how we see the world and thus the action we take (1) (2). To my surprise, it turned out to be pretty hard to find books that actually take collapse seriously instead of just using it as a backdrop.

Collapse is a topic people like to tell stories about, as it grasps the imagination with what might be and how everything we have now might be gone in the future. I found the books by searching the internet and asking friends and colleagues for recommendations. This means there is no coherent set of criteria that makes a book collapse relevant, more a vibes based approach on what I and other people felt could be a collapse relevant book. Obviously, this is also not a complete list, so I’d be happy to hear further suggestions in the comments.

This post gives an overview of the books I have read, makes some recommendations on which ones are worth reading and describes what I have learned from reading them.

Books covered so far

First, I will give a short overview of the books and what I thought about them. The list is roughly ordered by how much I would recommend reading them, starting with the ones I liked least and ending with my favorites.

The Years of Rice and Salt

The book starts with a great premise: How would the world have developed if the Black Death would have killed 99 % of the European population? And the first few chapters really hammer that home, as they tell the story of a lone warrior trying to survive, only ever finding ruins and death wherever he goes. But after that the book mostly forgets about what got it started, never really mentions that super plague again and instead tells an alternate history story of a monumental battle of cultures between China and an Islamized rest of the world in a connected set of short stories. Don’t get me wrong, the book is not bad, but it was quite disappointing to me, as it does not really say anything about collapse, even though the premise would have been great for that. The alternate history of it is interesting, although it sometimes felt like he took the actual history and just replaced all entries of Europe with China. Some of the short stories were quite good and if you like alternate history, this one is still worth checking out.

The Parable of the Sower

This story follows the life of a young girl that grows up in a world that is in a slow collapse, likely induced by escalating climate change. Social order is breaking down and people revert more and more to barbarism. The main character is trying to create a new ideology of positive change to counteract this and over the length of the book gathers a ragtag group of other survivors. The world it describes is interesting, but remains quite vague, as the book really wants to focus on the thoughts and feelings of the main character. This makes the collapse element seem more like the backdrop in what is actually a coming of age story. So, it was an okay read for me, but ultimately not that interesting.

Oryx and Crake

The world of this novel is one ravaged by climate change and rampant resource overuse. This has destabilized the world, which humanity tried to counteract by going all in on manipulating biology. Creating pigs to harvest human organs or brainless flesh tubes to produce meat, quickly and cheaply. The story is told from the perspective of Snowman, on of the few survivors of an engineered pandemic. Over the length of the book, it is slowly revealed that Snowman’s childhood friend Crake is responsible for this. According to the Wikipedia entry Crake did this to save Earth from humanity, but while reading the book this did not become super clear to me and the whole release of the engineered pandemic felt somewhat random and unearned given the setup. The book is nicely written and good to read, but ultimately I did not find the characters super interesting and the societal collapse itself is only described very vaguely.

Last and First Men

Here the attempt is to tell the story of humanity from the 1930s until the extinction of the last descendant of humankind. This happens via the last men contacting the author of the book from the future to write down the whole history. It is a very weird book. It reads less like fiction and more like a historical treatise from the future. And the author imagines a very wide variety of future humans ranging from flying humans, to ape humans and also humans that are only giant brains in a vat. You also really notice that this book was written by someone from the 1930s, because oh boy does Olaf Stapledon love eugenics. So many pages in this book are spent on describing how better versions of humanity are bred purposefully. Still, it is quite interesting as an historical document, as it shows how people in the 1930s envisioned the future. Also, it is interesting in how he describes how all the different past civilizations perished, some from resource overuse, some from moral failures or others by just being unlucky. Overall, a somewhat fascinating book, but not really that great to actually read.

When Sysadmins ruled the Earth

Not really a book, but a longer short story. The idea is that Earth is suddenly hit by a super deadly pandemic, likely introduced by bioterrorism. Most people die within days, but large groups of sysadmins survive in their data centers, as a large cyber attack just before the pandemic hit all made them gather in their fortress-like data centers, where they are safe for a while due to filtered air and backup power. From those data centers they try to coordinate a response, but have a hard time going anywhere due to never ending discussions. The story itself is just fine, but I liked the focus on infrastructure and its importance. Also, it is always nice if people like sysadmins, who work on maintaining our current world, without ever being seen, get some recognition.

The Death of Grass

This book wants to tell a story about how human morality is only something rich countries can have, because we live in abundance. This abundance is disrupted by a new kind of virus that kills all grass species in the world. As this includes most of the major food crops, the result is global famine. The book follows a pretty normal English family and how they try to navigate a world that quickly goes from abundance to scarcity. I think the premise of the book is good, as I also think that without food humans might quickly get more aggressive and violent. However, the book does not really tell this change in a convincing manner. The main protagonist of the book just takes a few days to go from polite, boring dad to being completely fine with robbing and killing innocent people to advance his position. Also, it is super misogynistic for no reason. Still, I really liked the idea of what this book could have been, if it would have been better.

The Windup Girl

A post contraction world. Fossil fuel capitalism has run its course and left the Earth broken. There are only scarce reserves of oil and gas left and so society has reverted again to more mechanical labor. However, this is enhanced by massive bioengineering and there are many new species to take on some of the burden. However, this massive focus on bioengineering also has released many new diseases into the world and food crops have to be continuously adapted to stay valid. Due to this power is concentrated in a few bioengineering corporations that control most of the world. One of the remaining independent countries is Thailand. The book focuses on a set of characters that try to steer their life in better directions, while around them the country slowly degrades into civil war.

I think this book did a pretty good job in describing a plausible future. Everything seems alien, but you can see how today’s society could end up in such a scenario. It also goes into a good amount of detail how such a society would work and how it would set different priorities that we do today. What stops this book from being more of a favorite is that the actual story it tells is somewhat meandering, forgets its own strands and then results in a very mid ending. Still, worth checking out just for world building.

World War Z

This one was recommended to me by several people and I get why. I would not have expected this from a book about a global war against zombies, but this book is pretty good at thinking through how such a collapse would look like and what the consequences might be. It is told through interviews with survivors of the zombie war and describes what happened throughout the war in chronological order.

I am not sure how much I can actually learn from this about “normal” collapse, but it certainly was quite interesting to see how the author manages to describe how politics, military tactics or economics change if suddenly the biggest threat to humanity are millions upon millions of zombies.

The reason why this did not make it further in the ranking is that the writing seemed pretty repetitive to me. While the book claims to interview a large group of different people from very different backgrounds, they all sound and feel very similarly, which gets a bit exhausting over the length of the book.

The Ministry for the Future

Climate change, its consequences and possible solutions are the theme here. In the near future the ministry for the future is founded, which has the task of representing future generations and pushing for projects that allow those future generations a better life. The book mostly follows the head of the ministry and her struggles to actually get things done while facing massive resistance and a former aid worker who gets traumatized by having to live through a deadly heat wave and tries to understand his fate.

This seems to be the most well known collapse relevant novel. If you haven’t read it, it is very worth picking up. If you have little time, just read the first chapters about the Indian heat wave. This is the best part of the book and also the most haunting one. The book is very detailed and drills down into the details of what proposals could actually stop climate change and the consequences of us failing to do so in time.

Children of Memory

This book is part of a longer series about species uplifting, but it can be read on its own. The plot revolves around a new colony on an exoplanet that is quite hostile to life. It follows the colonizers in their struggle to wrestle a life from the hostile environment. The book is really good in highlighting how hard agriculture is and how much can go wrong, especially in an environment that is not well suited to it. As the situation of the colony gets more and more dire the book shows how the settlers get less and less trusting and putting ever more force into law and order.

I feel like this book does well what Death of Grass tried and failed. Showing that food is the foundation of society and how humans that start trusting and cooperative quickly cease to do so when food gets really scarce. The book also has quite some interesting turns and twists, but I don’t want to spoil too much.

The Dispossessed

Really loved this book. It is the story of two societies and how they organize their political and economic life, told through the eyes of a scientist who visits both of them, but is originally from the anarchist society. The first society is organized as an aristocratic, capitalist society, seeming like a mixture of the UK during the industrial revolution and Cold War USA. The rich suppress the poor, the latter ultimately stage an anarchist revolution and to find peace, they are allowed to resettle to a nearby moon, which is barely habitable. On this moon they start a new society focussed on sharing, consent and ending suppression. Just as the colony in Children of Memory they struggle with the environment and face hunger, but ultimately make it through by the strength of their shared solidarity. Still, this society is not safe from problems either, as even if there is no formal governance, humans easily fall back into power hierarchies and work against the shared solidarity.

The book is really good in contrasting the anarchist society with the capitalist one. Both work as the mirror for the other, showing their shortcomings and where they fail their own values. Ultimately, the anarchist one seems like the much more liveable place, but it is constantly in danger of failing, as it is a constant negotiation between everyone involved. But at least discussion is possible, while in the hierarchy all dissent is violently suppressed.

While none of the societies involved collapses, I think this book is still relevant, as it is so good in contrasting different forms of governance, where they fail and where they succeed, plus the bonus of again highlighting the importance of food. Only in this book the societal bonds are only strained and not broken.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

If society collapsed and we found the remains of our modern world decades later, would we be able to decipher what those remains even meant? What would we do with them? Could we still use it to rebuild? These are the questions this book tries to answer. It follows a group of monks over thousands of years as society tries to rebuild after a nuclear war. The monks have made it their task to preserve artifacts and books from the past, even though they do not know how to understand them. They merely keep on copying them, because they think they might prove valuable again in the future.

I enjoyed this book because I feel like it gives a realistic vision of how the world might look after a nuclear war. Humanity would be shattered, but probably not broken. Given enough time, it might restart, especially if some of the previous knowledge is conserved. However, the book also asks the question if humanity would learn from something like that, or if we would simply start to prepare for the next annihilation by our own hands.

The Road

The Road does not even mention which catastrophe befell humanity, though it very much seems like nuclear winter. The only thing we know is that things are really, really bad. The book follows a father and a son on their trek through a totally devastated America. They are aiming to find a place where life is better, all while trying to not sacrifice their own morals for their survival.

This book is bleak. Likely the bleakest book I have ever read. But it is so extremely well written that I could not put it down. While it does not teach you anything about how a society might collapse, it teaches you a lot about how horrible it would be if it happened, which is also an important lesson. And still, through all this darkness, it manages to always keep a sliver of hope going, that a better life might still be possible, even in the worst of times.

Conclusion

While I enjoyed reading all these books about collapse and catastrophe, I am a bit unsure how much I have actually learned while doing so. I started a project to have a new angle on the topics I usually cover. But I had to start wondering if many of these authors take collapse as a topic seriously. For me this would mean that the book really tackles the problems that collapse causes. How do people adapt? How do institutions shift? How are morals under pressure?

For many of the books, you have this one big, defining catastrophe that ends the world or at least completely whacks it out of balance. The book focuses on the catastrophe in some detail in the first few chapters, but then many kind of forget the catastrophe they started the book with? Take “Years of Rice and Salt”; it starts with the premise of a super deadly pandemic that wipes out all of Europe and the descriptions in some of the earlier chapters are haunting and interesting, but for the following ~700 pages it just is not really a topic anymore.

It seems to me that many of the books here just use the catastrophe as a kind of motivator for the plot. The books are not really about collapse, instead they want to tell a specific story and they want to place it in a collapse scenario, as this gives their protagonists a reason to do stuff. Most often they seem to want to tell a kind of cautionary tale, along the lines of: “Do humans really have morality or is this just something we can have now, because we are not on the verge of dying?”. And this is not an uninteresting question and some books, especially “The Road”, really try to answer this on a deep level, but then we have a story about human nature and not a story about how a society might cope with catastrophic conditions.

Maybe I just approached this the wrong way, because I wanted to learn something about collapse using fiction? I do not think so, as there are some books that at least gave a glimpse of what I was looking for. I think the book that did this best was probably “A Canticle for Leibowitz”. It really tries to think through how a society after a nuclear war could cope and how over time even the simplest artifacts from the past could seem like magic, as the reset society does not have the same understanding of the world anymore. Also pretty good in this regard was “World War Z”, as it cleanly describes what happens in reaction to this big catastrophe on all levels of society.

Looking at which books worked for me and which did not, the best predictor seems to be how much a book focuses on individual actors versus institutions and movements. A narrative usually wants to focus on one or few main protagonists, but collapse happens at the scale of systems. The books that gave me the most insight are exactly the ones that found ways around this. “A Canticle for Leibowitz” follows an institution over centuries instead of a person, “World War Z” replaces protagonists with dozens of interview voices and “The Dispossessed” is built around comparing two whole societies. At first “The Road” looks like it breaks this pattern, as it only ever focuses on two people and still felt valuable to me. But I think it provides a different kind of insight. It does not teach you anything about how collapse works, it teaches you why it matters and how horrible it would be. So maybe there are two things fiction can offer here: insight into the dynamics of collapse and insight into its stakes. The systems focused books provide the former and “The Road” the latter.

The timeline of a book also plays a role. Collapse of a society and the subsequent adaptation necessarily takes longer than a week and if this is the amount of time a book covers, well the collapse insights can only ever be surface level. So, this likely has to be months or rather years or decades. Though, you can also lose the plot in the other direction, as “Last and First Men” shows. If you are looking at billions of years, everything can only be a fantasy.

Still, I think this project was worth it and I will keep on reading these kinds of fiction books. They might not have been what I was originally looking for, but it certainly was interesting reading them (or at least most of them). And maybe there are more of the kinds of books I am looking for out there? If you know any, please let me know in the comments, I would love to put them on my reading list. Especially books that cover topics besides climate change, pandemics and nuclear war.

Further books I plan to read

Endnotes

(1) See this post for a detailed argument on why visions of the future are so important for the present.

(2) If you want yet another perspective on the topics, I can also recommend checking out this excellent reading of Lord Byron’s Darkness.

References

  • Atwood, M. (2009). Oryx And Crake. Virago.
  • Bacigalupi, P. (2009). The Windup Girl. Orbit.
  • Brooks, M. (2006). World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Del Rey.
  • Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the sower. Headline.
  • Christopher, J. (1956). The Death of Grass.
  • Doctorow, C. (2007). When the Sysadmins ruled the Earth.
  • Le Guin, U. K. (1974). The dispossessed.
  • McCarthy, C. (2006). The Road.
  • Miller, W. (1959). A Canticle for Leibowitz.
  • Robinson, K. S. (2002). The Years of Rice and Salt. Del Rey.
  • Robinson, K. S. (2020). The ministry for the future. Orbit.
  • Stapledon, O. (1930). Last and first men.
  • Tchaikovsky, A. (2023). Children of memory. Orbit.