Science fiction: the 10 best post-apocalyptic novels

THE NOVELTY

SWAN SONG, by Robert McCammon (1987)

They did it ! The nuclear apocalypse has destroyed the Earth. In what remains, several survivors try to find meaning in a life that has become as complicated as it is dangerous. Some choose violence, others try to preserve human relations… Famous in the United States, where it was released in 1987, this apocalyptic novel follows an almost metaphysical struggle between good and evil at a hellish pace. On one side, an evil man paving the way for legions of demons, on the other “people of little” (a homeless person, a young girl endowed with a marvelous gift, a teenager and a colonel) tempting to maintain hope for humanity. Combining the marvelous with the rawest realism, involving a ring with supernatural powers, taking the time (more than 1,000 pages) to camp and bring intense characters to life, spreading its story over nearly ten years, McCammon signs one of the great achievements of what has become a genre. And which is for the first time published in France! We will particularly appreciate the terrifying way of describing the nuclear attacks and the winter that follows them…

Swing Song (I and II), by Robert McCammon. Transl. from English (United States) by Jean-Charles Khalifa. Monsieur Toussaint Louverture, 540 p., €12.50 each.

THE CLASSICS

THE SCARLET PLAGUE, by Jack London (1912)

As in The road, by Cormac McCarthy (see below), an old man and a child roam a devastated world. An epidemic has ravaged the world. With it disappeared solidarity and attention to others. It is about the latter that the old man tries to talk to the children by the fire, in the evening, in the bay of San Francisco, invaded again in this year 2073 by vegetation, trying to convince them that it is necessary to rebuild another thing. Four years before his death, at age 40, in circumstances that lead some to consider the hypothesis of suicide, Jack London sums up in this apologue a life of struggles and commitments. The fable is luminous and pessimistic, denouncing man’s inability to do anything but destroy. This short and dazzling story announces all those who are chronicled in the notes to come.

The Scarlet Plague, by Jack London. Transl. from English (United States) by Louis Postif. Librio, 112 p., €2.

RAVAGED, by René Barjavel (1943)

In 2052, in a hyper-mechanized society, an unexpected energy failure causes the short-term fall of humanity, which, left to itself, panics and sinks into violence. A few survivors attempt to recreate the beginnings of a rural, non-technological civilization. The path will be difficult. The vision is clairvoyant, the description of future times remains striking. The book ends with an apology for the peasant world. Its release during the Occupation and the very right-wing evolution of its enlightened author have sometimes caused it to be considered as a Vichyist. The hypothesis can be defended, but does not detract from the pleasure that we still take from reading this novel eighty years after its release, and which remains one of the most famous of French SF.

Ravaged, by Rene Barjavel. Folio, 313 pages, €8.20.

I’M A LEGEND, by Richard Matheson (1954)

To be the last of his kind… Robert Neville is the only one to have escaped a pandemic that turned humans into vampires. He tries to fight against the attacks of his congeners by going out during the day with infinite precautions and barricading himself at home at night. But what’s the point of this will to survive and this concern to keep one’s true nature when all around you nothing responds to it? How not to sink into madness when the loneliness is both extreme and endless? If, today, the scientific passages trying to explain the disease seem a little outdated, all the rest of this novel adapted three times to the cinema continues to fascinate. Credibility of the situations, humanity of the hero, economy of means, surprising conclusion: this book is a legend…

I’m a legend, by Richard Matheson. Transl. of English (United States) by Nathalie Serval. Folio, 240 pages, €8.10.

MALEVIL, by Robert Merle (1972)

It is too often forgotten, so much its vast historical fresco Wealth of France in 13 volumes has (too much, think his admirers) overshadowed the rest of his work, but Robert Merle has written some notable SF novels: A sentient animal, Protected Men, The Own of Man And this Maleville, his greatest success in the genre. At Easter 1977, a nuclear disaster ravaged the planet. In Malevil, in the French countryside, a few survivors, gathered in a medieval castle, organize themselves. How to release an authority, how to succeed in planning the essential, how to resist the hordes of bandits who begin to devastate the little that remains? Keeping the fable tone of his great books, Merle abandons the scientific to take an interest in man and his reactions in times of crisis. Rise of authoritarianism, cruel but necessary choices, sometimes risky reconstruction… Maleville, it’s Noah’s Ark in the French countryside.

MALEVIL, by Robert Merle. Folio, 640 pages, €12.20.

THE LAST MEN, by Pierre Bordage (2002)

Originally, Pierre Bordage wanted to rediscover the spirit of the good old soap opera and published his Last Men in six successive deliveries to Librio. Today, it is only found in one volume, and it is a pity, so much the art of the story of this great storyteller was titillated there by constraint. A hundred years after a nuclear war, life on Earth has become almost impossible, and men are nothing more than nomads looking for this now too rare treasure that is water. As a result, we travel a lot in a Europe invaded by a mutant nature. Humanism and ecology are sometimes insipid ingredients: Bordage sprinkles them on his apocalyptic soup as a talented kitchen boy.

The Last Men, by Pierre Bordage. To hell with Vauvert, 700 p., €23.

METRO 2033, by Dmitri Glukhovski (2005)

Russia, 2033. Twenty years after a nuclear war, Muscovites are surviving in the metro. Each station is home to a different form of government (dictatorship, sects, Nazi resurgence, nothing very pleasing…), while the undergrounds are left to the excluded. It is this more than mined ground that Artyom must survey, charged with a capital message (mutants are coming…) for the only community of stations still functioning with humanity. To get there, he will have to cross the worst areas of the network… If we can regret the virtual absence of women in this very virile universe, this muscular vision of our future succeeds in making the metro, interlacing tunnels hiding all the dangers possible and conveying the worst urban legends, a character in its own right. A worldwide success greeted this anticipation, which has already inspired three sequels to its author and the resumption of this universe by several other writers, including the Frenchman Pierre Bordage, present above with The Last Mens.

Metro 2033, by Dmitri Glukhovski. Transl. from Russian by Denis E. Savine. The pocket book, 864 p., €10.40.

THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

One of those rare genre books recognized as masterpieces by those who never read them. In a frozen, devastated world, a father and son walk down a road south, pushing a full shopping cart and trying to escape hordes of cannibals. They have no name, we will never know what caused the disaster… Despite the disaster, the father tries to teach his son the meaning that life can still have… In a language of total stripping, McCarthy upsets with nothing. Monosyllabic dialogues, refined descriptions, short chapters: we are sometimes close to the skeleton, but the author creates a constant tension. Beyond survival soon remains only the idea of ​​saving hope and the need for transmission against all odds. And this sorry romance becomes a work of faith.

The road, by Cormac McCarthy. Transl. from English (United States) by François Hirsch. Points, 256 p., €7.90.

THE YEAR OF THE LEO, by Deon Meyer (2016)

With this big post-apocalyptic novel, the South African master of thrillers changed genres but not obsessions. Through the struggle of a man and his son to recreate the beginnings of civilization in a world where a virus has wiped out 90% of the population, Meyer once again questions the ability of man to live in community and whether or not to let violence contaminate everything. What is building a new world? How to reinvent politics, trade, economy, hierarchy? What is a leader? Chorale, teeming with characters, mixing the investigation of the son on the death of his father with the testimonies of the pioneers of the experience, this cobblestone brings a reflection on utopia and its ambiguities without forgetting to weave a thrilling plot. The change of register suits Deon Meyer.

The Year of the Lion, by Deon Meyer. Transl. Afrikaans and English (South Africa) by Marie-Caroline Aubert and Catherine Du Toit. Points, 720 p., €9.30.

AND ALWAYS THE FORESTS, by Sandrine Collette (2020)

Far from the flamboyant CinémaScope of Swan Song, nothing here is spectacular. Hardly do we understand that the apocalypse was climatic than Sandrine Collette tightens her lens on a survivor, Corentin, who oscillates between combativeness and despair, struggles against madness, against lack of love, against emptiness and disappearance. colours. To fight, he only has, beyond the gestures of survival, the memory of his great-grandmother, the one who raised him, Augustine, whom he will obsessively want to find. The writing is dry, poetic, made up of short sentences and frequent line breaks. No effects, no self-pity, just a being gripped closer in hopes and fears.

And always the forests, by Sandrine Collette. The pocket book, 332 p., €7.90.