lnhammer pointed me toward the storyTropes TVTropes entry on the Cozy Catastrophe, an alternative to the "only the mean/tough/etc. survive" end of the world scenario. :-)

I've been thinking for a while about how, just as we can rig the worlds of our stories to make them sympathetic to the ways we think the world does or should work, we can also rig the (fictional) end of the world.

( On rigging the end of the world )

Justine Larbalestier and Sartorias are saying interesting things today about dark fiction for teens, and about folks who complain teen writers are being edgy for its own sake and because they can be, rather than for any deeper purpose.

In the comments to sartorias post, the issue was brought up that the world is so dark already, and that maybe not everyone is comfortable with the idea of adding to the darkness without good reason.

Which got me to thinking about some of the reasons that I do write dark stories--especially given that I'm also perfectly capable of writing funny ones. And that's not because the world's darkness needs to be increased, but because the world already has dark places--and fiction can show us how to navigate them, literally or figuratively. I don't think books should ever be only or even primarily about their messages; but I do think a book can provide hope that there are ways through the dark, something that at 15 (or 35 or 65 for that matter) isn't always easy to believe.

Writing about darkness is, in many ways, really writing about light--specifically, about the light that shines through the dark, and about the things that survive when most things seem lost.

(Not that I think about this consciously while writing, especially in earlier drafts--while writing it's mostly all about "what does the story want to be told well?" The patterns and reasons often only become clear afterwards.)

Went for another walk this morning, and visited the delightful little library in my Mom's small town that I'd somehow never visited before. She moved after I was in college, and they're only open three days a week. Something about spending time inside any library that always makes me just a little bit happier. And they had a nice children's section, too.

Since I've recently finished writing one book and am still digging into/returning to the other, I find myself in a sort of transition place between books--and thus am seeing the winter New York landscape through both the eyes of my old protagonist (L) and new protagonist (H). This leads to some interesting conversations.

( Three-way conversation )

Stumbled upon Life After People on the History Channel (unlike me, my relations have cable) last night, an account of what would happen to the world if all the people disappeared. Much like The World Without Us, only less detail--but interesting stuff nonetheless. And the look at the 20-years abandoned zone near Chernobyl was pretty fascinating. They predict it would take a thousand years to get to the point where our cities have turned to giant tree-covered hill with no signs of said buildings. (I've sped this process up a bit for Bones of Faerie. :-) Even while keeping the largest roadways clear.)

Thought I had while watching this, though: is part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction (and non-fiction) that on some level we fear the world won't make it, and want reassurance that even if the worst happens, something will survive? Something to ponder, that.

Tomorrow When the War Began, by John Marsden

How the world ends: I'm not really sure the world does end, actually. An invading army occupies our protagonist's Australian town while she's off in the backcountry camping trip, and she and her friends return to find their families gone and the home they've known all their lives unfamiliar and suddenly dangerous.

Maybe it's that sense of the world changing without warning that makes this feel like a post-apocalyptic book, even though it technically isn't?

I first read this soon after it came out, and found the book intriguing but a little unsatisfying without being sure why. Now I know it's because this is the first book in a fairly long series, and not meant to come to any real conclusion. I do think the book is a bit heavy on the telling instead of showing, which can make it slow going at times, but even so, it's an interesting setting with room for all sorts of interesting conflict. Now that the rest of the series is out, I'll be curious what I think once I finish reading the other books.

(The post-apocalyptic reading list and thoughts on some of the other books on same.)

The Dead and the Gone, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

How the world ends: A meteor hits the moon, knocking it into an orbit closer than earth; tidal waves, earthquakes, and mass volcanic eruptions result from the moon's increased gravitational pull.

A companion volume to Life As We Knew It. We're in Manhattan this time around, which ought to make us feel closer to those tidal effects, but you know how it is in Manhattan: walk just a few blocks and you're in another world. Lower Manhattan may be flooded out, but we're 50 blocks or more north of that, and never see much more than a few damp streets. So as in the first book, we're pretty much viewing the effects of the catastrophe, rather than the catastrophe itself, though of course there's tension enough in that.

The biggest problem with the end of the world (especially an end of the world where volcanic eruptions block the sun and stop things from growing) is obtaining enough food to survive. But while Life As We Knew It left me wanting to hoard food, The Dead and the Gone left me wanting to band together with my neighbors, pool our resources, and generally find some more altruistic solution to the crisis. Not because the characters in The Dead and the Gone did this, but because--with a few notable exceptions--they more or less coped in the same ways they coped in Life As We Knew It. Only the second way around, having been here before, I had more mental time for questioning whether this really was the only way to survive.

Though connections do play something more of a role in this book than in the first--but those connections are mostly the province of the rich and powerful, and even our protagonist's story would be very different, arguably, if not for his few tenuous links to same.

Which brings up an interesting question: is the end of the world is a great leveler that would make class distinctions stop mattering, or the ultimate case of "those with money and connections survive." Depends how the world ends, no doubt.

Anyway, the day-to-day details of survival remained harrowing (in Manhattan there are enough people that you can't avoid seeing the bodies) enough to make this still a very compelling, couldn't-put-it-down-until-I-was-finished sort of read.

And as with the first book, I had vivid dreams while reading it. (I don't remember most of them. But I know that at some point they involved people hoarding food, while I vainly tried to explain to them that hanging onto canned vegetables wouldn't do them half as much good as stocking up on bags of rice and dried beans.)

Been a while since I did a post-apocalyptic YA reading report--I've been on more of a mainstream YA reading kick lately. (Ellen Wittlinger's Sandpiper is amazing. I'm beginning to wonder if anything of hers isn't amazing, but Sandpiper was the strongest yet.)

=========================

River Rats, by Caroline Stervermer

How the world ends: the Flash, presumably a nuclear attack or nuclear accident of some sort, though as is common after the end of the world, no one is really quite sure what exactly happened.

It's a couple decades after the Flash when the book begins (a timeframe I've used myself, because it has the benefit of letting a generation with no memory of life before reach YA age), and Tomcat and his fellow River Rats are happily plying their living along the toxic Mississippi river, floating a restored paddle wheeler and trading mail and music for supplies. Until they rescue a stranger from his pursuers and take him on board, after which, of course, Things Happen.

In most end of the world books, it seems to me there's either some longing for the time before, some effort to come to terms with what's happened, or some struggle to survive amid the current, changed conditions. The most interesting thing to me about River Rats, on this reread, is that none of these things are the case here--the protagonist and his friends are doing just fine with the basics of survival, and they have no desire to have lived in an earlier time they can't remember (and, being free-ranging orphans, perhaps have heard fewer nostalgic stories about than most).

So instead of any sort of struggle to survive, the struggle here is for the protagonist and his friends to preserve their post-apocalyptic way of life just as it is, and to hang on to their boat, their freedom, and each other. Kind of interesting that that sort of thing isn't more common in end-of-the-world YA, actually.

madrobins on why she loves the end of the world.

This rang especially true:

In near-event post-apocalyptic settings, your characters are dealing with the disaster itself, and their own survival. Just as intriguingly, in a long-past post-apocalyptic setting, the characters deal as much with the meaning of the old world and its demise, and that can make for really interesting fiction.

I'm finding there can be something strangely comforting about some end-of-the-world fiction, too. It's like we're saying, okay, let's pretend the worst things have already happened; now, here's what survives.

Of course, in real life, I'd still rather avoid end-times entirely if we can, thank you very much.

(But speaking of the end of the world, it looks like the answer to "What will I read at WFC?" is "None of the above," mostly because "the part with the mulberry trees" runs just a little too long. So it'll be "the part with the tree shadows" instead.)

I've added music and non-fiction categories to my post-apocalyptic YA (and other) reading list.

Under music, "The Fall" (free download) by Peter and the Wolf is a strangely comforting after-the-end-of-the-world song. I can listen to it over and over again. I finally purchased the album it's off of, and that's pretty haunting, too. (Said album lists itself as a "hand-drawn CD," and it really is.)

The idea of post-apocalyptic non-fiction sounds strange; the world is still here, after all. But I'm in the middle of The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, which is a thought experiment: if every last hidden abruptly disappeared from the planet without warning, what would happen to the world we left behind? More on that when I finish it, but interesting so far.

And behind the cut, just for fun, a post-apocalyptic meme. (Via _twilight_.) By which we know that I might not actually survive the end of the world, but I'd at least last longer than 99 percent of the rest of you. :-)

( The Apocalypse Survival Test )

Kathy Dawson of Harcourt Children's Books talks about working on the sequel to Life As We Knew It (scroll down to the What I'm Working on section).

... it's set during the same period as the first book, so I thought I'd be okay since I'd already been there. But this one hits even closer to home. Where Life was set in a remote town in Pennsylvania, The Dead & the Gone is set in New York City. Here's one of the points where my heart stopped: "The mandatory evacuation of the Borough of Queens will begin on Saturday. All municipal services will end by Friday, July first."

Meanwhile, I finally watched The Princess Bride for the first time--I'd read and loved the book in college, but hadn't seen the movie all the way through.

I still love much of what the story was trying to do, but ... I suspect the movie version of Buttercup, the stories female lead, would have gone down much better in the eighties. Then, I might only have seen someone holding on to her belief in true love and its power to conquer all; now, I kept screaming at her to do something. True love may indeed conquer all, but that doesn't mean letting the object of that true love do all the fighting and strategizing, while you stand anxiously by and do nothing.

After two weeks chasing down the homeplaces of women such as Hallgerður Höskuldsdóttir and Guðrun Osvifssdóttir, it's hard to come home to passive Buttercup, who cannot bring herself to so much as hit a giant rat (rodent of unusual size) with a stick when it's going for her true love's throat. Fortunately, we really have gained some ground since the 80s (with thanks one more to Buffy, and Keladry, and countless others), even if there still is much ground left to gain. (And yes, I know Buttercup was an improvement over the 50s, and 60s, and 70s, but that fact offers less comfort.)

Green Angel, by Alice Hoffman

How the world ends: A fire destroys the city, sending ash across the river into the countryside; there aren't any signs of nuclear fallout, but there does seem to have been a deliberate attack of some sort

Most end of the world books spend some time laying out both how the world ended, and what the challenges of survival now are. Green Angel was fascinating because it danced so lightly over these things--yes, there was a disaster; yes, getting enough food is a concern. But the book isn't concerned with the details of these things, Rather, it tells a smaller, closer story: how a single girl comes to terms with her own very personal losses, and how she loses and finds her own self in the process. This isn't a survival story, but rather a strangely gentle fable, one that has things to say about how we all deal with our losses. I loved this book, and would probably put it up there right behind Life As We Knew It and The Green Book.

Messenger, by Lois Lowry

How the world ends: The same unspecified Ruin as in Gathering Blue and The Giver

Even more compelling than books about the end of the world, to me, are books about healing the ruined world. It's clear from the start of this book that its world needs healing, and it's also clear that there's someone who may be up for the job. All of which means, this could have been a book that I loved.

( Vague spoilers )

In the end we never even have a hint of how the world came to be a place in need of healing. Not that we need to know how civilization collapsed--easy enough to believe in that--but we never find out how magic found its way into the world that emerged from those ruins, either. After all, Gathering Blue makes clear that the world has a history of collapses, and we know from our own history (because I'm assuming this is our world) that magic never rose up out of any of the other ruins.

Gathering Blue, by Lois Lowry

How the world ends: An unspecified Ruin, involving fire and the fall of tall buildings

After this particular end of the world, the characters have lost quite a lot: not only the basics of technology, but also the basics of human kindness; the world they live in is exceedingly harsh, though they don't know this. The protagonist, Kira, is a weaver. She's nearly killed as a child on account of her lame leg (one rarely keeps damaged children; everyone agrees there are too many children as it is), but is later singled out by the town's Guardians to help repair the Singer's Robe, which tells the history of her (our) people, going all the way back to the start of time, when we first made our way from water onto land. There are other artists who've been similarly singled out--a carver who works on the Singer's Staff, a successor to the Singer himself, whose job it will one day be to tell the story. Behind it all lurks the dark wood, where unspecified beasts attack men without warning, which keeps them all from leaving the town or seeing the wider world. That wider world is important for many reasons, including that somewhere, out there, is another lost thing--the plants from which one can create a dye for the color blue, one more thing that's been lost.

I loved many of the elements of this book, though ultimately the end didn't quite gel for me and the prose seemed a little flat. Which, as I recall, was also my reaction to The Giver, which is apparently set in the same world, though in a very different town. Still, this was interesting enough that I'll seek out Messenger, a third book in that world.

Z is for Zachariah, by Robert C. O'Brien

How the world ends: Nuclear war, classic cold war style

Our protagonist, Ann Burden, survived the war alone in an isolated valley that, through random luck of wind and weather patterns, is one of the few places, maybe the only place, untouched by radiation; her family all died when they went visiting nearby towns looking for other survivors. As far as Ann knows, she may be the only person left living in the entire world. Until, inevitably, another person--a man--shows up, wearing a radiation safe suit made from cutting-edge magnetized plastics.

The characters are also classic cold war characters; the book was written in 1974. Before the war, Ann dreamed of being a teacher, having discarded the one other obvious profession for a teenage girl, nursing. She does all the cooking at first, because the man, John Loomis, is ill, but when the also-inevitable falling out happens, she feels guilty about not continuing to cook his meals. The cooking of meals, and the performing of other domestic chores for herself and the possibly-last-man-in-the-world, is clearly very important to Ann. I couldn't help but keep thinking of my mother, who for a while kept cooking for my Dad even after she'd announced she wanted a divorce, because cooking for the men in your life, and making sure they had hot meals, was what you did.

But at least our protagonist has also grown used to doing all of the other work of running a farm and generally surviving for herself, too, so when Mr. Loomis--who she always calls by his last name, adding to the book's dated feel--tries to seize control, she doesn't go along with it like a well-behaved housewife, but fights for her independence.

Think of it as the end of the world meets the classic early YA problem novel. :-)

Hole in the Sky, by Pete Hautman

How the World Ends: Viruses again, this time a particularly virulent flu virus, which wipes out 5 billion people in its first year, and has the population of the planet down to about 38 million within a few years after that.

Hautman's virus was way scarier than the virus in the first Fire-Us book. Possibly because we get to see how the virus works; and, more, because we're aware that the virus is still out there--those who escaped live in small communities, try to limit contact with outsiders, yet know that the virus could still find them.

( Minor spoilers for the first half of the book )

I can't decide whether the ending quite worked for me. But the world of this book felt very real, with its apocalypse that is still, really, ongoing; again I'm reminded that the world doesn't just end all at once, but keeps ending. And the story's being set close to home--I recognized some of the Grand Canyon landmarks--made that world more convincing for me. The Southwest has precisely the sort of isolated communities that would manage to hang on after the world ends, after all.

The Green Book, by Jill Patton Walsh

How the world ends: Not entirely clear; all we really know is that there's a Disaster, which has something to do with the earth getting colder and bluer; and that our characters escape two days before the world falls into radio silence

Told from the point of view of a band of survivors who take one of the last, oldest spaceships available off the planet. They make their way to a new world with strange symmetrical boulders and crystalline plants that shatter in their hands; they build homes of translucent wood lit by the green glow of oils from local jellyfish.

But the planet may not be able to support them--and the ship that took them there is unable to take them any farther.

Anyone who tries to read this as science fiction will probably hate it; the worldbuilding makes little sense, and if that's what you read for, you'll be disappointed. The book wants to be read as a sort of fable, instead.

As such, this was a lovely, lovely book. It reminded me of Alexander Key's The Forgotten Door, though I'm not entirely sure why. Both have the same sort of haunting feel; and also, maybe, the same innocence; the same knowing children; the same muted knowledge of the harshness of the world beyond that innocence.

Fire-Us: The Kindling (book one of the Fire-Us trilogy), by Jennifer Armstrong and Nancy Butcher

How the world ends: A virus kills all the grown-ups (everyone past puberty?) in the world; without the adults around, most of the kids soon die, too.

Set five years after the virus (remembered by the kids as the "fire-us") hits; a small group of kids, ranging in age from 5 to 14, who as far as they know are the only people left in the world, are surviving in a small Florida town by raiding the local stores for canned food. But the food is running out, so they hit the road, looking for a place called Washington and a grown-up called President. The kids remember only bits and pieces of life before, and are trying to make sense of those memories and their world. They've even forgotten their real names, which was stretching it, for me; on the other hand, by the end of the first book I began to think perhaps the virus had actually messed with their memories. All the kids are a little crazy and unbalanced, in their different ways, whether from the virus or from seeing the world fall apart at a very young age, we don't know yet. Each kid has also taken on a role in trying to hold their makeshift family together: Hunter hunts for food and clears the bones of the dead away so the younger kids don't have to see them; Teacher goes through old magazine clippings searching for knowledge that will help them; Mommy feeds and comforts the little ones, and so on. They all hold things together, in their strange way, but one gets the sense that this isn't sustainable over the long term, and that something's going to give soon. Besides, the oldest kids are now almost grown-ups themselves--what if the fire-us gets them, too?

Imaginative, clever, lots of nice details; not sure I completely suspended my disbelief or was fully immersed in the world, but a lot depends on how the next two books handle the story.

Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

How the world ends: A meteor hits the moon, knocking it into an orbit closer than earth; tidal waves, earthquakes, and mass volcanic eruptions result from the moon's increased gravitational pull.

A decade back, I published a scary short story, "Drawing the Moon," that resulted in letters from readers telling me how I'd made them afraid of moonlight. I suppose it's only fair that now someone has written a story now that makes me a little uneasy when I look at the night sky, in turn. :-)

cedarlibrarian and literaticat were right: once I started reading this one, I couldn't put it down. I did stop to sleep last night -- and had some very uneasy dreams when I did -- and had some obligations today that kept me from it as well, but pretty much every spare moment this weekend, this book was in my hands.

Harrowing, gripping, quietly intense--grounded in all the small details of daily life from the point of view of a teen in one of the less affected (there are no unaffected) areas.

The book pretty much had me from this description of a news broadcast after the meteor hits, when massive tidal waves begin devouring the U.S. coastline:

It was like one of those lists on the radio to let you know which schools were having snow days. Only instead of it being school districts in the area, it was whole cities, and it wasn't just snow.

But even when the world ends, it doesn't end all at once; part of what makes the book harrowing and gripping is the way everyday life gets chipped away at one piece at a time.

I'm still thinking about this book, and suspect I will be for a while.

Quick takes on the ones I've already read.

( The City of Ember and The People of Sparks )

( How I Live Now )

Actually, one thing about the end of the world seems to be that you often see it through relatively local eyes -- because you no longer have the sort of communications that make a wider-angle view possible.

( Uglies and Pretties )

( Siberia )

Thank you, all, for recommending your favorite children's and YA fiction set after the end of the world. (And thanks especially to bondgwendabond for pointing folks here from her typepad blog.)

I thought I'd compile a list. The ones I've already read are in bold. The ones that aren't in bold are the ones I clearly need to get out and read. If I missed one, or if you have others, let me know and I'll add them! (I'll keep adding books as I find them, too.)

Post-apocalyptic kids' and young adult books:
- The Kindling and the other books of the Fire-Us trilogy, by Jennifer Armstrong and Nancy Butcher
- The City of Ember and The People of Sparks, by Jeanne DuPrau
- Siberia, by Ann Halam
- Hole in the Sky, by Pete Hautmann
- Green Angel, by Alice Hoffman
- The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger, by Lois Lowry
- Maddigan's Fantasia, by Margaret Mahy
- Tomorrow, When the War Began and sequels, by John Marsden
- Z for Zachariah, by Robert C. O'Brien
- Life As We Knew It and The Dead and the Gone, by Susan Beth Pfeffer
- How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff
- River Rats, by Caroline Stevermer
- The Green Book, by Jill Patton Walsh
- Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Extras, by Scott Westerfield

Apocalyptic books (set during, but not so much after, the apocalypse):
- Feed, by M.T. Anderson
- Peeps, The Last Days, by Scott Westerfeld

Adult books:
- World War Z, by Max Brooks
- Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
- White Plague, by Frank Herbert
- The Stand, by Stephen King
- A Pail of Air, by Fritz Leiber
- The World Ends in Hickory Hollow, by Ardath Mayhar
- Swan Song, by Robert McCammon
- The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
- Emergence, by David R. Palmer
- Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
- On the Beach, by Nevil Shute
- The Chrysalids and other books, by John Wyndham

Nonfiction:
- The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond

Essays:
- "I Love the End of the World," by Madeleine Robins

Music:
"The Fall," by Peter and the Wolf