Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel)

This gloriously heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel jumps back and forth through time, telling the story of the Georgia Flu pandemic that wiped out 99.9% of all humanity in a space of weeks. We meet a cast of people who faced the end of the world, some who made it through and some who didn't. We learn of their lives leading up to the disaster, getting to know who they are and where they came from. We learn of what happened to them as civilization fell apart, and for those who survived, what their world was like for the next decades. Every person is fully realized, every setting and event is hauntingly true, and moments grab you without letting go: the realization that you have eaten your last orange ever, that you will never, ever know what happened to your loved ones, that there is no choice you can make that doesn't end in disaster and death. It is a splendid story, skillfully told, and I loved it.

The Leftovers (Tom Perrotta)

At one moment, all over the world, people suddenly vanish. Cars careen driverless, dinners burn on the stove, babies stop crying between one breath and the next. Some folks immediately think it's the Rapture, but there is no rhyme or reason as to who goes and who stays: old, young, Christian, Muslim, atheist, kind, abusive. No explanation is every uncovered for the Great Departure. This book is about what happens to those who are left. Everyone is knocked off-kilter, either because of their own loved ones gone, or because of the disruption to society and to their sense of the stability of the world. A woman tries to find a life after her whole family is taken, a mother retreats from her own fully-intact family out of a sense that the world has lost something that can't be regained, a boy leaves college to follow a charismatic guru. These characters are real and their pain, and their heroism, call out to all of us. Tender and wrenching, this book draws you in and won't let go.

The Girl With All the Gifts (M. R. Carey)

If I'm not careful, I'll develop a theme of reading zombie stories where the protagonist is a good zombie, bent on protecting the humans from the bad zombies. That was the theme in Raising Stony Mayhall (Daryl Gregory), and it's the theme here. It has all the usual zombie tropes (relentless, mindless creatures hunting human flesh, humans huddling in enclaves, fleeing across a world of decay and ruin) even though it never actually uses the word zombie. The main character is a child who, despite being infected with the zombie parasite, still has a mind and a strong sense of morality. How can she live with the humans who increasingly learn to care about her? How can she learn to live with herself? Is there any future for humanity, and what could that look like? This book doesn't have the depth of Stony, but it was engaging, thrilling, and moving. I completely enjoyed it.

Shovel Ready (Adam Sternbergh)

The first-person narrator of this book scrabbles a living in a dark, dangerous post-apocalyptic New York City. He calls himself Spademan, a name with two meanings. He once was, he tells us over and over, a garbage man, back when the city worked and people came and took away your garbage. Now, he is a killer for hire, one with strict rules about not knowing why you want someone killed, only that you're willing to pay for it. When someone points him at the estranged daughter of a famous evangelist, he starts to have second and third thoughts and winds up being drawn deeper and deeper into a morass of murder, torture, and terror as he tries to do the right thing. It is surprisingly easy to like this protagonist because we never see him acting in his primary occupation as a cold-blooded murderer; we only see him as someone who has become the unlikely defender of the young and helpless. With its intense action and its spare style (short, incomplete sentences and one-line paragraphs abound) this story moves quickly, almost breathlessly. Recommended.

The Age of Miracles (Karen Thompson Walker)

There is a lot to like in this touching story of a girl on the edge of womanhood dealing with the usual teenage issues and also with the global catastrophe that may signal the end of the planet. For some unknown reason, the rotation of the earth begins to slow drastically. Really drastically - it gains over half an hour in the first day. This slowing continues at an unpredictable pace throughout the book, with a day stretching to well over 70 hours before the tale ends. Along with this unexplained shift in rotation, there is also an unexplained change in gravity, which apparently increases enough to interfere with the flight of birds and soccer balls but not with walking. The orbit of the moon also shifts, so that a solar eclipse that was supposed to occur in the Pacific instead happens unexpectedly in California. So although the main character is well drawn and her family and peer relationships are touchingly illuminated, I kept being thrown off by the cavalier disregard for the most fundamental nature of reality. My disbelief just wouldn't suspend enough for me to ignore conservation of momentum, or gravity, or orbital mechanics, and not all happening together. I kept getting thrown off by other minor but unforgivable gaffes as well. When Julia's best friend abandons her she says she missed her "like a phantom limb" - but phantom limbs are not something you miss, they are something you wish would go away. Strange things are happening to airplanes, and also to the astronauts on the space station "ten thousand times higher," but of course the orbit of the space station is about 250 miles up, less than a hundred times higher than a commercial jet. When the earth's magnetic field begins to break down (something that would, indeed, follow from the slowing of the earth's rotation), people hear and feel this sudden shift, which is nonsense. The bottom line is that I just couldn't shut off the part of my brain that kept scoffing at the science, which spoiled everything else for me, which is too bad, since the other stuff was pretty good.

Odds Against Tomorrow (Nathaniel Rich)

This is an odd story, but engrossing. Mitchell has always been fascinated with disasters, carrying a card with him listing the probabilities of dying in various odd ways, and this leads him into a career calculating risk for a financial institution, but he feels that he is not getting anywhere in his job and his personal life is essentially nonexistent. He jumps to join a brand new company that helps corporations prepare for disaster, and his obsessions spiral almost out of control as he spins worst-case scenarios for clients about everything from terrorist attack to the Second Coming. When a superstorm targets Manhattan, he is hailed as a prophet who foresaw the disaster, but the reality of his fears is nearly overwhelming. Intertwined with his psychological apocalypse is an unexpected connection with a woman he spoke to once in college, who addresses her own worst-case scenario in a very different way. I was definitely interested and wanted to find out what happened next, even though Mitchell's twisted psyche was always just a touch too over the top for me to really identify with him.

Spin (Robert Charles Wilson)

One quiet evening in October, everything changes. All Earth's satellites fall out of the sky at once and the moon and stars flash and vanish. We quickly discover that the universe outside of Earth's atmosphere is experiencing time differently than we do; millions of years pass every day. The sun rises the next morning as usual, but it's a bland imitation of the real thing, with no sunspots and no aurora. As scientists compute the time differential, it dawns on us that within a few decades we will have outlived the sun, engulfed in its swollen surface, and no matter what this barrier is that blocks us from the universe, we will die. Who did this to us, and why, and how will humanity cope? Though these events are literally world-shaping, Wilson tells it in the most personal, compelling way, by focusing on one man, following him from the childhood night when the stars disappeared to the unthinkable new world he finds as an adult. Through his eyes we observe two people, one vital to the planet, one vital to his own soul, and this makes us care. I very much liked the book. It makes me think about big ideas and about human questions.

Boneshaker (Cherie Priest)

I couldn't really get into this book. I gave it over 100 pages, but I never really connected with the main character. The setting was interesting, but not really compelling for me. I'm not a big fan of steampunk, so that's probably part of the reason. Mostly, though, it was just a lack of emotional connection. It might work for other people, but apparently not for me.

The Rapture of the Nerds (Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross)

It is years after the singularity, and most of humanity has abandoned Earth and meatspace and uploaded itself to the cloud, living a virtual life. Huw is one of those who remained behind, rejecting not only a cybernetic existence but even electricity and telecommunication. So at first he is happy to have been selected to serve on a jury that evaluates new technologies thrown up by the post-humans in the cloud, but it turns out that he has been infected by something that is using his body for its own purposes. He winds up on a grand tour of the many different ways of being human, from violently fundamentalist to the expanded consciousness of the cloud, and in the end the fate of the entire solar system rests on him. I have enjoyed the smart, geeky works by Stross before, but not Cory Doctorow so much, and this one didn't really work for me. Although Huw is central to resolving some major crises, the primary tool he (or sometimes she) uses is avoidance. I like my protagonists to be more actively involved in solving problems, not throwing temper tantrums. I also tended to lose the convoluted threads of the plot sometimes. I suppose I am not uplifted enough for this novel.

Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)

This is a story for young adults, focusing on a massively multiplayer online game, that I really enjoyed. The protagonist is a young man in a bleak future world where the environment, the economy, and the nation are all falling apart, but at least there is this really wonderful online world you can go to where things are much better. The creator of this world has just died, and left all his billions to whoever can solve a series of puzzles using clues he buried inside the world. Because the popular culture of the 1980s was his passion, all the games and clues are based on comic books, video games, TV shows, and movies of that era, so it's a lot of fun for those of us who remember that decade! The antagonist in the story is pretty cardboard: an evil multinational corporation bent on stifling all individuality and turning the game world into a cash cow, and not above torture and murder to get the prize. On the other hand, the protagonist and his friends are rather amazingly good. Still, I enjoyed the action and the rapid-fire cultural references. Fun!

The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)

In the future, genetic modification, climate change, and short-sighted agricultural policy have caused the world food supply to crash. Bangkok is a city under siege, with giant levees to keep out the ocean and strong barriers to keep out unnatural things - including windups. These "New People" are genetically designed and creche-grown, and one of them ends up abandoned in Bangkok when her Japanese owner tires of her. She is just one of the people trying to survive in this dystopian future. Others are a calorie man, secretly working for an American company making its money providing food to starving people. One is a displaced Chinese man whose family all died in a wave of riots in Malaysia. One is an official taking seriously the attempt to keep dangerous products out of the city, and his unsmiling assistant. How these various people deal with the corruption, physical and psychological, that surrounds them makes for a complex and moving story.

The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)

I wanted to read this book to find out what everyone was talking about. It was better than I expected; I actually did get caught up in the story of survival, and I enjoyed reading it. A 16-year-old girl in a brutal, post-apocalyptic world volunteers to take her young sister's place in an annual spectacle in which 24 teens are dropped into a vast arena and forced to fight to the death on live TV. The plot is rather far-fetched, even for science fiction, and the characters and dialogue rather flat and unconvincing. There was altogether too much emphasis on food and clothing for my taste. Still, I liked the tough, ass-kicking heroine.

Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)

This tragic and gripping post-apocalyptic tale jumps back and forth through the life of young Jimmy who grows into solitary, doomed Snowman. It starts grimly enough, with the world divided into the gated, guarded, isolated Compounds of the elite, and the desolate, chaotic Pleeblands. As Jimmy grows, the world lurches more an more into an ecological disaster. He befriends a cynical genius named Crake, and finally meets Oryx, the object of his childhood fantasies, just as the final catastrophe befalls the human race. The origins of that catastrophe, and how it relates to Crake, Oryx, and the strange people who survive, makes for an enthralling, heartbreaking story.