(Thunderdome or Fury Road) Looking for dirty post-apocalypse. Absurd characters, primitive civilitations, pulpy stories. Preferably in deserts but I'm not picky. Short stories would be cool too.
No zombies please.
Posted Nov 8, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC · edited
You might enjoy Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill. It's about characters trying to survive in the post apocalypse, the twist is that they are all robots. It's basically about what would happen after a robot uprising when all of humanity is wiped out. Excellent book and has some of the over the top violence found in the movies you've mentioned.
Helldivers by Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Swan Song
You might consider Brandon Sanderson's original Mistborn Trilogy. It's fantasy, so there's magic involved, but the magic is kind of like a new technology. It's "hard" magic with definite rules that can be exploited by anyone with the right knowledge and materials.
In the world in which the trilogy is set the sun and sky are red, vegetation is brown, and the ground is constantly being covered under black volcanic ashfalls. Knowledge of technology has been suppressed by an immortal autocratic ruler and his cronies, who call themselves nobility and rule tyrannically using seemingly magical powers.
Someone once described it as a heist story like Ocean's Eleven set in a world where Sauron won and turned the whole world into Mordor, then ruled for a thousand years.
There are a lot of post-apocalyptic books out there, but few set in a hellish wasteland with over the top weird characters. That's why I thought of Mistborn.
Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse by Victor Gischler. Really good pulpy post-apocalypse story with no zombies.
Here's an obscure one - The Last Circus on Earth by B P Marshall. It's a freakshow circus travelling through a post-apocalyptic world. It's biopunkish too.
Damnation Alley by Zelazney is pretty darned close to
what you're looking for. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239919.Damnation_Alley
This isn’t a book, but if you like dungeons and dragons, Descent Into Avernus is very clearly inspired by Fury road.
Thank you! This is actually research for an Apocalypse World P&P, and I will steal ideas left and right. An adventure about a journey through hell? yeah!
Thank you! This is actually research for an Apocalypse World P&P, and I will steal ideas left and right. An adventure about a journey through hell? yeah!
There's Jane Morris' Heroes in Hell series, which might prove useful, though as a literary work I did not find it very entertaining (I read perhaps one of the books), despite including stories by David Drake and C. J. Cherryh, two of my favorite authors.
Heroes in Hell is a series of shared world fantasy books, within the genre Bangsian fantasy, created and edited by Janet Morris and written by her, Chris Morris, C. J. Cherryh and others. The first 12 books in the series were published by Baen Books between 1986 and 1989, and stories from the series include one Hugo Award winner and Nebula nominee ("Gilgamesh in the Outback" by Robert Silverberg from Rebels in Hell), as well as one other Nebula Award nominee. The series was resurrected in 2011 by Janet Morris with the thirteenth book and eighth anthology in the series, Lawyers in Hell, followed by seven more anthologies and four novels between 2012 and 2021.
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Pump Six & other stories and The Windup Girl both by Paolo Bacigalupi
Dune
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse, maybe? I haven't read hers yet but the covers give me those vibes, maybe a little more fantasy than you are after but definitely has some themes in common. She writes short stories too though not sure if any fit this brief.
Also recommend the TV series Carnivale, 1920s dustbowl America, a travelling circus and weird, dark, twisted things going on
Run by Blake Crouch.
Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books scratch a few of those itches. I saw you mentioned P&P, so you may know D&D’s magic system is inspired v (i.e. completely stolen) from these books. If you play the game you should recognize a few of the spells.
When I read them, rather than interpreting the magic as a mystical force, I imagine an incredibly advanced AI and nanotechnology that has been forgotten by time but still embedded in the places and things of the stories in the books.
I am legend
The Girl with All the Gifts
Novel by Mike Carey
[removed]
The Road by Cormac McCarthy