Readers want to be kept on the edge of their seat, but for Apocalyptic fiction to really strike an accord with its reader it needs to penetrate their psyche. Get beyond the simple mechanics of writing a novel and Apocalyptic fiction is not an easy sub-genre to master. At their best, they stun you with their visions of ultimate endings both small and catastrophic with hauntingly bleak futures, but sadly the bestsellers represent just the tip of an awfully big iceberg with a huge amount of dross below the surface. Amongst genre bestsellers, the quality of writing and the depth of social discourse underpinning Apocalyptic novels and post-apocalypse novels has never been better. Novels like The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert, Zazen by Vanessa Veselka and of course The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Today there are a host of bestsellers that readily spring to mind. Indeed, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man was actually published in 1826 but it wasn’t till after World War II when the possibility of global annihilation by nuclear weapons entered the public consciousness that the genre started to build a burgeoning fan base. They might be gathering momentum as a sub-genre of science fiction, dystopian or horror but they’ve been around for longer than you might think.
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