The best science fiction books where ordinary people survive the extraordinary

Growing up in Florida near the end of the Cold War, the looming threat of nuclear war was ever-present. We were even still doing nuclear attack drills in school. When this book was assigned reading for an English class, I had no idea how close to home it would hit. Survivors in a small town in Florida must survive the aftermath of a nuclear war. Ironically, the small town in the book was based on a town only a short drive from my own home. Witnessing the experiences of wholly ordinary people—people who could have been my own family, friends, and neighbors—thrust into an extraordinary situation was gripping and terrifying.

Parts of Gust Front hit home. I read this while living in the Appalachians, so seeing Cally preparing for an invasion in a remote valley in Georgia, and the subsequent fighting that takes place in and around the Appalachians, struck a nerve with me. If the worst happened, up to and including the alien invasion depicted here, would the mountains be the best place to hold out and resist? The scope of the novel covers many settings, including other familiar ones like Washington D.C., all of which ground the speculative premise of an alien invasion in a story that feels very real; something that any of us could be forced to live through.

Unlike the typical post-apocalyptic fare of nuclear war or other identifiable disasters, Dies the Fire posits an interesting question: What if everything just stops working? Everything we rely on to drive modern society, from combustion to electricity, fails. Against this backdrop, a cast of characters from varied backgrounds all must struggle to adapt to this new reality. Civilization falls apart, and new orders spring up in their place. What drew me most to this was the different ways in which the characters responded to this situation. Some seek simply to survive, while others seek to exploit this new reality for their own gains at the expense of others.

What is more terrifying than an alien menace bent on eradicating humanity? One that won’t even say why they are doing it. To me, that’s the most striking thing about this book. In other alien invasion stories, an antagonist often has a particular bone to pick; there’s some failed diplomacy or other motives to make it clear why they are attacking. In War of the Worlds, they just show up and take over without a word. Then, it falls to ordinary people to fight back against or simply survive in the face of a technologically superior foe who won’t even tell humanity why they are being exterminated.

The Stand thrusts ordinary people into a desperate situation. What stood out for me was that the nature of the apocalypse itself or surviving the aftermath was not the focus of the book. Rather, it focuses on the tensions between the factions that arose after the fall of civilization. In a struggle that reflects those experienced on a global scale in reality, a democratic society must confront a totalitarian regime in a struggle for the fate of humanity. This clash of ideologies is a wonderful exploration of the different ways in which civilization might be rebuilt, and fuel for a gripping conflict.