13 books like Emberverse

This book one of The Savage North Chronicles, is a great read.

I enjoy Lindsey Pogue’s books because she has a talent for creating flawed, sympathetic characters whose personal challenges compound the disastrous state of the world.

This book also incorporates a slightly supernatural element I found refreshing. I felt the frigid temperatures and life-threatening weather they faced, the moral dilemmas, and the struggle to adapt to a radically altered reality.

Surprising plot twists and a colorful and memorable cast of characters will suck you right there with them, wondering how you’d survive and which surprising psychic ability you’d end up with. 

Sarah Lyons Fleming writes exceptional zombie apocalypse fiction.

I love her masterful characterization, the struggles beyond zombies she explores, and the human dramas that unfold. Her characters always face dilemmas beyond the immediate crisis, making them feel real. Unlike much post-apocalyptic fiction, Fleming avoids the "suddenly turning on your neighbors" trope—while people can be jerks or even evil, her approach feels more nuanced.

It was hard to choose which series to recommend because they're all great, but her Cascadia series is truly special. With well-drawn characters, gripping plots, superior storytelling, realistic relationships, and harrowing zombie encounters, Fleming's books demand rereading.

The audiobook versions are amazing if you prefer that format.

I could not stop listening to Deadly Lockdown because it was so exciting. I had to know what happened next.

I’ve thought of how I would get through different disaster scenarios (as you do), and a pandemic is the one that actually scares me. I’m not worried about zombies or an EMP, but a deadly disease? Egad. The pace of this story never lets up, and the characters were ones I cared about. I found them frustrating at times, but whatever they chose, I believed it.

One thing I really liked was the medical accuracy. Misty Zaugg is a physician, and her expertise made this ‘What if?’ story feel all the more real. And scary.

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.

I’ve always preferred those stories of great global catastrophes that remain in a single small location.

In the case of Alas, Babylon the small town of Fort Repose survives the nuclear holocaust because it’s small. Written at the height of the cold war when there were several and very real moments of brinkmanship between the Soviets and Americans. 

It’s a great read for another reason: this is a well-informed writer. For instance, here we find that salt is as vital for survival as water? And what good is a doctor if he has no medicine? These are things this little community has to face, but the author is hopeful.

This is one of those books that is a lens into a period in time but is at the same time easily readable and to the point. How Fort Repose deals with nuclear Armageddon is the same story of how all… show more.

Vampires kept me up at night when I was a kid.

When they got twinkly and dreamy in popular fiction, I was unimpressed. Then I read The Passage. These are your grandfather’s vampires, boys and girls, and they want to kill you. I loved the blend of horror, science fiction, and the dystopian near-future United States where the story begins.

From the scientist who wants to cure death to the quest a hundred years after the Virals appeared, this book is filled with a raw humanity and the struggle to survive that captivated me. It’s a long book, but when I finished, I dove right into the next one. I had to know what happened, and I needed another dose of vampires that scared the sh!t out of me.

This isn’t a typical murder story, but it has it all: personal dilemmas, paranormal lines, and killings wrapped around a dystopian world where good and evil are on a collision course. This is, perhaps my favorite book.

It was King’s gold standard for decades. The traveling east to west, the sages met, the people killed. Those turned against their friends. Twists galore. It is a long read, a bit over 1,100 pages. Don’t let that scare you, it is a page turner from start to finish. 

It was the comic book titles of HG Wells early science fiction books which drew me in as a teenager, including this, his most famous. You never had to guess what it was about. And I was never disappointed. They took me into a different world.

What I always liked about HG Wells was his attention to detail and his attempts to provide a rational scientific explanation for the events which occurred in those books.

This series, to my mind, epitomizes the idea of a gradual rebirth after a galactic civilization collapses, leaving humans stranded on countless worlds with varying degrees of technology. I found the way in which Drake approaches said rebirth incredibly fascinating as well as entertaining, by using sentient artifacts of the long-vanished empire to guide humans back to the stars. And, as a dog lover, I really enjoyed him using oversized canines instead of horses for his pre-industrial cavalry.

The War World series of novels, novellas, and short stories drew me in because they represent a microcosm of what happens when a civilization crashes in an inhospitable environment. I’ve been an avid fan of Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium universe ever since reading West of Honor and seeing how it evolved for good and for bad through the War World lens, as developed by a long list of fantastic authors, kept intriguing me for years. Many of the concepts developed throughout the series had a marked influence on my own worldbuilding, and for that, it will always have a special place in my pantheon of books.