Here are 64 books that The Rapture fans have personally recommended if you like
The Rapture.
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I am a Pulitzer-nominated writer who began as a poet, then shifted to prose during a period of aesthetic and personal crisis in my life. I am interested in how the novelist can gather and curate fascinating facts for the reader and incorporate them into the text. I see writing as a great adventure and investigation into issues of empathy, power, and powerlessness, and the individual in an increasingly technological world.
When I wrote my first novel, I began investigating modern-day technology—robotics, bioengineering, AI, and information technology—and have read and worked in this area for over 15 years. It is a pleasure to share some of the books that have informed my own journey.
I love the exquisite writing and haunting narrative in this book—Ishiguro’s prose is masterful, his imagination precise and engrossing. He creates characters that are poignant, complex, and caught in a world beyond their control. Issues of bioengineering, of empathy, of powerlessness, are beautifully woven through the whole.
I am moved by how this book marries technology and deep emotion, the dystopian with the palpable reality of today’s world, and the rapidly changing technological milieu we live in.
One of the most acclaimed novels of the 21st Century, from the Nobel Prize-winning author
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
It’s Saturday, 5 p.m. If you could peer back in time to the late ’60s, you’d find me plunked in front of our new colour RCA Victor, a Swanson TV dinner steaming before me, and the theme…da-da-DAAA-da-da-da-da-DAAAA, announcing my favourite show: Star Trek. I absorbed the logic of Mr. Spock, the passion of Dr. McCoy, and the fantastical world of Klingons, wormholes, and warp drives. Add to that a degree in history and English, and it set the stage for my passion to read and write in genres of science fiction and magical realism. I hope you find these books as stimulating and thought-provoking as I did.
The Chrysalids – my inaugural dive into science fiction in the late sixties – hooked me from the first paragraph.
Wyndham creates a dystopian world of post-nuclear destruction where genetic mutations abound, and if discovered, culled from a civilization steeped in a stark biblical ideology. The Chrysalids track protagonist David Strorm as he safeguards his six-toed friend, Sophie, and ultimately connects with a band of telepaths offering new world hope.
I loved this book because of its adolescent hero and his defiance against a society that was morally corrupt.
In the community of Waknut it is believed mutants are the products of the Devil and must be stamped out. When David befriends a girl with a slight abnormality, he begins to understand the nature of fear and oppression. When he develops his own deviation, he must learn to conceal his secret.
Writing my eighth novel, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, I had to move the story into the future in order to explore the topics I was trying to understand. I think through writing: sometimes I feel it is only through writing that I really engage with the world. Work on Jessie Lamb entailed a lot of scientific and future research, and after that I read more and more future fiction, with an increasing appetite for the work of writers who are really interested in exploring where we are headed as a species, and how we might try to survive the damage we have inflicted on the earth.
I love this book for its humour in the face of catastrophe.
As the rain falls and the floods rise, Chris sees his mission as to warn humanity of the impending terrors of the climate emergency. His wife Emma meanwhile tries to keep their home and family fed, safe and happy.
An incurable optimist, she finds Chris’ behaviour both pointless and faintly ridiculous. And when he takes to switching off the electricity in order to teach her to be more self-sufficient, she’s less than pleased.
What I really admire is the way Carys tackles the serious topic of climate breakdown with wry humour, generating sympathy for both partners and drawing us into each one’s point of view.
_________________________ 'This is a powerful and truthful story about hope and how to find it' THE TIMES
'Wry, beautifully written . . . it works on many levels' DAILY MAIL
'Bray's satire shines with observation and subtlety' GUARDIAN
'She writes with a quiet formidable brilliance. Her observations on relationships are acute, painful and extremely funny. This is a gem of a book.' EMILY MAITLIS _________________________ Global temperatures are rising. The climate of the Abrams' marriage is cooling.
Emma is beginning to wonder whether relationships, like mortgages, should be conducted in five-year increments. She might laugh if Chris had bought a…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
Writing my eighth novel, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, I had to move the story into the future in order to explore the topics I was trying to understand. I think through writing: sometimes I feel it is only through writing that I really engage with the world. Work on Jessie Lamb entailed a lot of scientific and future research, and after that I read more and more future fiction, with an increasing appetite for the work of writers who are really interested in exploring where we are headed as a species, and how we might try to survive the damage we have inflicted on the earth.
I came across Salt Lick when hunting for novels on the topic of climate breakdown.
I was looking for writers who go beyond the doom and gloom, to find either rays of hope or at the very least a story where life and love might survive. For me, hope was an essential element in Jessie Lamb’s story. And in Salt Lick, Allison does deliver a dogged kind of hope for her strange trio of wandering central characters.
Beyond that, she delivers bewitchingly beautiful prose; her first page is a masterclass in description.
'A compelling fable of decline, a lament for a way of life, and a warning about what society is already becoming. It is a capsule of England and its dystopian present ... as sad and angry as it is memorable' Ronan Hession
'Salt Lick is that rare beast - imaginative, risky storytelling where every sentence is a gift' Heidi James
Britain is awash, the sea creeps into the land, brambles and forest swamp derelict towns. Food production has moved overseas and people are forced to move to the cities for work. The countryside…
I have always been interested in the world’s mysteries. This is why I studied theoretical physics. Ultimately, this scientific pathway led to a permanent position in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. But archaeology is also fascinating, and I was lucky enough to decode some ancient symbols at one of the world’s most important archaeological sites, Göbekli Tepe. The resulting story combines archaeology, astronomy and geophysics to present a new synthesis for the origin of civilization. My academic background in science has helped me to provide compelling evidence and arguments for these ideas.
This is a great introduction to the science of the Younger Dryas impact. Published a year before the seminal paper of Firestone et al. (2007), it makes the case for a devastating cosmic event, probably a meteor or comet impact, circa 10850 BC.
The book combines science with historical accounts and mythology to arrive at this stunning conclusion. Although I think some of the evidence in the book is speculative and possibly wrong, I think their main arguments in 2006 have held up well to intense scrutiny by critics since then. I consider this book to be another essential read for the coherent catastrophist enthusiast.
Scientific proof validating the legends and myths of ancient floods, fires, and weather extremes
* Presents scientific evidence revealing the cause of the end of the last ice age and the cycles of geological events and species extinctions that followed
* Connects physical data to the dramatic earth changes recounted in oral traditions around the world
* Describes the impending danger from a continuing cycle of catastrophes and extinctions
There are a number of puzzling mysteries in the history of Earth that have yet to be satisfactorily explained by mainstream science: the extinction of the dinosaurs, the vanishing of ancient…
For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to make a difference—by helping others become wiser and/or happier. But how? Colleagues, clients, and friends tell me that I have a capacity for energy that is boundless. I resisted that statement. It sounded “fluffy”. How could I make a difference if I saw “energy” as being some flighty firefly? Then, when I went through 2 bouts of burnout, I realized that energy was the secret—the secret to resilience, the secret to growth and service. Reading, writing, and speaking fill me with the energy to grow, learn, laugh, and serve. I trust these books and my writing will bring the same to you.
I was so intrigued by Becky and her story that she became one of my case studies in my book. She has been through more traumatic transitions than most of us have in a lifetime. From her own experience and struggle, Becky has crafted a masterful model for sustaining and stabilizing our lives.
She created the Four C’s as a foundation: comfort, control, community, and connection. I refer to her work as another guiding source when life becomes crazy…as indeed it will. From a place of feeling stabilized, Becky advocates a resilient response: how do you understand and use the experience? What assumption will offer support? And what resources do you have? I can and should refer to her book often for my own stabilizing.
If you are in crisis or walking alongside someone in crisis, this book is meant for you. This is more than a book; it is like being with a great friend.
When you hear the word crisis what do you think? A dramatic car wreck. A critical medical diagnosis. Divorce. Job loss. Natural disaster. Death. What about the mini-shocks within those crises or the smaller events that disrupt our lives more frequently? A fender bender in rush-hour traffic. Personal information getting hacked. Being overlooked for a promotion. When crisis hits, large or small, we are thrown off balance.
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I pride myself on my independence and sense of adventure. I started traveling the world with my family when I was 3 and I haven’t stopped since. When you travel, you have to cope with new situations on a daily basis and navigate different obstacles to meet your needs. An interest in adventure and how people cope with new situations are the biggest reasons why I have a passion for books dealing with overcoming obstacles. Before I retired to Spain, I was a teacher of students between 10 and 15 years old. I chose two of the books I recommended to read to my students when I was a teacher.
This book captured me from start to finish. Like my book, this story is told in a gripping journal format. A meteor knocks the moon off its orbit and this causes catastrophic consequences on earth. Summer turns to a bitterly cold winter and Miranda and her two brothers and mother must figure out how they will survive in such harsh conditions. Having enough food to survive is a constant concern. This book helps us realize that when things get really awful, all that matters is food, water, staying warm, and remaining together as a family. All other concerns fall away.
New York Times bestseller! A heart-stopping post-apocalyptic thriller that's "absorbing from first to last page."*
When a meteor knocks the moon closer to earth, Miranda, a high school sophomore, takes shelter with her family.
Told in a year’s worth of journal entries, Life as We Knew It chronicles the human struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world.
As August turns dark and wintery in northeastern Pennsylvania, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited…
In 1999, fresh out of Harvard, I moved to Zendik Farm—a neo-hippie cult with a radical take on sex and relationships. Since I left in 2004, I’ve been composting the experience into a source of fertility. I've explored not only what drew me to Zendik and kept me there but also how groups like Zendik feed on deficiencies in our cultural soil—and how common it is for us humans to get trapped inside stories. Even—especially—if we assume ourselves immune to cultism. That is, I’ve approached my cult experience with sincere curiosity. So have all the authors on this list. That’s why I love them.
In fictional Union Grove, post-collapse, it takes a cult—the New Faith Church—to sustain a village. Equipped with social cohesion, ecstatic optimism, and shared purpose, the New Faithers come through for their neighbors in surprising and admirable ways.
I love this book because it shows the bright side of cult life. The New Faithers remind me of myself and my fellow Zendiks at our best. For all our failings, we sure did know how to band together to get shit done.
In The Long Emergency celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production, combined with climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely…
I have an idea. A conviction, let's call it, that humanity is not doomed. The Mad Max scenario where civilization collapses, thrusting us into an anarchic hellscape in which the living envy the dead, is totally unrealistic and not likely to happen. So let's imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario in which people come together to help each other, to save what knowledge they can, to build something new and useful. To learn the lessons from the destruction that came before. This is what I tried to imagine in my novel Bannerless, and this is why this topic interests me so much.
When you study the long arc of history you begin to suspect that apocalypses aren't just inevitable, they're common. And so is survival, which is a really heartening thought. Human beings are crazily adaptable, and our ability to come together in communities (ideally, when we're at our best, which granted isn't always and is hard to see sometimes) will aid our survival. Annalee Newitz tells us how this is has happened before, and how it can happen again.
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in Science & Technology
In its 4.5 billion-year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way. Can we survive it? How? In this brilliantly speculative work of popular science, Annalee Newitz, editor of io9.com, explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember explores…
I am a historian of early America and I teach at George Mason University.What got me interested in disaster history was Superstorm Sandy, which ravaged the Jersey Shore (and New York City) in 2012. Sandy destroyed places I cared about—my childhood rollercoaster plunged into the ocean! As I watched the news obsessively, I saw a pattern that was familiar to me from Katrina and from other recent disasters. Quantitative information—how many lives and dollars lost—and insights from hurricane science came first, followed by human-interest stories, uplifting news of relief and resilience, and (eventually) post-disaster investigations and recriminations. I wanted to understand the roots of this pattern—this "culture of calamity." When did it originate? Where did it come from?
Back when people understood hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters as literally being "acts of God," they sensibly concluded that human intervention could not prevent them. Yet that language—and its wide-ranging implications for public policy—has persisted, even as scientists have come to understand the physical causes of disasters and, increasingly, to believe that no disaster is wholly "natural." Ted Steinberg shows how government and corporate leaders' perpetuation of the idea of disasters as "natural" or even divinely ordained helps them to evade responsibility and avoid meaningful policy changes that might prevent future catastrophes. (Ripped from the headlines, climate change denial is a prime example!) Gripping case studies of famous disasters like the Chicago Fire and the San Francisco earthquake make this serious book a compelling read.
As the waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain began to pour into New Orleans, people began asking the big question-could any of this have been avoided? How much of the damage from Hurricane Katrina was bad luck, and how much was poor city planning? Steinberg's Acts of God is a provocative history of natural disasters in the United States. This revised edition features a new chapter analyzing the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, a disaster Steinberg warned could happen when the book first was published. Focusing on America's worst natural disasters, Steinberg argues that it is wrong to…
