Karen Sandler

Tag: post-apocalyptic

  • Best Book of January – Ashfall

    Today, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks What’s the best book you read in January? I’ve actually read a few quite good books this month, but there’s a clear winner–Ashfall by Mike Mullin.

    This post-apocalyptic YA novel starts with a bang, literally. A super-volcano in Yellowstone erupts so powerfully that it flings large chunks of flaming rock a thousand miles away. The main character, an almost-16-year-old boy named Alex, is home alone. His parents and younger sister have gone to visit Alex’s uncle 140 miles away. In true surly teenage fashion (not that all teens are surly, but Alex certainly is), he refuses to go with the rest of his family.

    Then a flaming chunk of volcano falls on his roof and all hell subsequently breaks loose. A series of events lead Alex to decide to go in search of his family, but the ash-covered world has truly ended–no electricity, no communication, and there are some very vicious people roaming the countryside. Luckily, Alex meets up with Darla, whose survival skills complement Alex’s expertise at self-defense, and they’re able to help each other.

    What is especially notable about this book for me is that it stuck with me for days after I read it. Scenes kept drifting into my mind’s eye (like all that ash), bringing me back to the story. Mullin writes the book in such a plausible way. And it’s downright scary to think of what our world would be like if technology disappeared with the exploding of a super-volcano.

    Some of the scenes are very visceral and violent, so it’s not for the faint of heart. In fact, although the book intrigued me from the moment I first heard about it (it was released in September 2011, the same month as my book, Tankborn), I was, to be honest, a little afraid to read it. But it kept coming up when I would search for Tankborn on Amazon (yes, I’m obsessed about my ranking), and I finally decided to order it.

    I’m certainly glad I did, and I’m planning to get Ashen Winter too. The ending of Ashfall just begs for a sequel, and luckily, there’s one ready for me to buy.

    So, what have you read this month?

  • Dystopias & Apocalyptic Dreams

    Two or three times a year, I have a post-apocalyptic dream. Not recurring; it’s different every time. Some disaster has occurred on earth. I’m living with my family under a freeway underpass or in a cave. My life as I knew it has been thoroughly altered.

    Just by itself, Freud would probably have had a field day with a dream like that, but to add to the weirdness, I really like those dreams. I always wake up with a sense of Wow, that was cool! In the dreams, I have it together, I’m powerful and doing a great job taking care of my family and battling whatever the forces are that created the apocalypse. The dreams give me a sense of well-being. Yes, very peculiar.

    I’m guessing that one thing I like about the dreams is the story aspect of them. While I’m in the dream, I’m living that post-apocalyptic life. I’m a part of the landscape, living it first-hand. When I wake, the storyline doesn’t necessarily hold up, but while I’m in it, it’s like experiencing my very own post-apocalyptic movie.

    No surprise that I love reading post-apocalyptic and dystopian books. My first YA, Tankborn, is a dystopian novel. Emptied, a work in progress, is post-apocalyptic. They’ve both been a blast to write.

    So what’s the difference between post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories? Are they essentially the same thing? Definitely not. An apocalypse is a sudden event. Life goes from complete normalcy to utter chaos within a very short time. An asteroid hits earth and the resultant dust cloud & radiation wipes out millions. A disease escapes from a secret lab and kills three-quarters of the population on the planet.

    The story would then proceed from that event, the characters struggling to survive in the midst of disaster. Alliances would be formed, enemies would sprout up to to try to defeat our main characters. By the end, our heroes would have vanquished not only the villains but the desolate landscape itself.

    The creation of a dystopia is a much more gradual process. In a dystopian novel, the evolution of the society it portrays is all backstory, and the main story reveals only hints of how that society came to be as events proceed. If the author were to detail the entire history of how the society developed before she got to the action, her readers’ eyes would glaze over and they’d toss aside the book or delete the sample from their Kindle/Nook/iPad.

    So we jump right into Hunger Games‘ staging of gladiator-style games in which youths fight to the death without knowing exactly the path society took to get there (although it’s a believable extrapolation). The Adoration of Jenna Fox doesn’t detail the decades of scientific development it took to get from today’s medicine to the mystery of how Jenna came to be. Ditto for the Uglies series, where Scott Westerfeld uses another masterful extrapolation to create an entire society that revolves around beauty and fame, in which becoming beautiful is an everyday rite of passage for teens. But none of these worlds/societies happened overnight or due to any sudden, cataclysmic event.

    An apocalypse could lead to a dystopian society, could be the trigger for it. The Forest of Hands and Teeth would qualify, in which a virus of some sort leads to a plague of unconsecrated (i.e., zombies), which then leads to a quasi-religious dystopia. But in Forest, that society took a couple hundred years to develop to the present day depicted in the book.

    If there are examples out there that prove me wrong re: the definition of dystopians vs. post-apocalyptics, I’d be interested in hearing about them. I’d also be interested in more dystopians triggered by apocalyptic events. Leave the titles in a comment.