Do you have a favorite survival novel?


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The Reading Corner has been pretty quiet, which seems odd considering what a literate bunch the community seems like. 

Do you have a favorite book that features survival as an important theme? Doesn't have to be contemporary wilderness survival!

Mine is currently Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. There's not too much I can say about the story without massive, massive spoilers. However the setting is modern day and the book opens with the moon breaking apart. This has huge consequences for the planet and humanity, and ultimately results in some pretty intense survival scenarios as different strategies are applied by people and groups to deal with challenges. Highly recommended in you have an interest in speculative sci-fi!

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I know this is for novels...but for non-fiction I highly recommend:

Disaster at the Pole: The Tragedy of the Airship Italia and the 1928 Nobile Expedition to the North Pole

 

Disaster at the Pole

A really amazing story.

 

For fiction I stand firmly beside:

The Terror

The Terror by Dan Simmons

The men on board HMS Terror have every expectation of finding the Northwest Passage. When the expedition's leader, Sir John Franklin, meets a terrible death, Captain Francis Crozier takes command and leads his surviving crewmen on a last, desperate attempt to flee south across the ice. But as another winter approaches, as scurvy and starvation grow more terrible, and as the Terror on the ice stalks them southward, Crozier and his men begin to fear there is no escape. A haunting, gripping story based on actual historical events, The Terror is a novel that will chill you to your core.

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Obviously Walden is an essential book for anyone who likes to read about living in nature with the bare essentials.

I don't know if I'd count Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, but the second part about living as a tramp in England in the 1920's is a sort of 'urban survival'. I've never really read any fiction with a survival theme.

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I won't be very original here when I mention "The Road". I was basically raised on Fallout games and that was my take on the Apocalypse for a very long time - a scenario where people learned to live in the new reality and my character never went hungry. When I first read "The Road", I realised that this is how an actual Apocalypse would look like. Desperate people just trying to delay the inevitable death by a day or two. People that do not trust anyone because everyone is just as desperate. It was an amazing experience and the movie does the book justice, I think.

Another one is, of course, a zombie scenario: "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War". Loads of us know the film with Brad Pitt, but the book is something completely different. It is an account of a few people who all survived the zombie virus outbreak in surprising and interesting ways. It reads like a diary and I really enjoyed it.

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On 08/07/2017 at 7:50 PM, Miniwizard said:

Still rather fond of 'Rogue Male' by Geoffrey Household.

@Miniwizard, agreed that is a classic, really need to re-read it to see if it is as good as I remember.

I think The Martian by Andy Weir (now a popular movie I believe) was a great read, especially as one that started life as a self-publication. But possibly one of my favourite books, which resonates with me whenever I play some kind of survival game, is The Stand by Stephen King - it is boss! :)

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