Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I would second Paolo Bacigalupi, there's a couple other novels set in the sameish world, The Drowned Cities and Ship Breaker. Neither are as good as The Windup Girl, but they're still entertaining.

Not always dystopian, but Ian McDonald has a few books that are post-something sci-fi ish. If you're looking for something a bit farther out there, William Burroughs Cities of the Red Night trilogy. Also Jack McDevitt has a couple post-apocalyptic novels, Eternity Road and one other whose name escapes me right now.

Author william Gibson
Sprawl Trilogy
Bridge trilogy
Bigend Trilogy

I just finished "Station Eleven" yesterday. Emily St. John Mandel. Very good book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three ... em_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death%27s_End

Best thing since Frank Herbert's Dune, IMHO.

And speaking of Frank Herbert, I was surprised by the lack of his other works. The white plague, specifically, but all his books are about societies and how they change under duress.

But I was a teenager when I read all of his works, so maybe it isn't as great as I remember...

Although not usually classified as such, Infinite Jest by DFW does fall under the heading. Thematically speaking, it's relevant to ERE as it depicts a hyper consumer society (individual years are sold for branding rights). Plus its funny as shit. The President, a former crooner and germaphobe, ran under the platform "Make American Cleaner" which, well, you know...

How about:

"Cat's Cradle"- Vonnegut
"A Clockwork Orange"-Burgess
"Blindness"-Saramago

The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster

Darwin's Radio by Bear
The Water Knife is another one by Bacigalupi
Slow Apocalypse by Varley
Star's Reach by JMG, like Jacob said, not really post-apocalyptic, but it's pretty dystopian.

Thanks for linking this thread in the classic posts thread Jacob! Found many of my favorites here, and quite a few to add to my list to check out.

I wanted to throw out there, for anyone like me that grew up reading comic books and also likes zombie stories lol, check out Peter Cline's Ex-Heroes books (no affiliation).

Ex-Heroes Series by Peter Clines - Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/series/67447-ex-heroes

I found them quite enjoyable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up

I'm currently rereading the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. (8 books, ~850k words, longer than the bible). This was some of the first science fiction I ever read (special-ordered from the U.S.A. via the LBS and eagerly awaiting the two month steamboat transit shipping time). Rereading it, I realized its relevance to ERE2.

Recently, @AH recommended to me the book, “The Water Knife” by Pablo Bacigalupi. It is set in the southwest some unspecified time in the future. The focus is on water scarcity, the battle for water rights and the results and experiences of refugees from states that lost water like Texas and Arizona. The book builds on the excellent non fiction book, “Cadillac Desert,” extrapolating the ideas and issues into the future. I’d highly recommend it.

https://www.amazon.com/Dry-Neal-Shuster ... 481481975/

More like a contemporary disaster. Specifically, one day the water in CA is switched off completely and surprisingly (hinted as being water politics wrt the Colorado River, also see "Water Knife" mentioned above and around various old climate threads). The book, which is "young adult"-litt. albeit not overly so, follows a handful of teenagers in Orange County and is almost exclusively written from each of their respective subjective point of views, each person describing how they experienced a given situation. There's Alyssa and Garrett (clueless middle class suburban kids), Kelton (prepper family), Henry (rich kid who tries to profit), and Jacqui (gifted dropout, now homeless). The book is interesting because much of the focus is on how people change once they get desperate. Since a person can only live about 3 days w/o water and nothing is coming (various relief agencies are conveniently---for the story---occupied with a hurricane on the east coast) the timeline is pretty fast.