Comments on: Book ‘n movie roundup

By: Duck and cover

Duck and cover — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:56:12 +0000

[...] We tore our short-sleeved dress shirts, and the girls in the typing pool were vaporized! I hardly ever read post-apocalyptic stories anymore, but I feel like I would panic less at reading post-nuclear apocalypse than post-environmental [...]

By: » Sequel Summer: People of Sparks, by Jeanne DuPrau Parenthetical.net: Musings and snark about YA lit, libraries, and geekdom, from an overly opinionated middle school librarian.

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 14:08:11 +0000

[...] of Sparks is the sequel to City of Ember. The entire population of dying Ember (…yeah) follows Lina and Doon aboveground for their [...]

By: fairdice

fairdice — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:48:55 +0000

Oh wow — WordPress replaced my double hyphen &45;&45; with an em-dash! Okay, that just beats LiveJournal to pieces…

By: martini_corona

martini_corona — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 18:27:30 +0000

Mm, post-apocolyptic YA sci-fi. I was a big fan of anything by John Christopher. The Tripods… and then he had all these other ones, like one with mutants (Beyond the Burning Lands was the first one in that trilogy) and one about a walled-off city of civilized people and the people who are stuck outside the walls in the woods, which I can’t remember the name of. They were all relentlessly depressing and I LOVED them. Actually if you want a more adult post-apocolyptic read, you should borrow my copy of Vanishing Point by Michaela Roessler.

May I recommend that you balance the depressing post-apocalyptic food group with the telepathic horses/dragons/”special friends” food group?

By: fairdice

fairdice — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 16:03:24 +0000

Wow! And I’d just resigned myself to the notion that there was no plausible way to track down the book from what I remembered about it.

Yes please, I’d be happy to borrow and reread it — when you’re done.

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 15:50:21 +0000

Oh my god! You have no idea how excited I was reading your description of that book – that’s This Time of Darkness by H.M. Hoover, and it was my favorite book when I was a kid! That’s what started me on the whole YA post-apocalyptic sci-fi genre! (You’re right that there was no explicit apocalypse, I don’t think, but the reason the City was built was that the world was horribly overpopulated…I think. There must have been some sort of disaster, right? I’d have to re-read it. Which you can also do, if you want – it’s sitting on my bookshelf at home. :) )

Yay! That’s one of those books I didn’t think anyone else had read.

By: fairdice

fairdice — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 14:48:47 +0000

My pleasure! Glad you enjoyed it.

Your synopsis of City of Ember reminds me of an eerie book from my childhood, a story of two kids trying to escape from a gigantic underground city with hundreds of levels, where the surface-dwellers deposited all the poor people to get them out of the way, or something like that. The girl has lived there all her life, and the boy accidentally got in from outside; neither knows it’s underground. They eventually escape because the door out/up has a written description of what keys to press to open it, and the girl is illicitly literate, unlike even the cops chasing them.

There, something depressing and fatalistic with no apocalypse required! Feel better?