|  One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast . . . a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over your enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.
— Edward Abbey Science fiction literature has always been hospitable to questions of human survival – on hostile planets, in the face of alien invasion, and, especially, after the apocalyptic collapse of civilization. In fact, the aftermath of some global catastrophe has been one of the most popular themes in science fiction. The narrative has little variation: there is a disaster followed by savagery and bitter struggle for survival, with rape and murder commonplace. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that, for much of its classical period, science fiction tended to be strongly at the rightward end of the political spectrum. It is not a coincidence that apocalyptic science fiction is widely read among survivalists; the texts present a kind of life in which individuals are responsible for their own destinies and their moral choices are clear cut. It is true that some of the books see the new world as more peaceful and ordered, more in harmony with nature, than the civilized world that has been destroyed. But there is always a tension between loss and gain, between the new simplicities and the old glories and comfort. Whatever your political take on all this, there is no question that science fiction novels can be tremendously enjoyable, and can provide surprising insights not only into practical survival skills, often in the face of overwhelming odds, but also into the perennial questions of how human culture interacts with human nature.
 William Brinkley, The Last Ship (New York NY: Ballantine Books, 1989), ISBN 0-34535-982-8. After a nuclear war, the Nathan James, a United States destroyer, with 152 men and 26 women aboard, is the only ship that has survived. Her unnamed captain recounts how his ship, in the midst of nuclear winter, and with diminishing fuel, food, and supplies, crisscrosses the oceans in search of uncontaminated land on which to begin repopulating the planet. The captain's narration is thoughtful and sensitive, and the book is a well written, engrossing narrative, filled with attempts to deal with realistically foreseen problems, although some of them – such as the need to systematically repopulate the earth – are unlikely to occur in the usual wilderness survival situation.
 Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (New York NY: HarperCollins, 1999), ISBN 0-06093-139-6. This is a forty-year-old classic of the postapocalyptic genre. People in a small town in Florida must learn to live off the land after a thermonuclear war. The author, whose real name was Harry Hart, in fact served as a government advisor: in 1960, he was a member of the Democratic National Committee; in 1961, he received an American Heritage Foundation Award and served as a consultant to the National Aeronautics and Space Council; from 1963 through 1964, he was a consultant with the Department of Defense. The novel, written in 1959, was not intended primarily as science fiction, but as a realistic scenario for community survival after what was perceived at the time as an almost inevitable nuclear conflict with Russia. The author has clearly thought through the details.
 Robert Heinlein, Farnham’s Freehold (Riverdale NY: Baen Books, 1994), ISBN 0-67172-206-9. Written forty years ago, this is classic Heinlein – outspoken, sexist, individualistic, autocratic, and as outrageous as he could make it. Practical, self-made man Hugh Farnham takes a small group into his underground shelter, survives a thermonuclear war with Russia, and finds himself somehow projected two thousand years into the future. At first, he and his group struggle to survive in a world that appears devoid of other human life. Then he is captured, and he discovers that this world is in fact ruled by the descendants of Africans, who blame whites for the destruction of the world and consider them fit only for slavery. This book is a paean to rugged masculine self-sufficiency, and it arouses great passion in those who read it. Like most Heinlein books, people either love it or hate it.
 Robert Heinlein, Tunnel in the Sky (New York NY: Ballantine Books, 1970), ISBN 0-34535-373-0. A class of high-school seniors, taking a standard – well, standard in a Heinlein high school – ten-day survival test, get marooned on a dangerous planet and have to put their survival skills to practical use. Stranded somewhere in the universe, beyond contact with Earth, at the other end of a tunnel in the sky, the small group of young men and women have to learn to live without the luxuries and laws of their old civilization. Although technically one of his juvenile works, this book is vintage Heinlein.
 Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (Bloomington IN: University of Indiana Press, 1998). First published in 1980, this is a novel of great power by an author who writes both children’s books and skewed, quirky, dark novels for adults. In a remote future in a post-nuclear holocaust England, here called Inland, humanity has regressed to an iron-age, semiliterate state, represented by the language Walker speaks in the book. In this society, haunted by memories of a civilization dead for 3,000 years, Walker must learn how to become a “connexion man,” to recite the stories, interpret the omens, and “think on the idear of what things myt be.” As Walker puts it, “Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we don't know what it is. What a way to live.” The book is an extended meditation on the purposes of civilization and the human need for meaning, whether in science or in myth, in order to survive.
 Ursula K. LeGuin, Always Coming Home (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1985), ISBN 0-52022-735-2. LeGuin is the daughter of famous anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of the biography of Ishi, the last Yahi Indian – whose name, by the way, was adapted by George Stewart for the hero of Earth Abides. This book is a remarkable piece of speculative anthropology which describes the culture of the Kesh, inhabitants of the Napa Valley in California long after some unnamed catastrophe has sunk the cities of the coast. Although it contains some narrative, the book is primarily a collage of verse, tales, reports, drawings, music, and even the recipes of this minutely constructed matriarchal culture. This is not your usual postapocalyptic novel of survival, but it is about survival nonetheless, and perhaps more than most.
 Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Footfall (New York NY: Ballantine Books, 1986), ISBN 0-34532-344-0. In their earlier work Lucifer’s Hammer, Niven and Pournelle crashed a giant comet into the Earth. Here, it is an invasion of elephant-like aliens who put humanity to the survival test. In some ways, this is an attempt at transcending the genre, with a sprinkling of popular-novel summer-reading pop psychology and sex scenes. But it is still – stylistically and politically – traditional science fiction. A virtue of the book is that the aliens are really alien, with complex nonhuman motivations. As in their earlier book, the novel contains realistic descriptions of long-term survival situations.
 Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Lucifer’s Hammer (New York NY: Ballantine Books, 1978), ISBN 0-44920-813-3. This is one of the great classic TEOTWAWKI – The End Of The World As We Know It – science fiction novels. A giant comet collides with Earth, causing earthquakes, tidal waves, and destruction of unbelievable proportions. Civilization rapidly deteriorates, and those who survive the impact must learn to live in the aftermath of the devastation, banding together or turning savagely against each other in order to survive. It contains some very realistic descriptions of long-term survival situations.
 George Stewart, Earth Abides (New York NY: Fawcett Books, 1971), ISBN 0449213013. This time it’s a viral plague of unparalleled destructive force, springing up almost simultaneously in every corner of the globe, that all but destroys the human race. One survivor, strangely immune to the effects of the epidemic because of a rattlesnake bite, ventures forward to experience a world without humans. The hero is named Isherwood, abbreviated to Ish – a neat reference to Ishi, the last Yahi Indian immortalized by Theodora Kroeber. Written, remarkably, in 1949, the book presciently explores the ecological effects of a global disaster which eliminates only humans. Civilization decays, and humans turn full circle into hunter-gatherers, but those who manage to survive find themselves linked more closely – and humbly – to the earth. This is a science fiction classic, which explores, like the best wilderness novels, the interplay between humanity and nature, the civilized and the the natural. On Ishi, see Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1976), ISBN 0-52000-675-5.
 Walter J. Williams, The Rift (New York NY: HarperCollins, 2000), ISBN 0-06105-794-0. An earthquake – 8.9 on the Richter scale and the world's biggest since 1755 – hits little Madrid, Missouri. A strange white mist smelling of sulfur rises from the crevassed ground. Dams and levees break, the Mississippi changes course, and St. Louis and Memphis are flattened. Fire, flood, and chaos follow, and ordinary people are pushed to the limits of ability and sanity as they learn to survive. The author follows nine characters through the aftermath, and provides lots of geological detail. Take this book with you if you are going to Antarctica for a year; it is definitely a doorstopper.
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