Call it "post-apocalyptic picaresque." Two of the most intriguing fall books fall into this category: Brian Slattery's Liberation, and Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away World. We talked to Slattery and Harkaway about putting the fun back into the post-apocalypse.

To be sure, there have been funny books about the apocalypse forever. Just look at Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Or the zombie/robot survival guides. Slattery also cites A Boy And His Dog, and the movie Hell Comes To Frogtown. Harkaway cites Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash: "That's definitely one. Post-collapse and funny as hell, just a little scary because it seems too plausible for comfort." Harkaway also mentions Don DeLillo's White Noise.

Says Slattery:

I was pretty inspired by the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Men in Black take on apocalypses — that even though the very fate of the world hangs in the balance, they're sort of a dime a dozen and nothing to get all that upset about. And both of those were pretty mainstream things.

But with novels like The Road achieving mainstream acceptance, it definitely seems as though post-apocalyptic novels have room to expand and create some new niches for themselves, including comical ones. "I'm not sure that post-apocalyptic is a genre, exactly. It would be a very, very broad one," Harkaway says. But he does agree that that type of story has gotten more acceptance lately. "Perhaps it's more that the reaction to this kind of story is less knee-jerk now, and more people are taking them seriously since Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road."

And once you start writing more silly books about the apocalypse, it opens the door to satire. You can use the end of the world to poke fun at the ways the world is messed up today. Says Harkaway:

In The Gone-Away World, I was definitely taking a few swings at the world we live in now. Not so much saying it's absurd as using absurdity to point out how awful it is, and how stupid. We really could make ourselves an apocalypse the way we're going, and we need to get it together. I believe our only hope is in being more human, in finding points of commonality and not, ever, allowing ourselves to be lazy. Peace is not a state of being, it's a constant action - like love.

Slattery says he set out to satirize the ridiculousness of our present-day world when he wrote Liberation, which portrays a massive economic collapse leading to the fall of the United States. It was just his weird luck that the events of his novel started appearing more realistic after it was published.

I'm not in the prediction business at all—that current events and the publication of Liberation converged as they did is really creepy and weird to me. When I wrote Liberation, economic collapse wasn't nearly as immediate a threat as it is now, and my intention was entirely to use it more as a tool for satire—to hold up a funhouse mirror to some of our more serious problems.

The other thing that jumps out at me about both Liberation and TGAW is that they're ultimately sort of hopeful stories. Not everybody dies in the apocalypse, because that wouldn't be much of a story. And they both end with a glimmer of hope that the survivors will be able to create some kind of a just society.

It's like I wrote ages ago: we don't consume post-apocalyptic stories to think about the end of everything. We consume them because we want to imagine surviving the worst disaster imaginable, both because that's intrinsically hopeful, and also because it would mean a simpler life.

Says Harkaway:

I agree entirely that post-apocalyptic stories can be hopeful - some of them aren't, because they're really about how the last of the population dies - and I think they're also attractive because they often promise a simpler life - one without mortgages or difficult choices about environment vs. consumerism. Mine, of course, isn't simpler; the people in TGAW are up against many of the same choices we are - including whether to sacrifice their fellows for their own convenience.

In both Liberation and TGAW, our heroes are rogues, rather than paragons of virtue. In Liberation, the story follows the members of the Slick Six, a colorful group of criminals (sort of) led by Marco, a ruthless killer. And in TGAW, the main survivors are a group of oddballs, including the somewhat demented Gonzo Lubitsch. Why is it more hopeful, or more interesting, to imagine such flawed characters surviving the end of the world?

"Everybody loves a rogue," says Harkaway. "They bring colour to otherwise very bleak situations. They return the human to a world which is otherwise alarmingly stark and humourless... Rogues offer hope - not just of survival, but of fun; the beginning of a new life, rather than just an endless series of hunter-gatherer actions to satisfy basic needs." But of course, Harkaway's characters become less rogueish and more heroic as the story goes on, in a progression he compares to Han Solo going from "smuggler to lover to general."

Also, Slattery says it was important to him to avoid any kind of utopianism or survival of the fittest in Liberation's post-collapse storyline:

A postapocalyptic story in which only the "best" people survive strikes me as kind of misanthropic and even carries the whiff of eugenics and genocide. (Thanks to Orwell and Huxley, who I read as an impressionable kid, I have a serious distrust of utopias because I always end up asking "Utopia for whom?") Because I really like people, I couldn't resist writing about as diverse a group of characters as I could.

I enjoyed Slattery's first novel, Spaceman Blues, a lot, despite a slightly all-over-the-place feeling. Liberation is also all over the place, with a sprawling cast of characters and a huge expansive vision, but it has a much stronger core.

The book's full title is Liberation: Being The Adventures Of The Slick Six After The Collapse Of The United States of America. Which pretty much sums the whole thing up. The U.S. doesn't collapse because of ecological disaster or plague, but just economic crappiness. It's pretty much Brad DeLong's worst nightmare: the U.S. dollar becomes worthless, the foreign lenders all pull their money out, the banks all go under, everyone starves. When things reach their worst point, a former gang of super-criminals called the Slick Six reunite to put things right (sort of.)

We hear a lot about the Slick Six in their heyday: their daring heists, their cunning scams, and so on. Which makes it all the more shocking when we find out that two of the Six have sold themselves into slavery. Or not actually sold, just donated. Slavery is what rises from the rubble of the American economy, when there's no money to pay anyone to do anything. Starving people are willing to give away their freedom in exchange for a roof and semi-regular meals. At first the revival of slavery is a slapdash affair, until someone puts some serious money into it.

That's the other interesting thing about Liberation — capitalism doesn't disappear after the American economy, and the dollar, are gone. The book's main villain is a crime lord named the Aardvark (whom I sort of pictured like the Kingpin from the Daredevil comics) who has the vision to realize that slave plantations can be a limitless source of wealth if someone puts the capital into organizing the economies of scale. He borrows fantastic sums from a Japanese businessman, and turns America's "peculiar institution" into a version of globalization for a seriously fucked world. It's capitalism without any government intervention, as he points out once or twice. (Reading this book reminded me of Eugene Genovese's argument that slavery was a "hybrid" system, both capitalist and non-capitalist.)

The greatest member of the Slick Six, and the book's main character, is Marco, the group's assassin/thief. He's studied fighting and killing from some of the greatest masters, all over the world, and the book is full of his ninja-tastic exploits. He's the one who comes up with a plan to reunite the group, and try to make things right again. Through his quest, we travel all over the world, visiting the New Sioux, a revived Indian tribe, as well as neo-hippies, ravers, and the free state of Asheville. Marco's journey is a weird mash-up of Tarantino and Kerouac, an introspective spiritual odyssey with comic-booky touches.

Liberation does have some flaws: Slattery's prose is lovingly crafted and musical, but there's an awful lot of it. And by the seventh or eighth lyrical, flowing description of a party where people pick up instruments and start playing old rhythm and blues songs, I was tempted to start skimming. But it's a book that rewards attention, and you'll find yourself flipping back after you finish it to find the best parts of its off-kilter odyssey and piece together new connections between its huge and memorable cast of characters. It's also a book that gets even better on the second read, as you pick up on stuff and make more of the connections between the characters. Most of all, the book's vision of a post-U.S.A. America will stick with you afterwards, haunting you and maybe thrilling you a little.

(Sorry, I realized after I started writing this review that Liberation doesn't come out until October, but you can pre-order it on Amazon. And you should do it now, lest the economy collapse between now and then.)