The rest of the list includes a lot of science fiction stalwarts - Charles Stross, Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown each have two books on the list. Also on the list are Nick Harkaway's Gone Away World, Patrick Ness' young-adult telepathy novel The Knife Of Never Letting Go, Iain M. Banks' Matter, Alastair Reynolds' House Of Sons, Ken MacLeod's The Night Sessions and Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

I haven't read any Auster for nearly a decade, but the description of Man In The Dark sounds really intriguing, and I might have to hunt down a copy. [Guardian]

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.

In The Gone Away World, there's a huge senseless war in a fictional central Asian country, and the British decide to unleah their secret weapon: the Go Away Bombs, which are only supposed to be inhumanly massive weapons of mass destruction but turn out to be far, far worse. The Go Away Bomb, in theory, strips the information away from matter, turning it into raw chaos and essentially erasing it. But in practice, the Go Away Bomb turns people and objects into Stuff, a sort of raw ontological matter which people shape into monstrous, or crazy forms using their thoughts and basest emotions.

The other half of the book is a sort of coming-of-age narrative of an un-named narrator and his friend, Gonzo Lubitsch. Without giving too much away, there's a massive twist about two thirds of the way through the book which puts everything you've read up until then in a new light and makes the whole exercise much more worthwhile, if you're willing to buy into it.

Beyond that, the Gone Away World is an alarming mash-up of genres. It's sort of one-half post-apocalyptic horror story, and one-half prim comedy of manners: call it P.G. Margaret Atwoodhouse. It doesn't always work, and there are sections where Harkaway goes off on a three-page comic digression that aren't nearly as funny as he seems to think. But over time, you start to recognize a kind of over-arching logic to the overly chatty narrative voice. It's like the voice of someone who's stared into the face of non-existence, and mangled existence, and is trying to maintain a whole image of the world with jokes and weird patter.

The most compelling parts of the book, frequently, have to do with war or military training. The main character gets dragged into the military life unwillingly, but somehow becomes a very assured guide to the realities of combat and preparedness. (The fact that Harkaway is the son of famous spy novelist John le Carré may have something to do with his ease at describing derring-do.) And then the entertaining story of crazy warfare turns into the story of how the world dissolves into goo. Here's an early description of the formless Stuff eating a bunch of soldiers, in which the Stuff literally becomes a sort of formless personification of warfare:

The Stuff is ragged and wispy. It is encountering some pressure or energy at our circumference, and responding to it. Things are happening at the meniscus: familiar shapes are appearing — armed men, vehicles, guns. They shimmer and collapse into one another, getting more solid. Some of them are ludicrous or awful. A small group charges across the border, Iwo Jima style, brothers in arms. They are too close together, weirdly awkward, and as they turn, I see that they are conjoined, all seven of them. The sergeant's hand on his corporal's back, urging him on, melds smoothly into the uniform and the spine. The soldier behind, supporting the sergeant, is merged with him at the hip. They struggle, scream and tumble, bringing down the others. They are an image to be seen from one side, not real men at all. They die, probably because they have not enough hearts between them, and slump to the ground, where a corpse-carpet is forming, the familiar exterior decor of modern skirmishing. I can hear the bullets whizzing, though there is as yet no-one to fight. This is not an attack. It's atmosphere. It's war as a condition, war as furniture. We are under siege by a notion of war.

As the Stuff gets more pervasive and eats into everything, the world goes fully post-apocalyptic, and the livable world is reduced to a single zone, maintained by some mysterious substance that neutralizes the Stuff. As reality and personhood become more and more subjective, people have to decide how to deal with the Newly Made, people who didn't exist until the Stuff created them. And meanwhile, an evil corporation called Jorgmund is trying to take over what's left of the world.

Did I mention there were ninjas? They play an increasingly large role as the book goes on, after having seemed like an afterthought in the beginning. They turn out to be bad guys, and have to fight a whole troupe of mimes, who turn out to be good guys. And there are ninjas versus bees, as well. It's actually hard to convey quite how silly this book gets at times. A lot of the characters feel a bit throw-away, consisting mostly of a funny name and one larger-than-life characteristic. But the last third of the book is almost pure genius, bringing together a lot of threads that seemed random in order to pull out a series of satisfying, if crazy, surprises.

All in all, The Gone Away World is a frantically entertaining journey into the polluted heart of the 21st century war machine. But it's also a zany adventure comedy about martial arts fighters battling on the ramparts of an evil fortress and finding true love. Harkaway somehow takes that pungent mixture and turn it into a deep fable about discovering your real self when everyone's melting around you. It's a story that could only work as science fiction, and yet it's also bigger than its science fictional conceit.