Time of the Fourth Horseman by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

But the tone is somewhat different: The good is sweeter, the evil is more sadistic, and the setting is harsher, because it's the world after a nuclear holocaust. Like The Stand, it's an end-of-the-world novel, with epic sweep, apocalyptic drama, and a cast of vividly realized characters. Swan Song is often compared to Stephen King's The Stand, and for the most part, readers who enjoy one of the two novels, will enjoy the other. They gather their followers and travel toward each other, all bent on saving a blonde girl named Swan from the Man of Many Faces. Swan Song is rich with such characters as an ex-wrestler named Black Frankenstein, a New York City bag lady who feels power coursing from a weird glass ring, a boy who claws his way out of a destroyed survivalist compound. I haven't read it in about ten years, but this topic made pick it up again. If you like 'The Stand' then you have to read 'Swan Song'īy Robert McCammon. On the other hand, maybe people are no longer idealistic enough to believe that an apocalypse would wipe the slate clean and offer us another chance. Maybe it's because there's less threat of atomic war, maybe people are more optimistic about the future. I have the impression that apocalyptic stories are less popular now (although that said, the Matrix is apocalyptic enough). Either you could continue with institutional racism, or you could try and do away with it. It was basically talking about racism, and how an apocalypse offered new opportunities. Farnham's Freehold by Heinlein deals with how, in the future, black people would control the world. In Day of the Triffids, this is quite overt: characters talk about the need to create a better society, of abandoning outmoded morality. What's interesting about apocalyptic stories is that, hidden in the background, there's often a feeling that the apocalypse is almost to be welcomed. And of course there 'Day of the Triffids' by John Wyndham.

Time of the Fourth Horseman by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro