Books like “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

What to read after “A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller Jr.: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
Earth Abides
George R. Stewart · 1949
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
A plague kills nearly everyone on Earth. An ecologist emerges from the mountains to find empty cities and a few survivors, and spends the rest of his life watching a new, smaller society take shape without the old world's machinery.
2
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · 1969
Similar atmosphere: “Satire” and “Philosophical”
- Satire
- Philosophical
Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain's assistant and prisoner of war in Dresden, becomes unstuck in time, living his life out of order among moments in the war and on another planet. His flat, looping account turns a firebombing and a life's small cruelties into a dark joke about fate.
3
The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham · 1951
Same genre: “Post-apocalyptic fiction” and “Science fiction”
- Post-Apocalyptic World
- Apocalypse
A meteor shower blinds most of humanity, leaving a few sighted survivors in a world where walking, venomous plants have escaped from farms. A young man and a small group try to reach safety and decide what kind of society can be rebuilt.
4
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury · 1953
Similar atmosphere: “Satire”
- Satire
- Forbidden Knowledge
Guy Montag is a fireman who burns books in a future where reading is a crime and screens fill every quiet moment. After a young neighbour asks him whether he is happy, curiosity makes him hide a book of his own, and he begins to question everything his job stands for.
5
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick · 1968
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- Post-Apocalyptic World
In a dust-choked future, a bounty hunter is paid to retire androids that have escaped to Earth and passed as human. As he tracks them down he starts to question what makes a life real, and whether he can trust his own memories.
6
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley · 1932
Similar atmosphere: “Satire” and “Philosophical”
In a future where citizens are engineered for contentment and kept calm with a drug called soma, Bernard Marx and the Savage John discover the cost of a stable, pleasure-driven society. John's arrival from a reservation exposes the emptiness behind the World State's comfort.
7
We
Yevgeny Zamyatin · 1924
Similar atmosphere: “Satire” and “Philosophical”
- Satire
- Philosophical
In the glass city of OneState, citizens live by a strict timetable and are known only by numbers. When the mathematician D-503 begins to keep a private journal, a woman named I-330 draws him into a movement that wants to tear down the walls of the ordered world.
8
Severance
Ling Ma · 2018
Similar atmosphere: “Satire”
A millennial office worker in New York keeps showing up to her publishing job as a fever turns people into repetitive, wandering shells. Her account of the collapse moves between satire of work and the quiet end of the world.
9
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 1962
Similar atmosphere: “Satire” and “Philosophical”
- Satire
- Philosophical
Alex, a teenager who loves violence and classical music, leads his gang through nights of brutal crime. When the state captures him, it offers to cure his impulses with an experimental treatment, making him the subject of a system that manufactures both good and evil.
10
Blindness
José Saramago · 1995
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
A driver suddenly goes blind, and the same blindness spreads through the city in a wave. The first victims are quarantined in an abandoned asylum, where order collapses, and one doctor's wife pretends to be blind so she can stay with her husband.
11
Solaris
Stanisław Lem · 1961
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
A scientist arrives at a station orbiting the ocean planet Solaris, where the crew is haunted by visitors shaped from their own memories. As the planet resists every attempt to understand it, he confronts what the living sea seems to be doing to them.
12
Anthem
Ayn Rand · 1938
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- Forbidden Knowledge
In a future run by the collective, the word I has no meaning and all work is done for the good of all. Equality 7-2521 breaks the rules by doing forbidden research and falling in love, then flees a society that cannot allow an individual to exist.