Green Planets by Gerry Canavan

ruins of America scavenging for food after an unspecified apocalypse in what is surely the most depressing book ever to be chosen for Oprah’s Book Club.
    Will McCarthy, Bloom (1998). Humanity has retreated to the asteroid belt after a gray goo disaster consumes Earth.
    Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse (2011). Short story collection that includes catastrophes of all kinds, from ecological to pandemic to zombie.
    Vonda McIntyre, Dreamsnake (1978). In a post-apocalyptic (but also radically bioengineered) desert America, the bite of the dreamsnake produces drug-like hallucinations in humans.
    Bill McKibben, Eaarth (2010). The environmental activist argues that we have already so altered Earth’s natural systems and climate that it would be best to begin thinking of it as another planet altogether.
    Judith Merrill, “That Only a Mother” (1948). Nightmarish exploration of the effects of radiation on pregnancy and motherhood.
    China Miéville, Embassytown (2011). Miéville’s first foray into space opera, set on a human colony on an alien world at the margins of known space. See also the surreal, dark-comedic Kraken (2010).
    Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). Monks attempt to retain modern knowledge in the catastrophic dark age centuries following a nuclear war.
    Walter M. Miller and Martin H. Greenberg (eds.), Beyond Armageddon (1985). Bracing collection of stories of what happens after the end. Also of interest to students of the apocalypse: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse (edited by John Joseph Adams, 2008) and The Apocalypse Reader (edited by Justin Taylor, 2007).
    David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004). Multiple futures populate the middle sections of this formally innovative novel: cloned human fabricants in a dystopic Brave New World, and then tribal hunters and gatherers in Hawaii in a post-apocalyptic, post-technological future a little further down the line.
    Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962). This early feminist SF novel, anticipating later developments of the 1970s a decade in advance, is also noteworthy for its imagination of alternative biologies and ecosystems.
    L. E. Modesitt Jr., The Forever Hero trilogy (1987–88). Superhero story set after ecological collapse that has its nearly immortal hero seeking to salvage a devastated Earth.
    Judith Moffett, The Ragged World (1991). Aliens come and demand we clean up our mess.
    Ward Moore, “Lot” (1953) and “Lot’s Daughter” (1954). Deeply disturbing visions of life after nuclear catastrophe in which we will, Moore suggests, finally be free to be the monsters we always were.
    Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1516). More’s imaginary island remains the template for utopian form to this day.
    William Morris, “News from Nowhere” (1890). Socialist utopia that is both anticapitalist and anti-progress, functioning instead as a primarily agrarian society in tune with nature.
    James Morrow, This Is the Way the World Ends (1985). Survivors of a nuclear war are put on trial by the Unadmitted—the time-traveling spirits of the people of the future who will now never exist.
    Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye (1974). Overpopulation novel in which a space-faring humanity encounters an alien culture whose bioforms must either reproduce or die, leading to inevitable cycles of population explosion followed by total civilizational collapse. The Moties (as they are called) have a social archetype called Crazy Eddie who believes that there must be some solution to this cycle of boom and bust; the humans realize with horror that if the Moties were able to get off their home world, “Crazy Eddie” would be right, and furthermore their rapid population cycle would help the Moties quickly overrun the galaxy. Fans of the fantasy genre will also be interested in Niven’s “The Magic Goes Away” (1976), which imagines a magic fantasy world experiencing the