Book picks similar to
White Sands by Nicholas Sansbury Smith


sci-fi
science-fiction
short-stories
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Post-Human Omnibus


David Simpson - 2014
    What will happen when humans can live forever? Or die with just a few keystrokes? How will our governments react as they lose control of their citizens' data? And how do you feel about uploading your mind into a computer so that you may live on after death?The Post-Human Omnibus is the perfect book for these times. It's an epic series of stories that explore all sides of humanity's future through science fiction, from both near-future dystopias to far-future utopias (and everything in between). Written by award winning author & TEDx speaker David Simpson, this collection explores many different genres from thrillers to romances to mysteries and much more.

Hater


David Moody - 2006
    Christened “Haters” by the media, the attackers strike without warning and seemingly without reason. Within seconds, normally rational, self-controlled people become frenzied, vicious killers. As the carnage mounts, one thing soon is clear: everyone, irrespective of race, gender, age, or class, has the potential to become either a Hater or a victim. At any moment, even friends and family can turn on one another with violent intent. In the face of this mindless terror, all McCoyne can do is secure his family, seek shelter, and watch as the world falls apart. But when he bolts the front door, the question remains: Is he shutting the danger out or locking it in?

V-Wars


Jonathan MaberryDacre Stoker - 2012
    The genes that once created vampires. Now, all over the world, people are beginning to transform. To develop unnatural and unstoppable hungers. Are they still human? Or is there now a brand new link in the food chain?The world is filled with vampire legend. Each culture with its own unique brand of blood-thirsty killer, but the stories aren't mere myth. Strange, savage, immensely powerful, and driven by a need to feed on human blood - vampires are returning.V-Wars is the chronicle of the first vampire war. From the savage murders committed by the patient zero of the plague to full-out battles with vampire terrorist cells, these are the stories of the most terrifying war mankind has ever faced.The vampire wars have begun.The world will scream. . .

Halfway to Free


Emma Donoghue - 2020
    To offset the devastation of climate change, state-of-the-art birth control has made daycares and playgrounds things of the past. As tempting as the government inducements are to remain child-free, Miriam’s curiosity about the people who “drop out” of society to become parents grows. When she finds a like-minded partner, she must choose between the rewarding comforts she knows and the unknowable mysteries of being a mother.Emma Donoghue’s Halfway to Free is part of Out of Line, an incisive collection of funny, enraging, and hopeful stories of women’s empowerment and escape. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.

The Atlantis Gene


A.G. Riddle - 2013
    They will set off a race to unravel the deepest secrets of human existence--and an event that could change humanity forever.

The Apocalypse


Peter Meredith - 2013
    It's a time of misery and death for most, however there are some who are lucky, some who are fast, and some who are just too damned tough to go down without a fight. This is their story.

Among the Nameless Stars


Diana Peterfreund - 2012
    But the journey was not an easy one.Featuring narrow escapes, thrilling boat races and at least one deadly volcanic wasteland.

Rebel Radio


Boyd Craven - 2015
    Can be read on it's own or as a companion after The World Burns 5: The World Bleeds!Life after an EMP puts the USA in the dark ages is not an easy one. Life is dangerous and difficult enough without humans preying on each other. Don, an alcoholic and a gamer girl called 'Z' make an odd introduction together and find themselves thrust into a survival situation neither of them are prepared to endure. A ghost from Don's past surfaces, one who's responsible for his pain and suffering. Can both Don and Z endure in a world that has gone crazy, when all they want to do is keep on living?

The Last Rail-Rider


Jason Gurley - 2014
    The empty towns. The rusted-out cars. The corpses, everywhere.He doesn't know why he rides the rails. He just does. The trains never take him away from the ruin. The trains never take him anywhere.Until one day they carry him to a little town called Black Hole, Kentucky, and he meets a strange woman who knows him.Who knows everything.

Bird Box


Josh Malerman - 2014
    One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remains, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now that the boy and girl are four, it's time to go, but the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat—blindfolded—with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children's trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. Something is following them all the while, but is it man, animal, or monster?Interweaving past and present, Bird Box is a snapshot of a world unraveled that will have you racing to the final page.

The Silence


Tim Lebbon - 2015
    Then there is light, there are voices, and they feed... Swarming from their prison, they multiply and thrive. To scream, even to whisper, is to summon death.Deaf for many years, Ally knows how to live in silence. Now, it is her family's only chance of survival. To leave their home, to shun others, to find a remote haven where they can sit out the plague. But will it ever end? And what kind of world will be left?

Darla's Story


Mike Mullin - 2013
    Her mother retreated into hyper-religiosity, leaving Darla to run the family farm almost single-handedly. But those struggles pale in comparison to the one she faces after the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, plummeting the world--and Darla's small corner of Iowa--into a cataclysmic natural disaster.

The Fireman


Joe Hill - 2016
    Stay cool.No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.

Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End


Manel Loureiro - 2007
    But he never expected that his anonymous blog would ultimately record humanity’s last days.The end of the world has begun…Governments scramble to stop the zombie virus, people panic, so-called “Safe Havens” are established, the world erupts into chaos; soon it’s every man, woman, and child for themselves. Armed only with makeshift weapons and the will to live, a lone survivor will give mankind one last chance against…Apocalypse Z

Way of the Wolf


E.E. Knight - 2001
    Possessed of an unnatural hunger, bloodthirsty Reapers rule the planet, sucking out human blood and souls. Starting in revenge for the loss of his parents, on to fellow soldiers, Lieutenant David Valentine intends to fight back in this western-style frontier.