Lauren Carter: Survival in CanLit
Lauren Carter is author of Swarm, a dystopian novel set "in a not-so-far-off future of diminished energy reserves and collapsing economies." Here, she recommends some excellent books that riff on the theme of survival. *** Search your library catalogue or bookstore for the term survival and you’ll likely pull up a list of dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels, even though the theme of characters facing threatening external forces echoes throughout literature. When working on Swarm, a novel in which my characters navigate a disintegrating city during a future economic collapse and subsequently learn to live off the land, I read several works that spoke to this experience—both historically, in present day, and in the future. Here are a few that inspired me, along with contemporary works that add to the theme.
