Please help me find these 1980s YA postapoc books

November 10, 2021 1:42 PM

I read these two books in my local library in my tweens, and my kid is just about getting to the age where he'd really like them. But I can't for the life of me remember the titles, and you folks seemingly have a close to 100% success rate with these questions, so can you help me track 'em down?

Book number one was a time-travel loop, in which a lab-grown supergenius from an underground postapoc creche is sent back in time to avert the apocalypse. He gets there, meets a family, Things Happen, and then he figures out that the company that built the underground postapoc creche did so because he went back in time to try to avert the apocalypse. Maybe "the Loomis company"? It's not Z for Zachariah nor is it The Evolution of Gloria Loomis. The cover was really, really green.

Book number two featured maybe someone Rebel-looking on a horse on the cover? Postapoc farmers, is pretty much all I remember, except for the end-of-novel twist. The main meat animals in this postapoc America look like humans, but are supposedly neither conscious nor sentient. Then, at the end of the book you find out that they're actually all POWs/slaves/etc. that have had their tongues cut out. That is so bleak to me that I have a hard time believing that it was in the YA section, but I clearly remember it on those shelves in between the kid-zone and the grownup-zone, on a display shelf, with I think Dragondrums and A Wrinkle in Time. I also clearly remember the conversation with the librarian about how maybe the whole accidental-cannibal thing was maybe darker than they had thought when they'd bought it.

Any leads? Thank you kindly for your posting.

posted by BrunoLatourFanclub to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Book one sounds a little like “A Rag, a bone and a Hank of hair” by Nicholas Fisk. The story is set in a future world where scientists have managed to clone a family from the Second World War. The clones don’t know what they are and have been set up in a mock WW2 environment. A boy, Brin, is chosen to visit the family to observe them. At first he is horrified by what he views as their savagery, but he is increasingly sucked into their world. Ultimately Brin realises that he, too, is a clone.

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for - there’s no time loop - but it does include some of the elements you describe.
posted by damsel with a dulcimer at 2:17 PM on November 10, 2021

You mentioned how old you were, but not the time period in which you would have read them... that might help, to know that they're at least X many years old.

They both sound vaguely familiar to me, but I read thousands of middle-grade and YA books as a kid, and they're not ringing an immediate bell.

Is there any chance that the second book might have been an older science fiction title, say, pre-90s, rather than deliberately YA as in the current market? I grew up in the 80s, and we had one teeny tiny shelf of stuff that was in-between kids and adults - it had things like Sweet Valley High mixed with SF & F pulled down from the adult section. Horror, though, was all in the adult section.
posted by stormyteal at 2:54 PM on November 10, 2021

Response by poster: I think we're in the same age group; I read these books between 1980 and 1990. That's why I put "1980s postapoc" in the title :) And yes, I do understand that YA as a genre didn't really exist then. We had maybe four or five rotating displays, with one devoted to Sweet Valley High & clones, another dedicated to, I dunno, whatever the Hardy Boys & their clones were doing that decade, and another of SF&F.

The librarians were doing their best, but the bleakness of the prisoners-as-proteins book makes me think that it was shelved poorly, because the protagonist was a teen. The book wasn't for teens, though, I feel pretty certain. Book ends with the tongueless protag chained & headed off to slaughter, I seem to recall. The first one for certain was for young folks, though, as the apocalypse takes a backseat to "supergenius from the future can't figure out American breakfast appliances!" and other such light-hearted material.
posted by BrunoLatourFanclub at 3:03 PM on November 10, 2021

Is book 2 Through Darkest America by Neil Barret Jr? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/85564.Through_Darkest_America
posted by peppercorn at 3:43 PM on November 10, 2021

#2 is the premise to a short story by Piers Anthony which I read in a collection around 1989. I imagine that story could have been expanded into a YA book but the version I read had explicit sex in it.
posted by bq at 4:50 PM on November 10, 2021

There’s a book with a similar premise titled ‘Meat’ by D’Lacey but it was published in 2008.
posted by bq at 4:57 PM on November 10, 2021

I'm leaving the stuff below the line just in case, but I'm reading through that Piers Anthony short story right now, and it fits awfully well. It's called In the Barn, and it was first published in 1971, in an anthology titled Again, Dangerous Visions. It's in reprint and even available in ebook form.
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The second one has some concepts in common with the movie Soylent Green and the book it was based on, Make Room! Make Room! - but I've never read that book. It appears there were movie tie-in editions published with the novel titled as Soylent Green, too.

TV Tropes has a page with lists of works with a similar concept, "Human Resources", but I'm not seeing anything that correlates well with what you described. (But then, TV Tropes itself is human-powered, lol... so stuff just gets added when someone happens to notice where it fits, y'know?)
posted by stormyteal at 5:44 PM on November 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

You might also consider asking for better post-apocalyptic ya fiction.... There's been a lot published since then that your kid would probably like.
posted by blueberry monster at 7:48 PM on November 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

I don't suppose there's any chance the first one is The Green Futures of Tycho? Certainly involves a time-traveling supergenius and has "green" in the title, and in some editions a green cover, but I don't remember there being a post-apoc angle or a scheming company.
posted by escabeche at 10:47 PM on November 10, 2021