It was important to me to write the survival skills described in my debut novel, The Last One, as accurately as possible. My main character isn’t an expert, and I needed to know what mistakes she could make. There are also characters who are experts, and I wanted to be able to write them convincingly as well. That’s why I undertook weeks of hands-on wilderness survival training while writing the book—so I could get it right. Or, at the very least, so I wouldn’t get it horribly, horribly wrong. While taking a handful of survival classes doesn’t make me an expert, I do know enough now to appreciate when a novel gets an important aspect of survival right.
Here are five novels that do:
The Martian by Andy Weir
When Watney comes to with a piece of an antenna sticking through him, he doesn’t hesitate—he acts. In what most of us would surely consider a hopeless situation, he relies on his training and saves himself from the most immediate threat to his life. That split-second decision—I’m not going to die here—is key to surviving many emergency situations. Moving forward, Watney’s resourcefulness and sense of humor are his main survival tools, not to mention his crazy depths of scientific knowledge. The Martian underscores the importance of ingenuity: When you’re in a true survival situation, you do whatever you need to do to survive, no matter how absurd. Even if that means growing potatoes in your own excrement.
The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis
Elka, the young narrator of this novel, is a master of reading her environment. Though she’s often forced to throw caution to the wind, she at least knows she should be cautious. Elka respects nature and its power. Too often, in our world, when people get in trouble in the wilderness it’s because they overestimate their own abilities while underestimating nature. Not Elka. She’s also got some killer wilderness survival skills. Need help setting a snare or skinning a squirrel? Ask Elka.
Breaking Wild by Diane Les Becquets
A hunter goes missing in the woods. A ranger sets out to find her. Reading this novel, I had an inner monologue going that was essentially, “Yes… yes… wow, really? Yes!” The realities of emergency wilderness situations are bluntly portrayed—how quickly a situation can go south when poor decision-making is involved—and the portrayal of search and rescue procedure is fascinating. I don’t have experience in search and rescue, but I believe the author, and for days after finishing this novel I bit back an urge to join local search and rescue outfits just to learn more.
The Red Rising Trilogy by Pierce Brown
Brown is a master of taking the sci-fi trope of “We’re the good guys overthrowing tyrants; we’ll suffer some sad losses along the way, but it’ll all be worth it—yay!” and grounding it in harsh reality. This trilogy is a breakneck read, yet also at times heartbreaking. It acknowledges the truth that when things get really rough, survival is isn’t pretty, or fun—it’s ugly—and if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might not even have time to make that split-second “I’m not going to die” decision. There can be a certain amount of randomness to survival; often not everyone will make it, no matter how well prepared they are.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Stranded on the ocean, Pi Patel employs some impressive survival skills. But that’s not why I chose this book. I chose this book because sometimes a situation is so terrible you need to tell yourself a story in order to get through it. That can mean staring down an impossible-seeming situation and telling yourself “I can do this,” or it can occur after the fact: “I had no choice.” Human beings are storytellers, and those stories aren’t confined to books and movies. Every memory is a story, every anecdote about our day is a story. And sometimes what you’ve experienced is so awful, so hard, you need a way to digest it and make sense of it. This novel, to me, underscores how important storytelling can be to survival.
Top image: Life of Pi (2012)
Alexandra Oliva was born and raised in upstate New York. She has a BA in history from Yale University and an MFA in creative writing from The New School. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband. The Last One is her first novel.
Hatchet was the most realistic-feeling survival novel I’ve read. The protagonist does have lucky breaks and close calls, without which he could have died. But with no prior experience in wilderness survival, he has to learn everything the hard way, through slow experimentation or swift and painful lessons. He sometimes experiences triumph, beauty, or peace, but that feels realistic too, part of his emotional ups and downs.
Wholeheartedly second the mention of Hatchet, which was one of my favourites as a child. Apparently it was extensively researched by author Gary Paulson, which probably explains why it seems so realistic
So my favourite novels along these lines are all real – look at the story of Shackleton in Endurance by Alfred Lansing, or Home of the Blizzard, Douglas Mawson. Antarctic survival is challenging at the best of times, they both were a long way from that.
The other one I love is We Die Alone, by David Howarth, where the sheer amount of luck that Jan went through was astonishing. The man survived hypothermia, avalanches, snowblindness, frostbite, even burial under snow for a week, yet the generosity of those who found him and nursed him back to health while hiding him from the Germans is staggering.
I should also mention Touching the Void, by Joe Simpson, which is harrowing for exactly how easy it was for their situation to go terribly wrong, and how lucky he was to survive.
If you love Hatchet, make sure you read Brian’s Winter, which answers the question – what if the radio in the survival kit never summoned a rescue plane at the end? (Didn’t want to spoil the ending of the first book, but it’s a single small change with big consequences!)
_Medicine Walk_ by Ardath Mayhar is a ya classic in this subgenre.