Post-apocalyptic thrillers

'Once the world ends, all your worries about your mortgage and your job get shunted off to the sideline. We use genre fiction to tell us what we are; I think with all genre fiction, where it becomes great is when it is saying something about the world we are in.

Paradoxically, as the world's various crises worsen we take more refuge in alternate worlds. I've never seen sci-fi as escapism, but I think horror is. I don't believe there will be an apocalypse that will sweep us off the earth but I think our civilisation has a sell-by date. There are only so many fossil fuels left in the ground, and it's not even energy, it's plastics - what are we going to do when there is nothing left to make plastic out of?'

Mike Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts in the Bookseller