By Author
- A couple of Paolo Bacigalupi's works have this sort of setting:
- In "The Calorie Man" from Pump Six and Other Stories, oil supplies have run out, so the protagonist makes a living scavenging useful items from the now abandoned suburbs before they're reclaimed for cropland.
- In Ship Breaker, after Global Warming led to changes in sea levels, many cities were destroyed. The protagonist, Nailer, lives in what once was Louisiana and takes apart former oil rigs for scrap metal. They run into a problem when they find a ship that has a living person in it.
- A few of Harry Turtledove's works focus on societies like this:
- In The Valley-Westside War, a nuclear exchange in the 60s led to the collapse of the United States, the USSR, and (it's implied) most other countries. 130 years later, the former area of "Ellay" is divided into several petty chiefdoms with nothing more advanced than muskets (some modern firearms survived, but nobody knows how to make new ones or make more ammo to fit them, and there's always a risk that it'll blow up in your face). Many of the abandoned cars have been repurposed into horse-drawn carts, since they're not that heavy after removing the engine, and others have been cannibalized as a source of metal. Bicycles and lighters from The Beforetimes still exist, though they have to replace rubber tires with wooden ones and lighter fluid with alcohol spirits.
- In the short story Secret Names, a hunter-gatherer tribe in what was once Texas uses artifacts from the time before the "Big Oops", and some of them are still literate. The tribe's shaman, Madyu, discovers a taxonomy book with the scientific names of various North American animals, which he believes are their True Names. He invokes these names in his rituals, to ensure a good hunt, and it works.
- "Autofac": After the inter-machine war permanently halts the autofacs' shipments, humanity is left to scrounge for resources and goods as best they can from the ruins of cities and machine convoys, shaping crude tools and moving on horseback and in scavenged trucks converted to run on wood.
- Bearheart: The characters struggle to find gas.
- The Books of Ember take place somewhere in the United States about 250 years after several successive wars and pandemics. In The People of Sparks, descendants of the survivors have reverted to old-style farming settlements, sending out 'roamers' to search pre-Disaster houses and such for supplies such as clothes.
- A Canticle for Leibowitz features this trope heavily, being a classic of the post-apocalyptic genre. Also averted, since the novel goes on long enough that the world regains its mastery of science. It's heavily implied that the remnants of technology the monks preserved was instrumental in the reconstruction of a technologically advanced society. (Whether or not this is a good thing is left as an open question.)
- Sylvia Engdahl's Children of the Star trilogy
shows off just such a world. - Ciaphas Cain: An apt example of the level of superstition around machinery can be found in the novels. At one point a techpriest worries about whether a device will work when she doesn't have any incense to light first, of course it does. Said techpriest is also something of a black sheep when we meet her because her rather pragmatic and creative approach is seen as a failure to understand the theology. Which of course had limited her advancement. Cain himself wonders, after building an IED in Death or Glory, if it can really work without a techpriest's blessing. He decides that killing Orks is "the Emperor's work", and He will probably cut Cain some slack on this.
- The City and the Dungeon overlaps this with Dungeon-Based Economy, with the remnants of society being supported by delvers exploring and scavenging from the massive, eldritch Dungeon located in the center of the last City.
- The City Without Memory takes place on a planet which suffered a collective memory loss 300 years ago. The king uses a dentist's chair as a throne; his guards use chamber pots as helmets.
- The world of Cthulhu Armageddon is one, explicitly compared to Mad Max and Fallout in the opening. The human race scrapes out a bare-bones existence living in those few structures not destroyed by the Great Old Ones' rising. It's notably also turned into a New Old West Weird West.
- The parts of The Dark Tower set in Mid-World have this flavor. It tends to become both more prominent and more dangerous as the series goes on: in the first couple of books Roland's six-guns are rare and precious artifacts, but by the fifth we've seen working robots, giant cyborg bears, weaponized Harry Potter props, and a supersonic maglev train with a yen for riddles, all of which are decaying and homicidal.
- Death Lands: The Trader specializes in tracking down Stockpiles left by the now defunct US government and selling the contents to the various Big Bad wannabes. As this included pre-Apocalypse weapons that can be used against him, he now realizes that it was a major mistake.
- The multi-author Death Zone series — taking place in the same universe as Stalker (1979) but 50 years later — involves five anomalous zones which are formed after an unknown cataclysm wipes out 4 major cities (plus the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone) and covers the areas with gravity bubbles. The zones feature many anomalies and rogue nanotechnology, as well as survivors called stalkers scrounging for supplies and hunting for tech. Unlike a typical example of this trope, the outside world is mostly fine, and supplies are often smuggled into the zones. However, most of the novels barely feature anything beyond the zones, so the atmosphere of the stories often makes it seem as if there is nothing else.
- Dinner at Deviant's Palace is set after some cataclysm blew large radioactive holes in southern California and led to a collapse of society and Lost Common Knowledge. The current society is built largely around digging useful (or just neat-looking) stuff out of the rubble of the past. Some people drive cars as status symbols, but they're drawn by horses because there's no gasoline anymore.
- Dream Park: In The California Voodoo Game, the Game-scenario occupants of MIMIC use materials scrounged from the damaged Arcology for clothing, tools, weapons and artwork. One of the first enemies "killed" in the Game carries a club made from a table leg with an old can strapped to the end, and a chunk of concrete stuffed inside for weight.
- Earth Abides deals with the consequence of most of the human population being wiped out by some plague. The protagonist sees mankind's technological advances undone, because the scattered survivors do not have the cohesion, nor the education or even the motivation to keep the technological marvels (electricity, indoor plumbing, metalworking etc.) running. Humanity reverts to a hunter-gatherer society.
- Curiously, we do meet a family of semi-literate farm-laborers somewhere in the Southern US who look like they're just going to carry on working the land as they have for generations (indeed, their situation may have improved insofar as they aren't working for someone else any more). They're only mentioned again at the end of the book...generations after their encounter with the protagonist, their descendants still grow cotton for their departed masters despite not having the knowledge or technology to use cotton for themselves. There's also a Native American settlement in New Mexico and a cult in southern California that both appear pretty well-organized and self-sufficient.
- The protagonist explicitly discusses and deconstructs this trope after encountering a couple in New York who are partying it up and living like kings off scavenged supplies. He negatively compares them to the aforementioned sharecroppers, pointing out that they rely too much on scavenging and haven't bothered to learn to be self-sufficient through things like animal husbandry or farming. He predicts that they are thus doomed to die once their supplies finally run out, and sure enough, they are among the few people he encounters in his journey that he never hears of or sees again.
- Emberverse: The laws of physics have been altered by the Universal Mind having an argument with itself so that electrical circuits, internal combustion engines, gunpowder, and nuclear decay no longer function as expected, leading to the collapse of civilization. But still the wreckage of technological society is useful: the survivors scavenge the wreckage for useable parts and metal alloys difficult or impossible to manufacture under the new conditions. The results are swords made from automobile leaf springs, catapults powered by heavy duty springs salvaged from truck chassis, windmills and water wheels using gears salvaged from automotive transmissions, et cetera.
- The Girl Who Owned a City combines this with Teenage Wasteland after a plague wipes out all the adults.
- In the Great Ship story Hatch, several million refugees are trapped on the exterior hull of the Great Ship. Surrounding their city (built inside a sealed-up rocket nozzle larger than the Earth) is the remains of the Polypond, which periodically spews out billions of biological and mechanical creatures. The refugees use needle-like ships (raiders) to harvest the creatures for building material, organics, and bits of technology.
- Zilpha Keatley Snyder implies this in the Green-Sky Trilogy. She describes several times how their great public buildings, palaces and temples, which involve some pretty complex engineering, were all built by teams joining their telekinetic powers together to lift heavy stuff. That "uniforce" ability has been lost for many generations. Now the Fridge Brilliance kicks in. These buildings are all made out of wood and vine in what is pretty much a rainforest planet. Stuff deteriorates very fast in these environments. Who's going to do the maintenance? Fortunately, The Magic Comes Back (or starts to) and by the end of the third book we're pretty sure they're going to be okay.
- Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America. Although there's a thriving industry (albeit kept at a Nineteenth Century level) Tipmen have the job of scavenging the fallen Cities for anything useful, ranging from books (though the latter are often confiscated by Dominion) to their steel frames which are sent to the re-rolling mills. Coins are relatively valueless but are used for decoration, and the superior glassware is prized. Sam Goodwin's father worked as a scrapper, salvaging the debris-choked shipping canals for valuable metals and chemicals—high risk work that eventually poisoned him.
- In The Lord of the Rings, the kingdom of Gondor has ancient cities and monuments constructed by means lost to the current dwellers due to technological regression.
- This is the fate of the Slavs in The Man in the High Castle, who were driven out of Europe by Nazi Germany. While the rest of the world has moved forward technologically (to the point of colonizing the moon by 1962), they've been rolled back to the Stone Age, riding yaks and hunting with bows and arrows.
- In the Moon Crash Series, the United States is on its way to becoming like this after an asteroid hits the moon and causes climate change around the world.
- Mortal Engines takes place After Several Ends; futuristic technology is scavenged from ancient ruins and traded.
- The People: In Deluge, with the People's Psychic Powers taking the place of labor-saving devices, they've simplified their daily lives to the point of minimalism, so when they find out that the planet is about to explode and they need to get the heck out of there, they don't have the technology to do it. Fortunately, what they do have is scavenger minds — access to the memories of dead ancestors, going back thousands of years, to the days when they did have interstellar spacecraft. By taking time to Remember back that far, each person can learn the skills of an ancestor who, say, built the navigation instruments, or installed the toilets.
- In the crapsack future England ("Inland") of Riddley Walker, the only source of iron is whatever rusting hulks of 20th-century machinery they can manage to dig out of the ground.
- The Road is exactly this. The story follows a man and his son walking south through the ash-covered ruins of America after an unspecified cataclysm, scavenging whatever food they can find and avoiding bandits who steal and murder to survive. Many people have even resorted to cannibalism.
- In Scavenger Alliance, during the Exodus Century, humanity rushed to colonize other worlds, using too many resources and emptying Earth of too many educated people too quickly. As a result, society's infrastructure has been all but crippled, and old technology is breaking down because there aren't enough people around who can fix or replace it.
- Shannara as a whole, with the Druid order being the only people with any knowledge of technology left. Specifically, The Genesis of Shannara, aside from the usual scavenging for supplies, includes sports stadiums as the last organized holdouts of civilization.
- The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has this in the Dreadlands, a massive plane that connects every universe, where all the infrastructure has essentially collapsed. The same can be said of Jacob's world in act 2, where the Sisters of Ruin survive off technology scavenged from earlier wars.
- Theodore Cogswell's story The Spectre General extends the concept to an interstellar scale, with a Galactic Protectorate rising on the ruins of The Empire and using technology it can no longer duplicate or reliably maintain until it makes contact with a lost outpost that has preserved the old technical knowledge.
- Star's Reach takes place in a future America (well, Meriga) ravaged by climate change and resource depletion, so its inhabitants have to take what they can get. Trey works as a ruinman, and most of his job prior to his journey consists of scavenging through old, ruined buildings to find materials that can be used or sold. On a greater scale, certain cities have walls made of parts of old freeways that have been torn up. Jennel Cobey's Evil Plan is to subvert this by using the knowledge of Star's Reach to build modern-style war machines.
- In "Staying Behind", a short story by Ken Lui, Brain Uploading has caused the collapse of civilization because most people chose to live forever in digital form. The protagonist tries to hold onto the living world, only for his children to desert to the Singularity. When he tries to stop them, his wife points out that he's nothing to offer them but a hard life picking over the technology of the old world until it runs out.
- In The Sundered, there is a whole industry made out of scavenging things to sell. When the main characters find a cache of guns, they are overjoyed because nobody had even seen any in years.
- Swan Song takes place After the End, where people barter old calendars for rubber bands because nobody has produced anything since before World War III.
- In The Wheel of Time, many ancient arts have been lost, including the art of creating magical items (ter'angreal). In an unusual move, we actually see characters rediscovering many of the lost arts over the course of the series.
- In Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, the clone community living in the Shenandoah Valley is all that remains of humanity. Requiring a high technological base to continue their cloning processes, they salvage supplies from the nearest cities. The first expedition to Washington D.C. is a major part of the book.
