Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction
Recognizable modern apocalyptic novels had existed since at least the first third of the 19th century, when Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) was published; however, this form of literature gained widespread popularity after World War II, when the possibility of global annihilation by nuclear weapons entered the public consciousness.
The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, the way to maintain the human race alive and together as one, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten (or mythologized).
[7] The King was advised to build a huge boat (ark) which housed his family, nine types of seeds, pairs of all animals and the Saptarishis to repopulate Earth, after the deluge would end and the oceans and seas would recede.
[11] Furthermore, they often explore a world without modern technology[12] whose rapid progress may overwhelm people as human brains are not adapted to contemporary society, but evolved to deal with issues that have become largely irrelevant, such as immediate physical threats.
The first chapters consist solely of a description of nature reclaiming England: fields becoming overrun by forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming overgrown, London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland.
Childhood's End is a 1953 science fiction novel by the British author Arthur C. Clarke, in which aliens come to Earth, human children develop fantastic powers and the planet is destroyed.
Al Sarrantonio's Moonbane (1989) concerns the origin of werewolves (he attributes it to the Moon, which is why they are so attracted to it), and an invasion after an explosion on Luna sends meteoric fragments containing latent lycanthropes to Earth, who thrive in our planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere.
The following year saw dueling big-budget summer blockbuster movies Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998), both of which involved efforts to save the Earth from, respectively, a rogue comet and an asteroid, by landing crews upon them to detonate nuclear weapons there in hopes of destroying them.
In the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), based on Whitley Strieber's speculative non-fiction novel The Coming Global Superstorm (1999), extreme weather events caused by climate change invoke mass destruction across the planet, and eventually result in a new ice age.
The Quiet Earth, a 1985 New Zealand movie notable for its visually stunning ending, follows a scientist's descent into madness after he wakes up to a world where every single member of the kingdom Animalia has seemingly disappeared.
Dies the Fire (2004), The Protector's War (2005), and A Meeting at Corvallis (2006), depict the world's descent into feudalism after a sudden mysterious "change" alters physical laws so that electricity, gunpowder, and most forms of high-energy-density technology no longer work.
Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra deals with the lives of Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand, after a plague wipes out all but three male mammals on the Earth, leaving the whole planet to be controlled by women.
Created by co-plotters Roy Thomas and Neal Adams, scriptwriter Gerry Conway, the Martians from H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds return in 2001 for another attempt at conquering the planet (later retconned as extrasolar aliens using Mars as a staging area).
The majority of the world was left an irradiated wasteland filled with hostile mutant lifeforms, with the surviving population being centralized in the so-called Mega-Cities, massive urban sprawls covering entire states created to deal with overpopulation during the 21st century.
Meltdown Man (SAS Sergeant Nick Stone) finds himself flung into the far-future by a nuclear blast, where the last remaining humans are led by a merciless tyrant called Leeshar and rule over the eugenically modified animal castes known as 'Yujees'.
After the apes break free and escaped to the Muir Woods, an infected Hunsiker went to his job as an airline pilot, triggering the spread of the ALZ-113 across the planet via international flight routes and leading to a worldwide pandemic that destroyed mostly of humanity.
After a global viral pandemic wipes out over 80% of the world's population, the crew (consisting of 218 people) of a lone unaffected U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, the fictional USS Nathan James (DDG-151), must try to find a cure, stop the virus, and save humanity.
Originally published in 1978, Stephen King's The Stand follows the odyssey of a small number of survivors of a world-ending influenza pandemic, later revealed to be the man-made superflu "Captain Trips".
Tom Clancy's The Division (2016) takes place in a pandemic-ravaged New York City that's become overrun by escaped prisoners, gang-members and a faction of 'Cleaners' that are determined to end the epidemic by incinerating anything that might possibly be infected.
The Terminator film franchise (first introduced in 1984) depicts an artificial intelligence called Skynet becoming self-aware in 1997 and trying to exterminate humanity by instigating nuclear war between the United States and Russia, which results in the death of three billion people.
A nuclear war occurs at the end of Bradbury's dystopian futuristic novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), with the outcasts, who had fled an unidentified American city to escape a despotic government which burned books in order to control the public by limiting knowledge, left alive to re-establish society.
John Wyndham's 1955 novel The Chrysalids (United States title: Re-Birth), set in a small community untold centuries after a nuclear holocaust (not expressly told, but strongly hinted at with genetic mutations, glowing ruins, landscape baked to glass), tells the story of David, part of a small group of teens who share a limited form of telepathy that allows them to communicate with others who have the same talent; however, the fundamentalist society they live in, regards the slightest difference from the norm as a blasphemy and affront to God.
In Hayao Miyazaki's manga (1982–1994) and anime film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), human civilization is destroyed after a war known as the "Seven Days of Fire", which results in the Earth's surface becoming polluted and the seas turning poisonous.
The games revolve around "vaults," underground bunkers for long-term survival (in reality social experiments created by the ruling elite of the pre-war United States), and exploring the outside wasteland, in locations such as California, Las Vegas, Washington D.C.,[43] New England, and West Virginia.
Fallout draws heavily from retro 1950s sci-fi, and the setting combines elements of mid-20th century technology, such as vacuum tubes and monochrome screens, with highly advanced artificial intelligences and energy weapons.
The story takes place in post-apocalyptic Moscow, mostly inside the metro system, but some missions have the player go to the surface which is severely irradiated and a gas mask must be worn at all times due to the toxic air.
The Danganronpa series is revealed to be set in a world where society has collapsed as a result of "The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History" which involves constant chaos, violence, and death for the sake of spreading of despair.
The Splatoon franchise takes place in a future where humans and all mammals died out due to accelerating climate change, multiple wars and the detonation of a nuclear device in the ice caps causing the ocean levels to rapidly rise.
Hayao Miyazaki's manga series Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982 debut), later adapted into a 1984 anime film by Studio Ghibli, depicts a post-apocalyptic future where industrial civilization was wiped out in the "Seven Days of Fire" 1,000 years before the main events.
(1966), is set in the dystopian future of 2022, in an overpopulated, heavily polluted world, where the masses of mostly homeless and destitute people have been herded into the overcrowded cities and barely survive on government-issued food rations made from the processed corpses of the dead.
