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*The 1957 novel ''[[Atlas Shrugged]]'' by [[Ayn Rand]]. American society slowly collapses after the country's leading industrialists mysteriously disappear.
*The 1957 novel ''[[Atlas Shrugged]]'' by [[Ayn Rand]]. American society slowly collapses after the country's leading industrialists mysteriously disappear.
*The 1990 novel ''Wolf and Iron'' by [[Gordon R. Dickson]]. A man and a wolf band together to survive in an America devastated by financial collapse.
*The 1990 novel ''Wolf and Iron'' by [[Gordon R. Dickson]]. A man and a wolf band together to survive in an America devastated by financial collapse.
*The 1998 novel ''Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse'' by [[James Wesley Rawles]]<ref>[http://www.rawles.to/patriots.htm Patriots, TEOTWAWKI, and Pulling Through, by James Wesley, Rawles<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref> (the editor of SurvivalBlog) is a novel about a full-scale socio-economic collapse.
*The video game ''[[Deus Ex: Invisible War]]''. After total global economic collapse (an event known simply as '[[Collapse (Deus Ex)|The Collapse]]'), all religion is collected into one, which is in conflict with the new world order. Throughout the game, the player can choose to be on either side, affecting the game's outcome.
*The video game ''[[Deus Ex: Invisible War]]''. After total global economic collapse (an event known simply as '[[Collapse (Deus Ex)|The Collapse]]'), all religion is collected into one, which is in conflict with the new world order. Throughout the game, the player can choose to be on either side, affecting the game's outcome.
*The 2008 novel ''World Made By Hand'' by [[James Kunstler]] explores life in an agrarian village in upstate New York after America collapses under the combined trauma of plague, [[peak oil]], [[global warming]], and [[nuclear terrorism]].
*The 2008 novel ''World Made By Hand'' by [[James Kunstler]] explores life in an agrarian village in upstate New York after America collapses under the combined trauma of plague, [[peak oil]], [[global warming]], and [[nuclear terrorism]].

Revision as of 05:09, 24 April 2008

This is a list of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction works, sorted by the nature of the catastrophe portrayed.

World War III and other apocalyptic wars (between humans)

Films

1930s

  • 1936. Things to Come, in which an extended future second world war leads to a breakdown of civilization in most of the world, with technology returning to medieval levels by 1970.

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s


Television

Novels

1880s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

Book series and uncertain dates

Short stories and plays

Games

Comics and manga

Other

  • Visual novel Planetarian: Chiisana Hoshi no Yume
  • "April 2031" a song by the band Warrant on the "Dog Eat Dog" album depicts an earth devastated by war where life lives on only by artificial means.
  • Your Attention Please, poem by Peter Porter, written in the style of a radio broadcast warning of an impending nuclear attack
  • "Your Attention Please", a song adaptation of the above Porter poem written and recorded by the Scottish post-punk group the Scars
  • see here for a list of other songs related to WWIII and nuclear war
  • The Horses, poem by Edwin Muir. Deals with society's regression to pre Industrial Revolution conditions in the wake of a nuclear war
  • The Ayreon series of concept albums depicts the end of life on Earth in 2084 due to, among other factors, a catastrophic nuclear war.

Pandemic (Plague)

Films

Television

  • The 1975-1977 BBC television series Survivors by Terry Nation
  • The 1989 ITV show Not with a Bang, about 3 people who lived after everyone else in England was turned to dust by a chemical that caused rapid aging.
  • The 1994 miniseries Stephen King's The Stand
  • The 1999-2003 New Zealand television series The Tribe
  • The 2002 TV movie Smallpox
  • The 2002-2004 Showtime cable television series Jeremiah, based on the comic of the same name. In the year 2021, 15 years after a virus kills everyone over the age of puberty, the child survivors have grown up, living on the scraps of the old world.

Novels

Other

Astronomic impact (meteorites)

Films

Television

Novels

Other

Alien invasion

Films

Novels

Television

Other

Ecological catastrophe

Films

Novels

Television

  • The 1976-1979 TV series Ark II - pollution devastates humanity
  • The 2003 television movie Encrypt
  • The 2004 television movie Category 6: Day of Destruction where Chicago is suffering from a series of tornadoes from numerous changes occurring in the climate
  • The Captain Planet two-parter Two Futures, in which the character Wheeler gets a glimpse of what could happen if damage to the environment was allowed to continue unchecked

Other

  • The 1952 short story The Birds by Daphne du Maurier, made into the 1963 film The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock - in which birds begin launching spontaneous mass attacks against mankind
  • The 1973 collection of short stories Flight of the Horse by Larry Niven
  • The 1977 short story The Screwfly Solution tells the tale of a virus which turns males into female-hating psychopaths when sexually aroused.
  • The 1986 short story The End of the Whole Mess by Stephen King in which a distillate of a Texas aquifer, originally harvested and distributed worldwide to reduce human propensity for violence--curses humanity with premature Alzheimer's disease and senility.
  • The 1993 console game Secret of Mana takes place long after a time of environmental collapse that destroyed the world's older advanced civilizations.
  • The 1994 console game Final Fantasy VI (named Final Fantasy III during initial American launch of the game) features a plot twist in where villian Kefka moves magical statues out of their intended alignment, which in turn causes the balanced fictional world to fall into ruin (and for Kefka to become its new god while protected by the powers of the same statues).
  • The 1994-2006 Japanese manga series Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, set in a peaceful post-cataclysmic Japan, after an untold environmental disaster.
  • The 1998-1999 anime series Cowboy Bebop in which a man made disaster has caused earth's moon to fragment, resulting in a constant rain of meteor strikes on the planet and forcing humanity to move out into the solar system.
  • The 2002 video game The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, in which a flood has decimated the fictional world of Hyrule.
  • The 2002-2003 anime series Overman King Gainer, which depicts humanity living in domes after an ecological disaster.
  • The 2005 short story The Garden Where My Rains Grows by Brian Keene, set in a post-apocalyptic world where it started raining one day and never stopped.
  • The 2005-2006 anime series Zoids: Genesis where an earthquake triggers a series of worldwide natural disasters that devastate Planet Zi.
  • The 2005-present radio drama Nebulous by Graham Duff, in which much of the world was destroyed by an event known as "the Withering".
  • The 2006 anime series Ergo Proxy by the Japanese production company Manglobe, in which an undefined global ecological disaster has decimated the surface of the Earth, and the small remaining human population lives in isolated, city-state dome complexes.
  • The 2006 PC game, Battlefield 2142, in which a new ice age renders most of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable. Wars are fought over the remaining habitable land.
  • The Command & Conquer: Tiberian series of games in which a radioactive, self-replicating alien crystal known as Tiberium has rendered most of the Earth's surface uninhabitable.
  • The game Dark Sun from TSR, Inc.

Cybernetic revolt

See also: Cybernetic revolt

Literature

Cinema & TV

Gaming

Music

The decline and fall of the human race

Monsters and biologically altered humans

After the fall of space-based civilization

The Sun's expansion

  • The comic series Just a Pilgrim by Garth Ennis
  • The video game "Tetris Worlds"
  • The poem "Darkness (poem)" by Lord Byron describes the end of life on earth after the sun's extinction.
  • The movie "Last Night (film)" by Don McKellar, which follows the lives of several individuals as they cope with their final six hours on Earth before the apparent incineration of the Earth by the sun (the cause of the apocalypse is never directly stated).
  • The short story "Finis" by Frank Lillie Pollock where a second sun's light incinerates the Earth.
  • The 2007 movie, Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle. The film follows a spaceship crew in the year 2057 who are tasked with reigniting Earth's dying sun.

Religious and supernatural apocalypse (Eschatological fiction)

  • The 1908 novel Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson.
  • The evangelical Christian film series 1972 A Thief in the Night, sometimes referred to as the Mark IV films.
  • The young adult book series Countdown by Daniel Parker, in which a demon wipes out the entire human population save for teenagers.
  • The Deadlands: Hell on Earth role-playing game, in which the Earth is reduced to a haunted, radioactive wasteland as a result of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ravaging the planet shortly after an eldritch nuclear war.
  • The End of the Age, by Pat Robertson
  • The book and film series Left Behind, concerning the Rapture.
  • The novels Black Easter and The Day After Judgment by James Blish, in which a black magician brings about the end of the world by releasing all the demons from Hell.
  • The Power of Five series by Anthony Horowitz
  • 1995. The sci-fi anime Neon Genesis Evangelion in which mankind's unearthing of a being known as Adam brings about Second Impact, a catastrophic shockwave which destroys Antarctica and subsequently leads to the extinction of thousands of organisms, the destruction of much of the civilized world, and the deaths of billions. Millions more die from the social and economic troubles which follow this impact and the ensuing wars.
  • 2007-2008 . Rebuild of Evangelion- remake of the anime series. The first of the four films, Evangelion: 1.0- You are [Not] Alone, debuted in this year, with the second part, 2.0- Division, debuting in 2008.
  • The film Prince of Darkness, directed by John Carpenter, in which all Hell breaks loose.
  • The film The Rapture (1991)
  • The 1989 novel The Dead, by Mark E. Rogers. Combines themes of the rapture and zombies.
  • The zombie novels The Rising and its sequel City of the Dead by Brian Keene. Rather than the zombies being an infection, as in most zombie fiction; these zombies are reanimated by demonic entities, the sisquisim, from the Old Testament. Keene has also written Conqueror Worms which is a very Lovecraftian tale of one of the last survivors on earth.
  • The novel Shade's Children by Garth Nix, in which a group of extradimensional beings invade earth and cause all human adults to vanish.
  • The manga and subsequent anime movies and TV series Silent Möbius by Kia Asamiya. The story is set in a Blade Runner-style world which has been invaded by demonic beings.
  • The novel The Taking, by Dean Koontz in which a malevolent demonic force kills off the majority of the human race.
  • The Third Millennium (1995) and The Fourth Mellennium (1996), by Paul Meier
  • The Tribe 8 role-playing game, in which sadistic demons invade (and conquer) the Earth.
  • The Clamp anime X/1999 in which the seven Dragons of Heaven battle the Dragons of Earth to save the world.
  • Hellgate: London – computer game released in 2007, where demons and humans are in constant struggle on earth.
  • The Doom series of computer games, in which demons invade a human base on Phobos (changed to Mars in Doom 3) and then move on to Earth.
  • Pulse – 2006 American film
  • The Shadow of Yesterday role-playing game, in which the unification of all people in a fantasy world under a single, supernatural language results in the destruction of a world by what is presumed to be an asteroid that becomes that world's new moon, one that eclipses the sun for a week out of each month.

Social or economic collapse

  • The 1954 short story The Last of the Masters by Philip K. Dick. 200 years after a global anarchist revolution, society has stagnated due to the loss of scientific knowledge during the revolt. Elsewhere, the last government, a highly centralized and efficient society, is in hiding from The Anarchist League, a global militia preventing the recreation of any government.
  • The 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. American society slowly collapses after the country's leading industrialists mysteriously disappear.
  • The 1990 novel Wolf and Iron by Gordon R. Dickson. A man and a wolf band together to survive in an America devastated by financial collapse.
  • The video game Deus Ex: Invisible War. After total global economic collapse (an event known simply as 'The Collapse'), all religion is collected into one, which is in conflict with the new world order. Throughout the game, the player can choose to be on either side, affecting the game's outcome.
  • The 2008 novel World Made By Hand by James Kunstler explores life in an agrarian village in upstate New York after America collapses under the combined trauma of plague, peak oil, global warming, and nuclear terrorism.

Unspecified phenomena

  • The 1885 novel After London by Richard Jefferies; the nature of the catastrophe is never stated, except that apparently most of the human race quickly dies out, leaving England to revert to nature.
  • The 1914 novel Darkness and Dawn by George Allan England, in which two characters wake from suspended animation and find that some great disaster has torn an enormous chasm in the Earth and created a second moon.
  • The Starlost is a Canadian-produced science fiction television series devised by writer Harlan Ellison and broadcast in 1973 on CTV in Canada and on NBC in the United States.
  • The 1975 novel Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany.
  • The 1987 novel In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster.
  • The BBC sitcom Red Dwarf (1988-1999), in which Dave Lister is the last human alive after being left in suspended animation for 3 million years. His only company is a member (presumably the last) of a race of Cat People which evolved from a housecat inside the titular Ship, a hologram of his former bunkmate and immediate superior Arnold Rimmer, the ship's senile computer Holly and later an android named Kryten. The setting implies mankind have gone extinct, though this is never proven, it is simply concluded by the characters that the human race must have gone extinct and/or evolved into a life form beyond humans during the 3 million years Dave was in suspended animation.
  • The 1994 novel Vanishing Point by Michaela Roessner. Life in Silicon Valley 30 years after the mysterious and spontaneous disappearance of 90% of the world's population. The Winchester Mystery House ("The House") serves as a focal point for parallel universes and inexplicable energies that are changing the world and its post-Vanishing children.
  • The novels Island in the Sea of Time (1998), Against the Tide of Years (1999), and On the Oceans of Eternity (2000) by S. M. Stirling, in which a cosmic disturbance of indeterminate cause transports the island of Nantucket and its surrounding waters backwards in time 3,000 years to the Bronze Age.
  • The novels Dies the Fire (2004), The Protector's War (2005), The Meeting at Corvallis (2006), and The Sunrise Lands (2007) by S. M. Stirling, in which a disaster of indeterminate cause (most speculation within the novels concerns an all-powerful outside force, often facetiously referred to as "Alien Space Bats") causes electricity, combustion engines, and modern explosives to cease functioning.
  • The 2006 novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
  • The series of novels set in the world of Wraeththu by Storm Constantine, in which humanity is replaced as the planet's dominant species by a race of mystic hermaphrodites. War and plague ravage the human population, but no single cause is specified.
  • The 1988 novel Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan, set in a cyberpunk world following a a vaguely described natural cataclysm.
  • Ongoing comic series 'Wasteland', takes place roughly 100 years in the future where North America is a dustbowl and lacking modern technology.

See also

References


  • Dodson, Eric (2003). Post-apocalyptic film and the post-modern apocalypse. State University of West Georgia. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); External link in |title= (help)
  • Quiet Earth - A website dedicated to post apocalyptic media
  • Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction - online book by Paul Brians, Professor of English at Washington State University.
  • Empty World: Apocalyptic and End of the World Fiction, Film and TV
  • Surviving Armageddon: Beyond the Imagination of Disaster - article by Mick Broderick in Science Fiction Studies.
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