Apocalyptic And Post-apocalyptic Science Fiction

Criticism

Examples (listed by nature of the catastrophe)

World War III

• Alas Babylon - Pat Frank's novel
• The Japanese manga and 1988 anime film Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo
• The Amtrak Wars epic novel series by Patrick Tilley
• Ape and Essence, a screenplay-novel by Aldous Huxley
• Apokalipsa wedlug Pana Jana - Robert J. Szmidt's novel
• Autobahn nach Poznan - Andrzej Ziemianski's short story
• A Boy and His Dog - Harlan Ellison's short story and 1975 film
• A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr's novel
• The novel Children of The Dust by Louise Lawerence
• Damnation Alley - Roger Zelazny's novel, and the film made of it
• Dark Universe - Daniel F. Galouye's novel from 1961
• The Day After, a 1983 film about the effects of nuclear war on a Kansas town
• Delicatessen - Marc Caro's black comedy
• Deathlands - by James Axler -A series of books set a hundred years after a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR in 2001 destroys most of the world
• Deus Irae - Philip K. Dick (in collaboration with Roger Zelazny).
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
• Down to a Sunless Sea - David Graham's novel of the last plane out of a fall-of-Saigon-like New York City
• Dr Bloodmoney - Philip K. Dick
• Fallout series - The computer role-playing game
• Farnham's Freehold - Robert A. Heinlein
• Gamma World- The Role-playing game from TSR, Inc., the makers of Dungeons & Dragons.
• The short film La Jete (1962) by Chris Marker
• Level 7 - Mordecai Roshwald's novel
• Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, and the film based on it.
• The Mad Max trilogy
• The Morrow Project - The Role-playing game from Timeline Ltd.
• Neuroshima - The Polish Role-playing game from Portal Publishing
• On The Beach - Nevil Shute's novel, and the films based on it.
• Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov. (A later book, Robots and Empire, gave a different explanation.)
• The Penultimate Truth - Philip K. Dick
• The Planet of the Apes film series
• The Postman - David Brin's novel
• Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban's novel
• Sexmisja - The Polish movie
• the Shanarra Series by Terry Brooks, a fantasy book set after WWIII destroys all technology and warps the human race into other species.
• The Survivalist series by Jerry Ahern (first novel Total War from 1981)
• The film Testament
• The film Threads
• - The Role-playing game from Game Designer's Workshop
• V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
• The Vampire Hunter D novels and anime films, set ten thousand years after a nuclear war occurs in 1999.
• Wasteland - The computer role-playing game.
• Wizards - Ralph Bakshi's film about a good wizard and his evil brother some two milennia after Armageddon
• The World Jones Made - Philip K. Dick
• Yellow Peril, a Chinese novel by activist Wang Lixiong under the pseudonym Bao Mi, about a nuclear civil war in the People's Republic of China.

Pandemic

• The novel Blood Music (1985) (and the 1983 novelette of the same name) by Greg Bear
• The novel The Children of Men, written by P.D. James
• The novel Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart.
• The novel Full Circle by Michael Boyle
• The novel A Gift Upon the Shore by M.K. Wren
• The novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, filmed as The Last Man On Earth and The Omega Man.
• The novel The Last Man by Mary Shelley
• The novel Some Will Not Die (1954) by Algis Budrys
• The novel and miniseries The Stand by Stephen King
• The novella The Scarlet Plague (1912) by Jack London.
• The 1980 Japanese film Fukkatsu no Hi a.k.a. Virus, directed by Kinji Fukasaku
• The films Twelve Monkeys and 28 Days Later
• 2004 film version of Dawn of the Dead
• The Showtime cable television series Jeremiah, based on the comic of the same name.
• The BBC television series Survivors, written by Terry Nation
• The manga by Hiroki Endo
• The comic series features a lone man & his monkey in a world populated only by women
• The FX movie Smallpox

Astronomic impact (meteorites)

• The film Armageddon
• The film Deep Impact
• Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
• The film Meteor
• The animated series Thundarr the Barbarian
• The film When Worlds Collide
• The anime Cowboy Bebop

Alien invasion

• The novel The Alien Years (1998) by Robert Silverberg
• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card.
• The Forge of God by Greg Bear
• The anime Genesis Climber Mospeada
• The anime The Super Dimension Fortress Macross and its sequels
• The film Independence Day
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• John Wyndham's novel The Kraken Wakes
• The computer game Manhunter
• Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!
• Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters
• John Christopher's The Tripods
• The TV-series V
• H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (in several media)
• The Ophiuchi Hotline, Steel Beach, and the rest of the Eight Worlds series, by John Varley

Ecological catastrophe

• The novel Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, in which all the water on Earth freezes
• The film The Day After Tomorrow, written, directed and produced by Roland Emmerich
• The novel The Death Of Grass by John Christopher, which was made into the film No Blade Of Grass, in which a virus that destroys plants causes massive famine and the breakdown of society
• The novel Dust by Charles Pellegrino, in which all the insect species on Earth die out, and the ecology crashes as a result
• The novel Eternity Road by Jack McDevitt
• The novel The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk
• The collection of stories Flight of the Horse by Larry Niven
• The novel Greybeard by Brian Aldiss, in which the human race becomes sterile
• The novel In the Drift by Michael Swanwick (also an Alternate history story), in which the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor incident resulted in a very large release of radioactivity
• The film It's All About Love, written, directed and produced by Thomas Vinterberg
• The novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, which was made into a 1973 film Soylent Green, directed by Richard Fleischer

• The novel Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• The film Quintet, directed by Robert Altman
• The novel The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, in which the United States is overwhelmed by environmental irresponsibility and authoritarianism.
• The film Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull
• The film Waterworld, starring Kevin Costner

The computers take over

• The 1909 short story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (more machinery than computers)
• The novel and movie, (not exactly an apocalypse, however)
• The novel This Perfect Day by Ira Levin
• The future depicted in the Terminator film series
• The film Alphaville, une trange aventure de Lemmy Caution by Jean-Luc Godard
• The film The Matrix
• Harlan Ellison's short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
• Neuroshima, the Polish role-playing game from Portal Publishing.
• The film I, Robot starring Will Smith.

The decline and fall of the human race

• The novel At Winter's End (1988) by Robert Silverberg
• Planet of the Apes
• The latter part of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine
• The 1970s movie Zardoz
• The films Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead by George Romero

After the Fall of Space Based Civilization

• Isaac Asimov's Foundation series
• Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (TV series)
• Dan Simmons's Endymion & The Rise of Endymion

Various

• Much of the work of J. G. Ballard, in which the current era is sometimes described as the pre-Third, referring to World War III.
• Much of John Wyndham's work, e.g. The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, later reprinted in the US as Re-Birth
• 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 Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel (A volcanic eruption floods the earth with cyanide gas, leaving only two survivors)
• The manga and movie Dragon Head, by Mochizuki Minetaro

To be categorized

• First Spaceship on Venus
• The novel In The Country of Last Thing by Paul Auster
• Aftermath by Gregory Benford
• Nosutoradamusu no daiyogen a.k.a. The Last Days of Planet Earth, a 1974 Japanese film.
• The novels The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986) (together also know as Across Realtime, 1991) by Vernor Vinge
• Reign of Fire, in which a race of terrifically powerful dragons awakes from sleep and decimates the world.
• The Final Programme, movie based on Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories
• The Role-playing Game Rifts, in which a massive release of psychic energy triggers several disasters, as well as various magic-based anomalies.

• Timeline of fictional future events

External link

• Empty World - a website dedicated to apocalyptic fiction
• Duck and Cover - A post-apocalyptic theme fan site

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