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Apocalyptic science fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization, through nuclear war, plague, or some other general disaster.
Post-apocalyptic science fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten (or mythologized). Post-apocalyptic stories often take place in an agrarian, non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered elements of technology remain.
There is a considerable degree of blurring between this form of science fiction and that which deals with false utopias or dystopic societies. A work of apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic fiction might also be called a ruined Earth story, or dying Earth if the apocalypse is sufficiently dire.
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Cultural views on apocalyptic fiction
For the most part, western literature and cinema on the apocalypse or in a post-apocalyptic setting tend to follow American mores, with the exception of British apocalyptic fiction. While American and Western apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction tend to emphasize the fantastic, with the possibility of world-ending meteor collisions, mutants, and jury-rigged vehicles roaming a desolate countryside, British fiction is more pessimistic in tone.
Post-apocalyptic literature was not as widespread in communist countries as the government prohibited depictions of the nations falling apart. However, some depictions of similar-themed science fiction did make it past government censors, such as Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (which was later adopted as the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky), made during Russia's Soviet era, which features the bombed-out landscape and survival-based motives of its characters and was inspired in part by the 1957 accident at the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. Recently, Wang Lixiong's Yellow Peril was banned in the People's Republic of China because of its depiction of the collapse of the Communist Party of China, but has been widely pirated and distributed in the country.
According to some theorists, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in its modern past has influenced Japanese popular culture to include many apocalyptic themes. Much of Japan's manga and anime is loaded with apocalyptic imagery. It has, however, also been claimed that disaster - and post-disaster scenarios have a longer tradition in Japanese culture, possibly related to the earthquakes that repeatedly have devastated Japanese cities, and possibly connected to Japanese political history, which includes strict adherence to authority until a sudden and dramatic change. See Meiji Restoration and the earlier ee ja nai ka phenomenon.
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Criticism
The use of post-apocalyptic contexts in movies and the typical accompanying imagery, such as endless deserts or damaged cityscapes, clothing made of leather and animal skin, and marauding gangs of bandits, is now common and the subject of frequent parody.
The number of apocalyptic-themed B-movies in the 1980s and 1990s has been attributed to film producers on post-apocalyptic films working around their low production budgets by renting scrapyards, unused factories, and abandoned buildings, saving them the cost of constructing sets. As a result, many films that would have been rejected by major studios on the basis of script or concept ended up being made, while other stories were adapted to a post-apocalyptic setting following the success of the Mad Max series.
Some apocalyptic stories have been criticized as implausible or as scaremongering propaganda.
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Films
1956. World Without End by Edward Bernd starring Hugh Marlowe and the film debut of Rod Taylor. Robust 20th Century men help pale nerds and their beautiful women emerge from underground and retake the post WWIII surface from mutants
1971. The Omega Man. An immune survivor of a biological/ nuclear war battles plague-altered quasi-vampires espousing primitive communism.
1983. The Day After about the effects of nuclear war on a Kansas town.
1984. Threads BBC Television Docudrama
Wizards by Ralph Bakshi about a good wizard and his evil brother some two millennia after Armageddon
Equilibrium in which, after barely surviving yet another worldwide conflict, mankind rejects all emotion and outlaws all forms of expression which might encourage emotional response
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Novels
Series The Ashes by William W. Johnstone
Hiero's Journey(1983), The Unforsaken Hiero(1985), by Sterling E. Lanier - A "metis" priest/killman quests across post-apocalyptic northeastern North America, seven thousand years in the future.
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Short stories
Magic City by Nelson S. Bond
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Role-playing games
Rifts, in which a nuclear exchange triggers the return of Ley Lines and Interdimensional Rifts or portals. These Ley Lines and Portals subsequently cause several natural and supernatural disasters.
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Other
Webcomic Post-Nuke that takes place in a nuclear winter
1978 anime series Future Boy Conan by Hayao Miyazaki. Supermagnetic WMDs devastate Earth and causes virtually all land to be sumberged underwater.
Role-playing game , sets the characters in a world where a Sino-Russian war degenerates into a limited nuclear conflict that eventually drags in Europe and America.
The CBS television drama Jericho premiering September 2006 about the residents of a small Kansas town which remains isolated in the aftermath of a series of nuclear attacks on America.
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Pandemic
The 1999-2003 New Zealand television series The Tribe
The 2002-2004 Showtime cable television series Jeremiah, based on the comic of the same name
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impact event|Astronomic impact (meteorites)
The 1979-80 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam talks of the impact of a massive meteor-sized space colony on Earth. A 1996 spinoff, After War Gundam X, is written around the idea of a war being ended by a mass colony drop destroying 70% of the habitable surface of the Earth and over 90% of the Earth's population.
Remnants, a book series by K.A. Applegate
The 1999 British TV six part drama The Last Train (Cruel Earth in Canada)
When Worlds Collide (1932) by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer, and the 1951 and 2006 films of the same name.
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Alien invasion
TV Series (1966) "The Invaders" -Created by Quin Martin and Larry Cohen US
TV Series (1970) "UFO" - Gerry Anderson Production UK
The custom StarCraft Campaign Legacy of the Confederacy Episode 1: Past Purposes, though episode 2 is decidedly different portraying an advanced earth civilisation bent on revenge on the zerg for their invasion of earth.
The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch. Alien flora is seeded on Earth, and quickly comes to dominate all landmasses, threatening Human extinction.
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Ecological catastrophe
The 1976-1979 TV series Ark II - pollution devastates humanity
The upcoming 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 anime Cowboy Bebop in which a manmade 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 novel Dust by Charles Pellegrino, in which all the insect species on Earth die out, and the ecology crashes as a result
The 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 novel Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, which presents a dying Earth where vegetation dominates and animal life is all but extinct. Originally published in the United States in abridged form as “The Long, Hot Afternoon of Earth.”
The video game , in which a flood has decimated the fictional world of Hyrule.
The anime Overman King Gainer, which depicts humanity living in domes after an ecological disaster.
The film Serenity and television show Firefly by Joss Whedon, in which the Earth's resources and biosphere get used up prompting mass exodus for the stars.
The novel trilogy Snowfall by Mitchell Smith (Snowfall, Kingdom River, and Moonrise) in which North America has retreated into hunter-gatherer societies and military kingdoms some 500 years after an apocalyptic ice age.
Film Them ! - desert nuclear tests create mutated gigantic ants - 1954
The novel "The Wind From Nowhere" by J.G. Ballard - First published novelWorld destroyed by increasingly powerful winds
The Japanese anime/manga series Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, set in a peaceful post-cataclysmic Japan, after an untold environmental disaster.
The novel This Other Eden by Ben Elton in which the earths population is forced to live in Biodomes for 50 years while the environment recovers from mankind's actions.
The anime Zoids: Genesis where an earthquake triggers a series of worldwide natural disasters that devastate Planet Zi.
The novel Mother of Storms (1995) by John Barnes - where a tactical nuclear strike in the North Pacific releases massive amounts of methane, spawning world-wide super hurricanes.
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Cybernetic revolt
See main article: Cybernetic revolt
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The decline and fall of the human race
The poem Bedtime Story from Collected Poems 1958 – 1970 by George Macbeth
Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut...After an ambiguous eradication of the human species, several people on a cruise to the Galapagos Islands get stranded there. Much to the dismay of the only male left, the women of the island continue the human species for thousands of years where they evolve into seal-like creatures.
The novel Titan by Stephen Baxter - A divided Earth sends a one-way manned mission to find life on Saturn's moon. The Chinese try to control an asteroid, and the Titan crew learn the asteroid has struck Earth, wiping out humanity.
The Japanese manga and anime The Big O, where humans apparently suffered mass amnesia 40 years prior and are afraid to leave their city, Paradigm. It is a sort of mecha/apocalypse subclass of its own; the protagonist has to battle mechanical beings and other robots who are trying to destroy the remnants of the human race.(See also Neon Genesis Evangelion)
Michael Haneke's film Le Temps du Loup (The Time of the Wolf), following a family through the (French?) country side after an undefined catastrophic collapse of civilization.
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After the fall of space-based civilization
The final two novels in Frank Herbert's Dune series, set after the disintegration of the Padishah Empire into many smaller factions.
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The Suns expansion
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Religious and supernatural apocalypse (Eschatological fiction)
The young adult book series Countdown by Daniel Parker, in which a demon wipes out the entire human population save for teenagers.
The 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 anime and manga Neon Genesis Evangelion in which over half of the human population is killed and the survivors are subsequently attacked by beings of apparently mystical nature named "Angels."
The film The Rapture (1991)
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 novel The Taking, by Dean Koontz in which a malevolent demonic force kills off the majority of the human race.
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.
computer game to be 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.
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Various
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.
Destructomundo, Podcast covering numerous genres and sub-genres of apocalyptic/post apocalyptic science-fiction, the show often takes an irreverent view of many world ending scenarios.
The Novels Dies the Fire and The Protector's War by S. M. Stirling, in which a disaster of indeterminate cause (most speculation within the novels concerns an all-powerful outside force ie. aliens or an act of god/gods) causes electricity, combustion engines, and modern explosives to cease functioning.
The machinima Red vs. Blue, the main characters are sent to the future in what they believe is a post-apocalyptic world.
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov; A rare cosmological event causes an Earth-like society inhabiting a multistar system to collapse as they experience their first nightfall.
The Revenants by Sheri S. Tepper; the nature of the catastrophe is never stated but technology has been displaced and a bizarre religion is dividing society into ever-smaller, racially-divided units.
The novel Taronga, by Victor Kelleher; after an unknown disaster simply described as "Last Days" a boy ventures throughout his surroundings, finding refuge in Tarronga Zoo and befriending a tiger.
The film Titan A.E., in which the Drej destroy Earth to stop the advancement of humankind.
The anime OVA series Giant Robo, in which a scientific experiment causes all power generation to stop worldwide, resulting in the death of one-third of the Earth's population in a week.
The film "The Omen" (6-6-06)
The novel "Wolf and Iron", by Gordon R. Dickson where after the fall of civilization from a worldwide financial collapse, a young scientist is trying to go cross country to his brother's ranch and gets help from a lone wolf.
The animated series , in which a distant planet's technology fails following the Alignment of its Three Suns.
It is widely believed that Third Earth, the setting for much of the Thundercats cartoon, is our own planet following two separate apocalypses, the exact natures of which are unknown.
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To be categorized
Nosutoradamusu no daiyogen (Translated as: Nostradamus's Great Prophecy) also known as The Last Days of Planet Earth, a 1974 Japanese film.
Reign of Fire, in which a race of terrifically powerful dragons awakes from sleep and decimates the world.
The Swedish role playing game Mutant.
The Swedish pen and paper role-playing game "Wastelands"
The role playing game Torg, in which several alternate realities invade earth simultaneously, some primitive, some technological, and some supernatural.
The Japanese anime series Wolf's Rain takes place in a post-apocalyptic world. Presumably it is after the decline of society and the petty wars of nobles who own domed cities where human life is bearable.
The film The Dark Crystal chronicles the Great Conjunction of the planet Thra's three suns. Aughra, a character in the movie, claims that the Great Conjunction will mean "the end of the world...or the beginning." The cracking of the Dark Crystal also placed the world of Thra into a semi-apocalyptic state.
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series of fantasy novels offers many hints implying that it is set in the distant future (or past, since it depicts time as cyclical) of our own world, with the current order of life passing away in a sort of "mystical singularity".
"" is an audio book-style story following a single person in a world where copyrights and 'listener licenses' are the rule of law.
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See also
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