List of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

Contents 1 World War III and other conflicts 1.1 Films 1.2 Television 1.3 Novels 1.4 Short stories 1.5 Role-playing games 1.6 Other 2 Pandemic 3 Astronomic impact (meteorites) 4 Alien invasion 5 Ecological catastrophe 6 Cybernetic revolt 7 The decline and fall of the human race 8 After the fall of space-based civilization 9 The Sun's expansion 10 Religious and supernatural apocalypse (Eschatological fiction) 11 Not specified 12 To be categorized 13 See also 14 External links

[edit] World War III and other conflicts

[edit] 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.
• 1959. On the Beach by Stanley Kramer, starring Gregory Peck, Fred Astaire, Anthony Perkins and Ava Gardner. The crew of an American submarine finds temporary safety from the fallout in Australia after the nuclear holocaust.
• 1959. The World, the Flesh and the Devil
• 1962. La Jetée by Chris Marker.
• 1962. Panic in Year Zero!, a 1962 movie about a family that escapes Los Angeles that was devastated by a nuclear attack.
• 1964. Fail-Safe, theatrical release based on the novel of the same name. Drama in which a technical failure causes a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by the United States. Deals with American and Soviet attempts to prevent escalation into a full-scale nuclear war.
• 1964. Dr. Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick, adapting the novel Red Alert by Peter George.
• 1965. The War Game by Peter Watkins.
• 1968. Planet of the Apes, adapted from the novel La planète des singes by Pierre Boule.
• 1971. The Omega Man. An immune survivor of a biological/nuclear war battles plague-altered quasi-vampires bent on erasing all vestiges of science and technology.
• 1973. Soylent Green. In an overpopulated futuristic Earth, a New York police detective finds himself marked for murder by government agents when he gets too close to a bizarre state secret involving the origins of a revolutionary and needed new foodstuff.
• 1975. A Boy and His Dog. A young man and his pet dog struggle for survival and encounter strife in a harsh, post-apocalyptic wasteland where food and sex are scarcities.
• 1977. Wizards by Ralph Bakshi. A good wizard and his evil brother battle some two millennia after Armageddon.
• 1977. Damnation Alley. A surviving American ICBM crew sets out across the United States in an armored vehicle in search of survivors in Albany, New York. Loosely based on the novel by Roger Zelazny.
• 1979. Mad Max
• 1981. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
• 1985 Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
• 1982. Human Highway
• 1983. Barefoot Gen, based on the actual atomic bombing of Hiroshima (not technically post-apocalypse, but rather post-disaster)
• 1983. The Day After. The effects of nuclear war on a Kansas town.
• 1983. Le Dernier Combat by Luc Besson
• 1983. Testament
• 1984. Threads. BBC Television Docudrama.
• 1984. Red Dawn by John Milius
• 1984. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki
• 1984. Sexmisja. A Polish comedy.
• 1986. When the Wind Blows by Jimmy Murakami, adapting the graphic novel by Raymond Briggs
• 1987. Cherry 2000
• 1987. Hell Comes to Frogtown
• 1988. Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo
• 1988. Miracle Mile
• 1988. Steel Dawn
• 1989. Cyborg
• 1990. The Blood of Heroes
• 1990. By Dawn's Early Light. The last such film made before the collapse of the Soviet Union, this HBO presentation was based on 1983 novel Trinity's Child.
• 1991. Delicatessen by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro
• 1993. Cyborg 2
• 1996. Star Trek: First Contact. A late-21st century Earth is devastated by nuclear conflict.
• 1997. The Postman (film), partly based on the David Brin novel
• 1998. Six-String Samurai
• 1999. The Matrix
• 2000. Fail-Safe, televised play based on the novel of the same name directed by Stephen Frears and produced by George Clooney. Drama in which a technical failure causes a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union by the United States. Deals with American and Soviet attempts to prevent escalation into a full-scale nuclear war.
• 2002. Equilibrium. After barely surviving yet another worldwide conflict, mankind rejects all emotion and outlaws all forms of expression which might encourage emotional response.
• 2005. The Dead: LIVE
• Day the World Ended
• Radioactive Dreams
• City Limits
• Def-Con 4
• Stryker (film)
• World Gone Wild
• Exterminators of the Year 3000
• The 1960 film adaptation of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine had an atomic war to explain the downfall of civilization.
• She, a low-budget b-movie made in 1982, an extremely loose adaptation of the novel She (novel) by H. Rider Haggard, starring Sandahl Bergman as a post-civilization warrior.
• Numerous other low-budget productions of the 1980s, such as Warriors of the Wasteland (film) and Warrior of the Lost World portray a world of Road Warrior-inspired post-nuclear barbarism.

[edit] Television

• 1987. Amerika (TV miniseries), an ABC mini-seires about the peaceful takeover of United States by the Soviet Union.
• 1992. Woops!, a very short-lived sitcom about the survivors of a nuclear war.
• 2002. Jeremiah (TV series)
• 2006. Jericho (CBS), about the residents of a small Kansas town which remains isolated in the aftermath of a series of nuclear attacks on America.

[edit] Novels

• 1933. The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells, predicting an extended WWII, societal upheaval, and the beginning of space travel. Filmed as Things to Come in 1936.
• 1934. Quinzinzinzili by Régis Messac, also predicting a great WWII that ends with the vanishing of humanity. Only a group of children survives and forms a strange new mankind.
• 1955. The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett, in the aftermath of a nuclear war scientific knowledge is feared and restricted.
• 1957. On the Beach by Nevil Shute (also the films based on the book)
• 1959. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, the aftermath of a nuclear war in a rural Florida community.
• 1959. A Canticle for Leibowitz and later its sequel Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, both by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• 1961. Dark Universe by Daniel F. Galouye.
• 1967. Ice by Anna Kavan. Nuclear winter is encroaching the entire planet.
• 1968. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, filmed as Blade Runner.
• 1970. The Incredible Tide by Alexandar Key.
• 1971. Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy.
• 1980. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.
• 1982. Survivors by John Nahmlos.
• 1983. Trinity's Child
• 1984. Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells
• 1985. The Postman by David Brin and the 1997 movie of the same name.
• 1988. The Last Ship by William Brinkley.
• 1997. Aftermath by Levar Burton. American civilization crumbles after a civil war pitting blacks against whites and a devastating earthquake.
• 1999. Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois, set 10 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated into nuclear war.
• 2001. Project Phoenix: Dead Rising by Darrin Brent Patterson.
• 2004. Cowl by Neal Asher.
• Die Letzten Kinder Von Schewenborn by Gudrun Pausewang. In German.
• By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benet.
• Deathlands by James Axler, set a hundred years after a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and USSR in 2001 destroys most of the world.
• Shannara Series by Terry Brooks, set after WWIII destroys all technology and warps the human race into other species.
• Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper
• Star Man's Son by Andre Norton
• Yellow Peril in Chinese by activist Wang Lixiong under the pseudonym Bao Mi, about a nuclear civil war in the People's Republic of China
• Apokalipsa wedlug Pana Jana by Robert J. Szmidt
• Children of the Dust by Louise Lawrence
• The City of Ember and its sequel, The People of Sparks, and prequel, The Prophet of Yonwood, by Jeanne DuPrau
• Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny, and a movie made from it
• Deus Irae by Philip K. Dick in collaboration with Roger Zelazny
• Down to a Sunless Sea by David Graham of the last plane out of a fall-of-Saigon-like New York City
• Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb by Philip K. Dick
• Emergence by David R. Palmer
• Farnham's Freehold by Robert A. Heinlein
• Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks
• Fitzpatrick's War by Theodore Judson
• Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald
• Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, and the film based on it
• Malevil by Robert Merle
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov. (A later book, Robots and Empire, gave a different explanation)
• Pulling Through by Dean Ing
• Red Alert by Peter George. Filmed as Dr. Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick.
• Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon
• The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
• The King Awakes and The Empty Throne by Janice Elliott, set in a Medieval-style society several generations after a nuclear war. Both novels deal with the return of King Arthur and his friendship with a youth from the post-holocaust world
• The Last Children by Gudrun Pausewang, set in post-holocaust Germany
• The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick
• The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick
• The Year Of The Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker
• This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow
• Time Capsule (novel) by Mitch Berman
• Warday by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka
• The World Ends in Hickory Hollow by Ardath Mayhar
• Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O'Brien
• Series The Amtrak Wars by Patrick Tilley
• Series Horseclans by Robert Adams
• Series Hungry City Chronicles by Phillip Reeve
• Series The Survivalist by Jerry Ahern, first novel Total War from 1981
• Series Traveler (novel series) by D. B. Drumm, first novel First, You Fight from 1984
• Series Wingman by Mack Maloney, follows a former U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds pilot trying to restore a balkanized and largely disarmed United States of America while flying the last remaining F-16 Fighting Falcon in existence
• Series and anime films Vampire Hunter D, set ten thousand years after a nuclear war occurs in 1999
• Trilogy The Greatwinter Trilogy by Sean McMullen
• Masters of the Fist and The Long Mynd by Edward P. Hughes
• The Chrysalids (U.S. title: Re-Birth) by John Wyndham
• The Steel, the Mist and the Blazing Sun by Christopher Anvil
• Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley. Also screenplay.
• Series The Ashes by William W. Johnstone
• Series The Pelbar cycle by Paul O. Williams
• 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.

[edit] Short stories

• 1950. "There Will Come Soft Rains", by Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles.
• "Autobahn nach Poznan" by Andrzej Ziemianski
• "Dear Devil" by Eric Frank Russell
• "Let the Ants Try" by Frederik Pohl under the pseudonym James MacCreigh
• "Magic City" by Nelson S. Bond
• "Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick
• "A Boy and His Dog" by Harlan Ellison. Filmed in 1975.
• "Enta Geweorc" by Nicholas Waller (Interzone 198, 2004).
• "Time to Rest" and sequel "No Place Like Earth" by John Wyndham
• "Extinction is Forever" by Louise Lawrence. A scientist uses a time machine to travel to the future and film the results of a nuclear war in a bid to prevent it from happening. However, his actions could have serious repercussions for the mutated descendants of the human race.

[edit] Role-playing games

• Gamma World from TSR, Inc., the makers of Dungeons & Dragons
• Fallout series
• GURPS Reign of Steel
• Land of Devastation (a BBS Door)
• Operation Overkill (a BBS Door)
• Wasteland
• Neuroshima from Portal Publishing
• The Morrow Project from Timeline Ltd
• Twilight: 2000 from Game Designer's Workshop, set in a world where a Sino-Russian war degenerates into a limited nuclear conflict that eventually drags in Europe and America.
• 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.
• Warzone 2100
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

[edit] Other

• Numerous episodes of The Twilight Zone and its revivals, including "The Old Man in the Cave"; "Time Enough at Last"; "A Little Peace and Quiet"; "Voices in the Earth"; "Shelter Skelter"; and "Quarantine"
• 1982 TV miniseries World War III with Rock Hudson
• TV series and film Whoops Apocalypse
• Comics franchise Judge Dredd, first popularized in 1977 by John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra and Pat Mills.
• Webcomic Post-Nuke that takes place in a nuclear winter
• visual novel Planetarian
• Japanese manga (and subsequent anime adaptations) Appleseed by Masamune Shirow
• Japanese anime series Saikano
• Anime/manga series Fist of the North Star
• 1978 anime series Future Boy Conan by Hayao Miyazaki. Supermagnetic WMDs devastate Earth and causes virtually all land to be submerged underwater.
• The computer game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri tells of a ship leaving Earth on the eve of WWIII to found a new colony orbiting Alpha Centauri
• "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.
• 99 Red Balloons, pop song by Nena, in which a computer malfunction leads to harmless balloons being mistaken for a missile launch, resulting in a nuclear war
• 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
• The Horses, poem by Edwin Muir. Deals with society's regression to pre Industrial Revolution conditions in the wake of a nuclear war
• The Command & Conquer series of games features several worldwide conflicts in the Tiberian (GDI vs. Brotherhood of Nod), Red Alert (Soviets vs. Allies), and Generals (USA vs. GLA vs. China) series.
• The comic book Ex-Mutants is set in a post-nuclear world.

[edit] Pandemic

• The 1826 novel The Last Man by Mary Shelley
• The 1912 novella The Scarlet Plague by Jack London
• The 1949 novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
• The 1954 novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, filmed as The Last Man On Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971)
• The 1954 novel Some Will Not Die by Algis Budrys
• The 1975-1977 BBC television series Survivors by Terry Nation
• The 1978 novel The Stand by Stephen King, and 1994 miniseries Stephen King's The Stand
• The 1980 Japanese film Fukkatsu no hi also known as Virus, directed by Kinji Fukasaku
• The 1982 novel The White Plague by Frank Herbert
• The 1985 novel Blood Music and the 1983 novelette of the same name by Greg Bear
• The 1986 movie Dead Man's Letters by Konstantin Lopushanskij
• The 1992 novel The Children of Men by P.D. James
• The 1995 film Twelve Monkeys directed by Terry Gilliam
• The 1999 novel The Transall Saga by Gary Paulsen
• The 1999-2003 New Zealand television series The Tribe
• The 2001 novel Hole in the Sky by Pete Hautman
• The 2002 TV movie Smallpox
• The 2002 film 28 Days Later
• The 2002-2004 Showtime cable television series Jeremiah, based on the comic of the same name
• The 2003 novel Idlewild by Nick Sagan
• The 2003 novel Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• The 2003 novel Full Circle By Michael Boyle
• The 2004 novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• The 2004 film version of Dawn of the Dead
• The manga Eden: It's an Endless World by Hiroki Endo
• The comic series Marvel Zombies
• The comic series Y: The Last Man features a lone man & his monkey in a world populated only by women, series written by Brian K. Vaughan and published by Vertigo
• The novel A Gift Upon the Shore by M.K. Wren
• The novel A Planet for the President by Alistair Beaton
• The novel Eternity Road by Jack McDevitt
• The novel Plague 99 by Jean Ure and its sequels Come Lucky April and Watchers at the Shrine
• The novel The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
• The novel The Night of the Triffids by Simon Clark
• The novel trilogy Fire-Us
• The short story The City by Ray Bradbury
• The short story The Visitor by Ray Bradbury
• The webcomic Wandering Ones by Clint Hollingsworth
• After The Bomb
• The novel "Shades of White" by R.C. Duggan.
• The book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

[edit] Astronomic impact (meteorites)

• 1932 When Worlds Collide novel by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer, and the 1951 and 2006 films of the same name.
• 1977 Lucifer's Hammer novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
• 1979 Meteor film
• 1979-80 Mobile Suit Gundam anime series, talks of the impact of a massive space colony on Earth.
• 1980-84 animated series Thundarr the Barbarian
• 1995 Tank Girl movie loosely based on the comic by Jamie Hewlett
• 1996 After War Gundam X anime, sequel to Mobile Suit Gundam
• 1997 Asteroid TV movie
• 1998 Armageddon film
• 1998 Deep Impact film
• 1999 The Last Train (Cruel Earth in Canada) British TV six part drama
• 2001- Remnants, a book series by K.A. Applegate
• 2001 Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies The Ulysses 1994XF04 asteroid crashes into the Usea Continent, killing 500,000 and leading to the development of an anti-asteroid weapon called Stonehenge, which becomes a catalyst to the ISAF-Erusian War.
• 2002 The Visitor by Sheri S. Tepper
• 2005 It's Only Temporary book
• 2006 Three Moons Over Milford TV series
• 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.

[edit] Alien invasion

• The novel The Alien Years (1998) by Robert Silverberg
• The novel Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard and the Razzie award winning film based on the novel
• The film and original television series Battlestar Galactica
• The SNES/PS1 video game Chrono Trigger, where modern civilization is at risk of being destroyed by an alien parasite in 1999 AD.
• The PS1 video game Chrono Cross, where in alternate time lines modern civilization was destroyed by an alien parasite in 1999 AD.
• The video game Destroy All Humans!, in which the player controls a Furon alien in an attempt to overthrow mankind.
• The novel Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
• The Forge of God by Greg Bear
• The anime Genesis Climber Mospeada
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (in several media)
• The film I Come In Peace, directed by Craig R. Baxley
• Independence Day (film), a 1996 film
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers, based on the novel by Jack Finney
• John Wyndham's novel The Kraken Wakes
• The computer and video game Manhunter
• Tim Burton's film Mars Attacks! (1996), based on the trading card series Mars Attacks (1962)
• Stephen King's novella, The Mist
• The Ophiuchi Hotline, Steel Beach, and the rest of the Eight Worlds series, by John Varley
• Outlanders series by Mark Ellis aka James Axler
• Outlanders, a Japanese manga by Johji Manabe.
• Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters
• The anime The Super Dimension Fortress Macross and its sequels
• John Carpenter's films The Thing and They Live
• Don Bluth's animated film Titan A.E..
• John Christopher's The Tripods
• The TV-series V
• The novel The Visitors (1980) by Clifford D. Simak
• H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (in several media)
• TV Series (1966) "The Invaders" -Created by Quin Martin and Larry Cohen US
• TV Series (1970) "UFO" - Gerry Anderson Production UK
• The novel The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski - aliens conduct a preemptive strike against humanity with relativistic missiles
• 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.
• Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars In the midst of the Third Tiberium War, an alien faction known as the Scrin lands on Earth seeking the alien mineral Tiberium for themselves.
• The Halo video game series - An alien alliance called the Covenant begin attacking human colonies in 2525. By 2552, almost all of the human colonies are destroyed and the Covenant are attacking the Earth.

[edit] Ecological catastrophe

• The novel Aftermath by Charles Sheffield, in which Alpha Centauri goes supernova and causes cataclysmic climate change
• The 1976-1979 TV series Ark II - pollution devastates humanity
• The 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.
• Film Beyond the Time Barrier - X-plane arrives in future after solar radiation catastrophe - 1960
• The made-for-TV 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
• The novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, in which all the water on Earth freezes
• The novels Children of Morrow and Treasures of Morrow by H.M. Hoover, set in California several centuries after pollution all but wiped out the human race
• The novels Clade and Crache by Mark Budz
• 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 "The Crystal World" by J.G. Ballard - Jungle in Africa starts to crystallize all life and expands outward
• The film The Day After Tomorrow written, directed and produced by Roland Emmerich. Based in part on the novel The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell & Whitley Strieber
• The film "The Day the Earth Caught Fire" (1964) - Earth starts hurtling toward sun as a result of man's nuclear testing
• 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 Deus X by Norman Spinrad, the results of global warming
• The novel The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard - Climate change causes flooding.
• The novel The Drought by J.G. Ballard- a super drought evaporates all water on earth.
• 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 Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, in which space-based civilization exists despite the government's wishes during an ice age.
• 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 The HAB Theory by Allan W. Eckert, in which the stability of the Earth comes into question.
• 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 novel The Ice Schooner by Michael Moorcock which is set in a new ice age on earth
• The novel Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason in which a microbe consumes all materials based on petroleum.
• 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, devastating the Northeastern U.S.
• The film It's All About Love written, directed and produced by Thomas Vinterberg
• The novel The Last Gasp (1983) by Trevor Hoyle
• The video game The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, in which a flood has decimated the fictional world of Hyrule.
• The novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, which was made into a 1973 film Soylent Green directed by Richard Fleischer
• The novel Nature's End by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka.
• The manga and film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki
• The radio drama Nebulous by Graham Duff, in which much of the world was destroyed by an event known as "the Withering".
• The novel Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• The anime Overman King Gainer, which depicts humanity living in domes after an ecological disaster.
• The novel The Quiet Earth written by Craig Harrison
• The film Quintet directed by Robert Altman
• The novel "The Ragged Edge(US)/A Winkle in the Skin (UK)" -John Christopher - Civilization destroyed by massive world-wide earthquakes
• The short story The Screwfly Solution tells the tale of a virus which turns males into female-hating psychopaths when sexually aroused.
• 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 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 novel The Snow by Adam Roberts, in which the world is buried under kilometres of unnatural snow.
• 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 film Ultimate Warrior - (1975) starring Yul Brynner
• The film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, where the Van Allen belt catches on fire.
• The film Waterworld starring Kevin Costner
• The novel "The Wind From Nowhere" by J.G. Ballard - First published novel. World destroyed by increasingly powerful winds
• The novel The World in Winter (UK)/The Long Winter (US) by John Christopher in which a decrease in radiation from the sun causes a new ice age.
• 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.
• The Command & Conquer: Tiberian series of games in which an alien crystalline material known as Tiberium has rendered most of Earth uninhabitable.
• The 1989 film Slipstream, by Steven Lisberger
• The novel "Midnight Sun" by R.C. Duggan.
• The made for tv movie Encrypt
• The novel Mr. Adam by Pat Frank depicts a world in which a nuclear power plant explosion renders the entire male population infertile.

[edit] Cybernetic revolt

Main article: Cybernetic revolt

• The novel The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J. Ryan
• The film Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution by Jean-Luc Godard
• The 2003 TV miniseries and subsequent 2004 television show Battlestar Galactica.
• The novel Colossus (1966) by Dennis Feltham Jones, and the film adaptation titled Colossus: The Forbin Project (not exactly an apocalypse, however)
• The anime and manga DragonBall Z, throughout the second of its major story arcs.
• The short story and computer game I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
• The novella It Happened Tomorrow by Robert Bloch
• The "Legends of Dune" series by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert, consisting of the novels Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, Dune: The Machine Crusade, and Dune: The Battle of Corrin.
• The 1909 short story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (more machinery than computers)
• The Matrix trilogy (The Second Renaissance)
• The novel The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams
• Neuroshima, the Polish role-playing game from Portal Publishing.
• The future depicted in the Terminator film series
• The Hazel O'Connor song The Eighth Day
• The video game Command & Conquer: Firestorm - The Brotherhood of Nod's AI system CABAL goes rogue and takes control of Nod's cyborg units.
• The 2004 movie adaption of I, Robot.

[edit] The decline and fall of the human race

• The videogame Gears of War (2006), which portrays humans fighting a losing war against monsters which have emerged from underground.
• The novel At Winter's End (1988) by Robert Silverberg
• The last two novels of James Herberts Rats Quadrilogy show how after a nuclear war, humanity is overthrown by mutated Giant Black Rats.
• The poem Bedtime Story from Collected Poems 1958 – 1970 by George Macbeth
• Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series
• The novel The Bridge (1973) by D. Keith Mano
• Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End
• The novel City (1952) by Clifford D. Simak
• Friday (novel) by Robert A. Heinlein, which portrays human society on a future Earth as slipping into a gradual, but inevitable, collapse.
• 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 films Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of the Dead by George Romero.
• Planet of the Apes
• The latter part of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine
• The 1974 John Boorman film Zardoz
• The Japanese mangas Biomega, NOiSE, Blame! and Net Sphere Engineer by Tsutomu Nihei
• 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.
• The Cartoon Network/Adult Swim animated parody of the barbarian/post-apocalyptic genres, Korgoth of Barbaria
• The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King
• The novel Cell, also by Stephen King
• 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.
• The movie A.I. depicts human extinction after 2000 years.
• The manga/anime series Wolf's Rain takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where constant conflicts between nobles leaves whole parts of the earth uninhabited, cities in ruins, and technology rare. Only the nobles possess futuristic ships, and the richest have domed cities where the debilitated earth can still support life. A second apocalypse ends the series, with a presumable renewing of the planet.
• The song In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans, which describes, stage by stage, the decline of the human race. Covers the 26th, 36th, 46th, 56th, 66th, 76th, 86th and 96th centuries.
• The television series The Future Is Wild, which uses computer animation to simulate the sort of creatures that may evolve from present-day animals. In the world depicted in the series, the human race has become extinct. The reason is not given.
• The short story "To Serve The Master" By Philip K. Dick
• The 2006 film Children of Men, where the human race has become infertile.

[edit] After the fall of space-based civilization

• Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke
• Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda series
• Yukito Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita
• The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Dragon Masters, by Jack Vance
• The final two novels in Frank Herbert's Dune series, set after the disintegration of the Padishah Empire into many smaller factions.
• Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II
• Dan Simmons's Endymion & The Rise of Endymion
• Few stories of Ray Bradbury Martian Chronicles mention catastrophe on earth
• The Mote in God's Eye by Niven & Pournelle
• Yasuhiro Nightow's Trigun
• The PlayStation video game Xenogears
• Red Dwarf, the British Science-Fiction Sitcom
• Star Man's Son 2250 A.D. by Andre Norton
• Transfusion by Chad Oliver
• Larry Niven's Ringworld, an expedition from earth to find a futuristic planet, a ring surrounding a star, results in the members finding that a meteor punture in the ring's floor and power failure caused the cities to break a part and civilization to collapse.
• The Last Legionary series by Douglas Hill, in which a lone soldier fights to bring down the organisation which unleashed a deadly radiation against his planet, killing all his people and rendering the planet uninhabitable.

[edit] The Sun's expansion

• The episode "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars," of J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5
• The episode "The End of the World," of the television series Doctor Who
• The novel Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke in which the last survivors of Earth arrive at a distant colony unexpectedly.
• Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven
• 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.

[edit] Religious and supernatural apocalypse (Eschatological fiction)

• 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 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.
• The film Prince of Darkness, directed by John Carpenter, in which all Hell breaks loose.
• 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 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.
• The Hellgate: London 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.

[edit] Not specified

• 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 1975 novel Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany.
• The 1987 novel In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster.
• The novels Dies the Fire (2004), The Protector's War (2005) and The Meeting at Corvallis (2006) by S. M. Stirling, in which a disaster of indeterminate cause (most speculation within the novels concerns an all-powerful outside force, i.e. aliens or an act of god/gods) 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.

[edit] To be categorized

• The Korean animated film Wonderful Days
• 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.
• The film Crack in the World
• The manga and movie Dragon Head, by Mochizuki Minetaro
• The machinima Red vs. Blue, the main characters are sent to the future in what they believe is a post-apocalyptic world.
• Jules Verne's The Eternal Adam, in one night all the emerged land submerges and some island emerge. The survivors start a new mankind.
• The movie The Last Woman on Earth, directed by Roger Corman, in which all the Earth's oxygen temporarily vanishes - leaving only three survivors.
• The novel The Lost Continent (1916) by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which an isolated and feuding Europe has retreated into barbarism
• The novel Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter has the deliberate creation of a new vacuum state in the universe, incidentally annihilating all existing matter in the Universe - including the Earth.
• 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 Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel; An unknown event floods the earth with a poisonous gas, leaving only two survivors
• 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.
• Although not generally recognized as such, the Star Trek franchise falls into this category as it takes place in the decades and centuries following World War III on Earth, which nearly led to the collapse of human civilization. The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Encounter at Farpoint" depicts one aspect of the "post-atomic horror"; the film Star Trek: First Contact takes place about a decade after the war and depicts one pocket of civilization living in a camp in Montana, and the Star Trek: Enterprise episodes "Demons" and "Terra Prime" refer to the rise of military rule and an act of genocide perpetrated on radiation-scarred survivors of the war a century earlier.
• 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 video game Final Fantasy VI where the villain destroys and takes over the world, creating the World of Ruin.
• 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 novel Présence de la mort (1922) by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz where the Earth falls into the Sun.
• 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 Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light, 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. In addition, the series begins with the main characters fleeing the destruction of their home planet.
• The video game "Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time", where the evil wizard Ganondorf attempts to take over Hyrule through the spirit realm.
• The cartoon series Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors in which the universe is threatened by intelligent mutant plants called "Monster Minds"
• Aftermath by Gregory Benford
• Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time stories, which are set in the days of the final collapse and end of the Universe itself
• The Final Programme, movie based on Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories
• Many (perhaps most) Godzilla movies - notably Monster Zero, Destroy All Monsters and Godzilla: Final Wars, in these films, space aliens use mind-controlled giant monsters to destroy Earth's capitals
• Nosutoradamusu no daiyogen (Translated as: Nostradamus's Great Prophecy) also known as 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 Swedish role playing game Mutant.
• The Swedish pen and paper role-playing game "Wastelands"
• Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker
• The role playing game Torg, in which several alternate realities invade earth simultaneously, some primitive, some technological, and some supernatural.
• The role playing game Wasteworld [1].
• The novel The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin contains apocalyptic science fiction elements.
• The manga Japan, written by Eiji Otsuka and illustrated by Mami Ito.
• 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.
• The "X-Men" story arcs "Age of Apocalypse" and "Days of Future Past" feature devastated alternate timelines.
• 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".
• The anime and manga Eureka seven
• The MMORPG EverQuest II, in which the world of Norrath has been all but destroyed by a series of cataclysms, leaving only two cities surviving from the original EverQuest game.
• The predescessor of the Mars Attcks! trading card series Dinosaurs Attack!,in which time displaced(some almost kaiju-sized)dinosaurs create a post-apocalyptic world.
• The animated TV show Thundarr the Barbarian takes place some 2,000 years after the end of civilization.
• The book Armageddons, a collection of short stories about various ways the world could end. Authors include Frederick Pohl, Gregory Benford, Larry Niven and Fritz Lieber.

[edit] See also

• Apocalypse
• Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction
• List of songs about nuclear war
• List of nuclear holocaust fiction
• Nuclear holocaust
• Nuclear weapons in popular culture
• World War III
• World War III in popular culture

[edit] External links

• Dodson, Eric (2003). Post-apocalyptic film and the post-modern apocalypse. State University of West Georgia.