Aliens ''
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. In
Argentine comic writer
Héctor Germán Oesterheld's comic series
El Eternauta (1957 to 1959), an alien race only mentioned by the protagonists as
Ellos ("Them") invades the Earth, starting with a deadly snowfall before using other alien races to defeat the remaining humans. In
Alice Sheldon's
Nebula-winning novelette "
The Screwfly Solution" (1977), aliens are wiping out humanity with an airborne agent that changes men's sexual impulses to violent ones.
Douglas Adams's ''
Hitchhiker's Guide'' series (1979–2009) is a humorous take on alien invasion stories. Multiple Earths are repeatedly "demolished" by the bureaucratic
Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass, to the chagrin of the protagonist
Arthur Dent. In
Gene Wolfe's
The Urth of the New Sun (1987), aliens or highly evolved humans introduce a
white hole into the sun to counteract the dimming effect of a
black hole, and the resulting
global warming causes a sea-level rise that kills most of the population. However, this may be redemptive, like
Noah's Flood, rather than a disaster. In
Greg Bear's
The Forge of God (1987), Earth is destroyed in an alien attack. Before its destruction, a different group of aliens is able to save samples of the biosphere and a small number of people, resettling them on Mars. Some form the crew of a ship to hunt down the homeworld of the killers, as described in the sequel,
Anvil of Stars (1992).
Al Sarrantonio's
Moonbane (1989) concerns the origin of
werewolves, which he attributes to the Moon along with their attraction to it. An invasion after an explosion on Luna sends meteoric fragments containing latent lycanthropes to Earth, who thrive in the planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere.
Moonbanes tone is reminiscent of
H. G. Wells'
War of the Worlds (1897).
Charles R. Pellegrino and
George Zebrowski's novel
The Killing Star (1995) describes a devastating attack on a late-21st-century Earth by an alien civilization. Using missiles traveling at
relativistic speed, they are determined to destroy the human race in a preemptive strike, perceiving them as a threat after watching several episodes of
Star Trek: The Next Generation that show human domination in space. In the video game
Chrono Trigger (1995), the giant alien creature
Lavos collides with the earth in prehistoric times, subsequently hibernating beneath the earth. As millions of years pass, it feeds on the energy of the earth, eventually surfacing in 1999 to wreak complete destruction of the human race, atmosphere, and general life on the planet in the form of a rain of destruction fired from its outer shell, known as the "Day of Lavos". In the video game
Half-Life (1998), hostile alien creatures arrive on Earth through a portal after a scientific experiment goes wrong. In its sequel,
Half-Life 2 (2004), it is revealed to the player that the creatures encountered in the first game are merely the slaves of a much more powerful alien race, the Combine, who have taken over the Earth to drain its resources after subduing the entirety of Earth's governments and military forces in only seven hours. In the 2000
Don Bluth animated film
Titan A.E., Earth has been destroyed by the Drej due to a human experimental discovery called Project Titan, which made them fear "what humanity will become". The 2011 TV series
Falling Skies, by
Robert Rodat and
Steven Spielberg, follows a human resistance force fighting to survive after extraterrestrial aliens attempt to take over Earth by disabling most of the world's technology and destroying its armed forces in a surprise attack. It is implied that the attacking aliens are in reality former victims of an attack on their own planet and are now the slaves of an unseen controller race. The television series
Defiance (2013–2015) is set in an Earth devastated by the "Pale Wars", a war with seven alien races referred to as the "Votan", followed by the "Arkfalls", which terraforms Earth to an almost unrecognizable state. Unlike most apocalyptic works, Earth is not inhospitable and humanity is not on the verge of extinction. ''
The World's End'' is a 2013 British-American
comic science fiction film directed by
Edgar Wright, written by Wright and
Simon Pegg, and starring Pegg,
Nick Frost,
Paddy Considine,
Martin Freeman,
Eddie Marsan and
Rosamund Pike. The film follows a group of friends who discover an alien invasion during a
pub crawl in their hometown. In the 2018 horror film
A Quiet Place, the 2021 sequel
A Quiet Place Part II, and the 2024 film
A Quiet Place: Day One, society has collapsed in the wake of lethal attacks by extraterrestrial creatures who, having no eyesight, hunt humans and other creatures with their highly sensitive hearing; the scattered survivors live most of their lives in near-silence as a result.
Astronomical In Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's novel
When Worlds Collide (1933), Earth is destroyed by the rogue planet Bronson Alpha, and a selected few escape on a spaceship. In the sequel,
After Worlds Collide (1934), the survivors start a new life on the planet's companion Bronson Beta, which has taken over the orbit formerly occupied by Earth. In
J. T. McIntosh's novel
One in Three Hundred (1954), scientists have discovered how to pinpoint the exact minute, hour, and day the Sun will go "
nova", boiling away Earth's seas and causing all life on Earth to be destroyed by natural disasters within twenty-four hours. A race is on to build thousands of spaceships to transfer evacuees on a one-way trip to
Mars. When the Sun begins to go nova, everything is on schedule, but most of the spaceships turn out to be defective and fail en route to Mars. In
Neal Stephenson's novel
Seveneves, The Moon is destroyed by an unknown agent, forming a massive debris cloud that threatens to produce a
White Sky and cause a massive bombardment of Moon fragments. As a result, a multinational effort is put in place to construct an ark for the preservation of humanity, built around the
International Space Station.
Brian Aldiss' novel
Hothouse (1961) is set in a distant future where the Sun is much hotter and stronger, and the human population has been reduced to a fifth of what it had been.
J. G. Ballard's novel
The Drowned World (1962) occurs after a rise in solar radiation that causes worldwide flooding and accelerated mutation of plants and animals.
Jerry Pournelle and
Larry Niven's novel, ''
Lucifer's Hammer'' (1977), is about a cataclysmic comet hitting Earth and various groups of people struggling to survive the aftermath in southern California. Hollywood—which previously had explored the idea of the Earth and its population being potentially endangered by a collision with another heavenly body with
When Worlds Collide (1951), a film treatment of the aforementioned 1933 novel– revisited the theme in the late 1990s with a trio of similarly themed projects.
Asteroid (1997) is an NBC-TV
miniseries about the U.S. government trying to prevent an asteroid from colliding with the Earth. 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. Characters in the six-part
ITV television drama serial
The Last Train (1999) awaken from a
cryogenic sleep after an
asteroid the size of
Birmingham strikes Africa, causing a worldwide apocalypse.
K. A. Applegate's 2001–2003 book series,
Remnants, details the end of the world by asteroid collision. The first book,
The Mayflower Project (2001), describes Earth in a sort of hysteria as 80 people are chosen by NASA to board a spacecraft that will go to an unknown destination away from the destroyed Earth. The later books deal with the few survivors waking up from a 500-year hibernation and succumbing to both strange mutations and the will of a strange alien computer/spaceship that they land on. Eventually, they return to Earth to find a couple colonies of survivors struggling on a harsh planet completely different from the Earth the Remnants knew.
Melancholia (2011), the middle entry of filmmaker
Lars von Trier's "depression trilogy", ends with humanity completely wiped out by a collision with a
rogue planet. The depressed protagonist reverses roles with her relatives as the crisis unfolds, as she turns out to be the only family member capable of calmly accepting the imminent impact event. In
id Software's video game
Rage (2011), Earth is heavily damaged, and humanity nearly wiped out, by the direct collision of the real asteroid
99942 Apophis with the Earth in the year 2029.
Marly Youmans' epic poem
Thaliad (2012) tells the story of a group of children after an unspecified apocalypse from the sky, perhaps connected with solar flares or meteor impact, resulting in people and animals having been burned and the skies having filled with ash. The children survive only because they were together on a school visit to a cave. In the 2013 Australian film
These Final Hours, a massive asteroid hits the Atlantic Ocean, dooming all life. The film follows James, who decides to head to the 'party-to-end-all-parties' and spend the last 12 hours before the global firestorm reaches Western Australia. In the 2020 film
Greenland, a massive comet, known as Clarke, is set to collide with Earth, with only a few people permitted into a massive complex of bunkers in Greenland. The film follows the Garrity family's attempts to reach these safe havens after they were unable to board the transport aircraft to the bunkers. Clarke collides with Earth, leaving the planet devastated. However, there are survivors throughout the world. A sequel,
Greenland: Migration, was released in 2026, and follows the Garrity family attempting to travel across a post-apocalyptic Europe to reach Clarke's imact crater. In the 2021
apocalyptic political satire film ''
Don't Look Up'' by Adam McKay, the main characters Dr. Mindy (played by
Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (
Jennifer Lawrence) discover a large
comet on direct collision course with Earth in six months. However, they are largely ignored by the U.S. government, and after a series of attempts to reveal the comet's existence and severity, the global response is mixed, with opinions ranging from calls to "Look up", shock, disinterest, and even outright denial due to a campaign of
disinformation (telling people to "Don't look up") by the administration. The comet eventually strikes Earth, triggering an
extinction-level event.
Cozy catastrophe The "cozy catastrophe" is not an intentional style of post-apocalyptic science fiction, but rather a criticism of certain apocalyptic works considered as not believably harsh enough for the critic's stated preferences. Stories subject to this criticism generally involve some sort of catastrophe wherein civilization comes to an end with mass deaths, but the main characters survive relatively unscathed and are freed from the constraints of vulgar civilization in their hideaway, perhaps finding a kind of quiet happiness in the changed world. The term was coined by
Brian Aldiss in
Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973). Aldiss was directing his remarks mainly at novels of English author
John Wyndham such as
The Kraken Wakes (1953), but especially his novel
The Day of the Triffids (1951), whose protagonists did not suffer enough associated hardship from the collapse of society for Aldiss's taste, as well as other British books in the era following the Second World War. The genre has been defended though as being a valid take on more low-key catastrophes of an ecological sort, and some question whether other books qualify at all
Margaret Atwood defended
The Day of the Triffids as not as "cozy" as alleged, for example.
Environmental disaster The Purple Cloud (1901) by
M. P. Shiel is a novel in which most of humanity has been killed by a poisonous cloud issuing from volcanic eruptions. In
Alfred Walter Stewart's 1923 novel ''Nordenholt's Million'', an engineered strain of bacteria denitrifies almost all plants, causing a collapse of food supply. The plutocrat of the title establishes a haven in central Scotland for a chosen group of survivors, while deliberately wrecking all alternative refuges. In
Alfred Bester's story "
Adam and No Eve" (1941), an inventor takes off in a rocket whose propulsion uses a dangerous catalyst. From
outer space, he sees that the entire world has been destroyed by fire in a runaway reaction caused by the catalyst. Fatally injured in a crash landing, he crawls to the sea so that the bacteria in his body can initiate new life on Earth. In John Christopher's novel
The Death of Grass (1956), a mutated virus kills cereal crops and other
grasses throughout Eurasia, causing famine.
Kurt Vonnegut's novel ''
Cat's Cradle'' (1963) ends with all the bodies of water turning into "
ice-nine", a fictional phase of ice that forms at room temperature. In
J. G. Ballard's novel
The Burning World (1964, expanded into
The Drought in 1965), pollution in the oceans creates a surface layer that resists evaporation, bringing about a worldwide drought.
John Brunner's novel
The Sheep Look Up (1972) describes an environmentally degraded world rapidly collapsing into social chaos, revolution, and anarchy.
Richard Cowper's
three-volume novel The White Bird of Kinship (1978–82) envisions a future in which
anthropogenic global warming has led to a catastrophic rise in sea level. Most of it takes place two millennia later.
Ursula K. Le Guin's novel
Always Coming Home (1985) takes place long after worldwide disasters—apparently largely environmental, though nuclear war may also be involved—have drastically reduced the population. It paints an admiring picture of a
primitive society that will not repeat the mistakes of civilization. It won the
Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was a runner-up for a
National Book Award. Chuck Dixon's
Winterworld comic has the anti-hero Scully and Rah-Rah the badger team up with teenage Wynn to take on a world fallen to winter. Continued in La Nina, Frozen Fleet, and the book ''
The Mechanic's Song''.
Palladium Books'
Rifts roleplaying game (1990) features an apocalypse caused by various natural disasters, including the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano, which releases a large amount of magical energy, This energy is amplified by the deaths of millions occurring during a solstice, at midnight, during a planetary alignment, creating the titular rifts that bring forth various beings and monstrosities from throughout the Megaverse. In
Octavia Butler's 1993 novel
Parable of the Sower, climate change and corporatism are the human-caused reasons for societal collapse. In the film
The Day After Tomorrow (2004), based on
Art Bell's and
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 video game
The Long Dark (2017) depicts survival in the wilderness of northern Canada during winter after a geomagnetic disaster has disabled all modern technology.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (2002) is set in the Great Sea, a massive ocean that was formed following a magical flood that destroyed all settlements besides those located on mountain peaks. This is later revealed to be the result of
Hyrule's goddesses submerging the land to stop
Ganon. Ganon attempts to raise Hyrule from the depths, but is thwarted by the wish of Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule, the last king of Hyrule. By the end of the game,
Link and
Tetra set off to find a new land.
Failure of modern technology In
E. M. Forster's novelette "
The Machine Stops" (1909), humanity has been forced underground due to inhospitable conditions on Earth's surface, and is entirely dependent on "the machine," a god-like mechanical entity which has supplanted almost all
free will by providing for humankind's every whim. The machine deteriorates and eventually stops, ending the lives of all those dependent upon it, though one of the dying alludes to a group of humans dwelling on the surface who will carry the torch of humanity into the future. In
René Barjavel's novel
Ravage (1943), written and published during the
German occupation of France, a future France is devastated by the sudden failure of electricity, causing chaos, disease, and famine, with a small band of survivors desperately struggling for survival.
Fred Saberhagen goes one better than Barjavel with the
Empire of the East series. The series starts with the 1968 book
The Broken Lands, sometime after the "Change" (with sincere nods from Boyett and Stirling), in which a defense designed to temporarily make nukes inoperative permanently changes some of the laws of science for magic.
Steve Boyett's novel
Ariel (1983, sub-titled "A Book of the Change") also has all technology—including electricity, gunpowder, and some physics principles—ceasing to function, while magic becomes real. He also contributed to the 1986
Borderland series, which investigates a return of the Realm of
Faery to the world.
The Quiet Earth, a 1985 New Zealand movie notable for its visually stunning ending, follows a scientist's descent into madness after he awakens to a world where all members of the kingdom
Animalia have seemingly disappeared. After recovering and finding other people, he realizes his experiments with energy transfers through the Earth's magnetic field are to blame, and that, unless he shuts down the experiment, it will destroy the planet.
S. M. Stirling also takes a swipe at the inconstant-physical-constants field with the
Emberverse series.
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. Civilization collapses, and two competing groups struggle to re-create
medieval technologies and skills, as well as master magic. Like Boyett's novel, Stirling's features
Society for Creative Anachronism members as favorably disposed survivors, and a hang glider attack against a building.
Afterworld (2007) is an animated American science fiction television series where a network of satellites firing persistent electronic pulses, combined with a strange nanotechnology, destroyed most electronic technology on the planet and caused the deaths of 99% of humanity, and is now causing strange mutations to occur in lower forms of life. The video game series
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is set after a second
Chernobyl Disaster which pollutes the Ukrainian countryside, resulting in otherworldly changes to the environment and causing the flora, fauna and laws of physics to irreversibly morph and mutate.
John Barnes'
Daybreak series (2010) deals with an America devastated by a
nanotech swarm. NBC's
Revolution (2012–2014) also revolved around a "change" after which the principles of electricity and physics are inoperable; however, the focus of the story is on how a group of protagonists attempt to get the power back on while opposing the efforts of a tyrannical militia leader, who seeks to understand it first so that he can take absolute power. The web series
H+: The Digital Series (2012-2013) depicts, in part, the aftermath of a world in which a
computer virus that infected a popular
brain-computer interface killed one-third of the population, leading to a breakdown in order and the lack or shortage of electricity and other modern conveniences.
All Systems Down (2018) is an American novel which describes a
cyber war that cripples Western infrastructure, resulting in the collapse of society.
Robert Harris's novel
The Second Sleep (2019) is set in a fundamentalist agrarian society several centuries after the collapse of global civilisation, which is implied to be the result of a sudden breakdown of the internet, possibly as the result of
cyberwarfare.
AI takeover and technological singularity The topic of
technological singularity, also known as "singularity," was first coined in 1993. Since then, the idea of the term has been used to produce countless major motion pictures and earn Hollywood producers millions of dollars at the box office. The "singularity" refers to a future moment in human history when science and science fiction, religion and philosophy, and hope and fear converge. The mathematician and science fiction writer
Vernor Vinge coined the term to denote a juncture when
artificial intelligence (AI) equals, and then in an intelligence explosion, far exceeds man intelligence." In laymen's terms, technological singularity is the theoretical future moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and becomes aware, autonomous, and potentially threatening to humans. •
The Terminator (1984), a science-fiction thriller directed by
James Cameron, is about a futuristic killing machine called the
Terminator (
Arnold Schwarzenegger), which is sent back to the year 1984 to assassinate a young woman named
Sarah Connor (
Linda Hamilton). The cyborg comes from the year 2029, following a nuclear war that has devastated the better part of civilization. Computer defense mechanisms have turned on their creators, starting another war in an effort to eliminate the human race altogether. Humanity's valiant rebel leader is John Connor, Sarah's son, who is destined to help them win the war, with the Terminator the only thing standing in the way. Sent back to the present, the Terminator must kill Sarah before John is born. It systematically eliminates every Sarah Connor in the city of Los Angeles, but Sarah escapes with the man sent to protect her,
Kyle Reese (
Michael Biehn), before the Terminator can get to her. What follows is a massive chase that will eventually end in victory for mankind. Co-writer
William Wisher Jr. has a cameo as a police officer.
Fossil fuel supply scarcities The film
Mad Max (1979), directed by
George Miller, presents a world in which oil resources have been nearly exhausted, resulting in constant energy shortages and a breakdown of law and order. The police do battle with criminal motorcycle gangs, with the result being the complete breakdown of modern society and nuclear war, as depicted in
Mad Max 2 (1981). The opening narration of
Mad Max 2 implies that the fuel shortage was caused not just by peak oil, but also by oil reserves being destroyed during a large scale conflict in the Middle East. The remnants of society survive either through scavenging, or in one notable case, as depicted in the third sequel
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), by using methane derived from pig feces.
James Howard Kunstler's novel
World Made By Hand (2008) imagines life in upstate New York after a
declining world oil supply has wreaked havoc on the US economy, and people and society are forced to adjust to daily life without cheap oil. Canadian novelist
Douglas Coupland's book
Player One (2010) deals with four individuals taking refuge in a
Toronto airport bar while a series of cataclysmic events occurs outside.
Alex Scarrow's novel
Last Light and its sequel
Afterlight narrate the fall of British civilization after a war in the Middle East eradicates the majority of the Earth's oil supply. The backstory of the video game series
Fallout revolves around the so-called "Resource Wars", beginning circa 2050, when oil supplies become depleted, leading to a disastrous series of wars that include Europe going to war with the Middle East before disintegrating into warring nation-states after all available oil is used up, the United Nations collapsing, the U.S annexing Mexico and Canada, and finally total nuclear war between the U.S and China in 2077 after over 25 years of war.
Pandemic Comics Crossed by
Garth Ennis is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which a bodily fluid-borne virus has destroyed civilization. Carriers of the virus develop a cross-shaped rash on their faces and act without inhibitions, raping, killing and torturing the few remaining uninfected humans.
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 Earth, leaving the whole planet to be controlled by women.
The Walking Dead is a comic book series published by
Image Comics, written by
Robert Kirkman, with artwork initially by
Tony Moore, and later by
Charlie Adlard. It began in 2003 and concluded in 2019. The story follows a group of survivors navigating a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies.
The Walking Dead television series is based on the comic books, which have also spawned a
motion comic.
Kamandi is an American comic book character, created by artist
Jack Kirby and published by
DC Comics. In the eponymous series, Kamandi is a teenage boy on a post-apocalyptic Earth that the textual narrative describes as "Earth A.D. (After Disaster)". The Earth has been ravaged by a mysterious calamity called the Great Disaster. The precise nature of the Great Disaster is never revealed in the original series, although it "had something to do with radiation" (in the series' letter column, Jack Kirby and his then-assistant Steve Sherman repeatedly asserted that the Great Disaster was not a nuclear war, a fact confirmed in issue #35). The Disaster wiped out human civilization and a substantial portion of the human population. A few isolated pockets of humanity survived in underground bunkers, while others quickly reverted to pre-technological savagery.
Xenozoic Tales (also known as
Cadillacs & Dinosaurs) is an alternative comic book by
Mark Schultz set in a post-apocalyptic future starring mechanic Jack Tenrec and scientist Hannah Dundee. Earth has been ravaged by pollution, and natural disasters and humanity survived by building vast underground cities. Some 600 years later, mankind emerged to find that the world had been reclaimed by previously extinct lifeforms, most spectacularly dinosaurs. In the new 'Xenozoic' era, technology is extremely limited and those with mechanical skills command a great deal of respect and influence.
Killraven (Jonathan Raven) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by co-plotters
Roy Thomas and
Neal Adams and 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. After humanity's enslavement, men not used as breeders or collaborators are trained and forced to battle gladiator-style for the Martians' amusement; women are used as breeders to supply infants, which are eaten by the Martians as a delicacy. Jonathan Raven, dubbed Killraven as his gladiatorial nom de guerre, escapes with the help of the gladiatorial "keeper", but without his brother, Deathraven. Killraven joins the Freemen, a group of freedom fighters against Martian oppression.
Deathlok is a Marvel comic book character created by
Rich Buckler and
Doug Moench. Colonel Luther Manning is an American soldier who was fatally injured and reanimated in a post-apocalyptic future, originally given the date of 1990, as the experimental cyborg Deathlok the Demolisher. He verbally communicates with his symbiotic computer, to which he refers as the abbreviated "'Puter". He battles the evil corporate and military regimes that have taken over the United States, while simultaneously struggling to retain his humanity.
Hercules, as portrayed in the DC comic book series titled
Hercules Unbound, featured the adventures of Hercules in a post-apocalyptic future. It made use of characters and concepts, such as the
Atomic Knights and the intelligent animals from Jack Kirby's
Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth series as an attempt to tie in some of the future series.
Judge Dredd is set in a future Earth damaged by World War III, a nuclear war instigated by corrupt U.S. President "Bad" Bob Booth in 2070. 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. Further massive conflicts during the comics' present, such as the "Apocalypse War" against East-Meg, the government of the former Soviet territories, and the "Day Of Chaos" cause even more destruction.
Axa is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth in the year 2080. The titular character is a woman who, having grown sick of the regimented and stifling society inside a domed city, flees into the untamed wilderness. The strip mixed elements of science fiction and sword-swinging barbarian tales; the lead character herself resembles Red Sonja.
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'. Accompanied by catwoman Liana, bullman T-Bone and loyal wolfman Gruff, Stone is intent on ending Leeshar's dark reign by leading the slave-like Yujees in rebellion.
Mighty Samson was set in the area around New York City, now known as "N'Yark", in an Earth devastated by a nuclear war. The series featured Samson, a barbarian adventurer, and was created by writer Otto Binder and artist Frank Thorne.
Druuna is an erotic science fiction and fantasy comic book character created by Italian cartoonist Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri. Most of Druuna's adventures revolve around a post-apocalyptic future, and the plot is often a vehicle for varied scenes of hardcore pornography and softcore sexual imagery.
Films and television Director
George A. Romero's
Night of the Living Dead (1968), and its five sequels, including
Dawn of the Dead (1978) and
Day of the Dead (1985), popularized the concept of a
zombie apocalypse, focusing on the breakdown of American society in a world where the dead are re-animating as mindless, undead cannibals due to some unknown disease, implied to be extraterrestrial in origin, and anyone bitten but not eaten will soon become a zombie as well. The
BBC television series
Survivors (1975–1977) and its
2008 remake series focus on a group of British survivors in the aftermath of a genetically engineered virus that has killed over 90% of the world's population. The first series of both versions examine the immediate after-effects of a
pandemic outbreak of the flu, while the subsequent series concentrate on the survivors' attempts to build communities and make contacts with other groups. The Japanese film
Virus (1980) illustrates the global effects of the deadly
MM88, a fictional virus that potentiates the effects of any other disease. It also features a
doomsday device where it is discovered that the nuclear arsenal could be triggered by an earthquake in a
chain reaction.
12 Monkeys (1995) is a science fiction film that depicts the remains of human civilization after an uncontrollable pandemic wipes out 99% of the human population. It is a semi-remake of
La Jetée (1962), and both films focus on the theme of fate by introducing the ability to
travel through time and make contact with pre-apocalyptic society.
12 Monkeys is also a
SyFy television series that premiered in 2015.
The Tribe (1999) is a television series that deals with a mysterious virus that kills the adult population, leaving the children of the world to fend for themselves, divided into different tribes and fighting against each other for their survival. The show focuses on the tribe called the Mall Rats, who take shelter in the city's mall to protect themselves from the dangers outside; however, the virus mutates and begins to infect all the children, forcing the Mall Rats to search for the rumoured virus antidote hidden in government buildings that the adults left behind. The film
28 Days Later (2002) and its sequels
28 Weeks Later (2007),
28 Years Later (2025) and
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) revolve around a virus in Britain that turns anyone infected into a mindlessly violent psychotic, though still alive and not undead, in a variation of the classic zombie theme. This also makes the infected more dangerous, as they can run very quickly and their bodies are not decaying. The plot centers on groups of uninfected survivors and a handful of virus carriers who are immune to the effects of the disease. In the reboot series of
Planet of the Apes, Will Rodman was a scientist of Gen-Sys who was working on an experimental drug he called ALZ-112 in an effort to save his father, who had been diagnosed with
Alzheimer's disease. The virus proved a success with ape test subjects by greatly enhancing their intelligence, and managed to cure Rodman's father, but only temporarily, as his body gradually developed antibodies against the virus. In order to make an stronger version, ALZ-113, later dubbed Simian Flu, was created, which proved to be fatal to humans. During the first trial, the virus was accidentally released onto Robert Franklin when Koba kicked off Franklin's breathing mask. Franklin was later found dead, but not before he infected Rodman's neighbor Douglas Hunsiker. After the apes broke 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 most of humanity. Later, the virus mutated, which caused humans to lose their speech capabilities and their advanced intelligence. Eventually, the Apes became the new predominant species of Earth, while humanity have regressed into a primitive state. In the comedy film
Zombieland (2009), a disease mutates most Americans and turns them into animal-like creatures hungry for human flesh. The story is about a group of people who stick together and try to survive against the zombies. Another comedy film,
Warm Bodies (2013), adds a romantic twist to its story, as a zombie falls in love with an uninfected woman and protects her from his fellow zombies. The
AMC television series
The Walking Dead, based on the
comic book series of the same name, premiered in 2010. It centers around a group of people in the state of
Georgia who struggle to survive and adapt in a post-apocalyptic world filled with zombies, known as "walkers", and opposing groups of survivors who are often more dangerous than the walkers themselves. The popularity of the series has led to a spin-off franchise comprising an
aftershow (
Talking Dead), a companion television series (
Fear the Walking Dead, a prequel with different characters from the source material), video games (e.g.,
The Walking Dead: The Game (Season One),
The Walking Dead: Season Two and
The Walking Dead: Season Three) webisodes (including
The Talking Dead webisodes and the
Fear the Walking Dead web series), and numerous
parodies and spoofs.
World War Z (2013) is an apocalyptic action horror film based on the 2006
novel of the same name by
Max Brooks. The film focuses on a former United Nations investigator who must travel the world to find a way to stop a zombie pandemic.
The Last Ship (2014) is an American action-drama television series, based on the
1988 novel of the same name by
William Brinkley. 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.
Train to Busan (2016) is an apocalyptic zombie film, based around a South Korean train from
Seoul to
Busan, hence the name. The virus was created from a chemical accident, and causes infected animals to develop heightened senses and infected humans to become violent and deadly, but disoriented by darkness. The story follows Seo Seok-woo (
Gong Yoo) and his daughter, Su-an (
Kim Su-an), as they make their way through a ravaged South Korea.
The Rain (2018) is a Danish post-apocalyptic web-television series. After a rain-borne virus is released over the region of
Scandinavia, causing a pandemic. Simone Andersen (played by
Alba August) and Rasmus Andersen, along with their mother and father, must make it to an underground bunker. Things soon go awry when the father must leave to find a cure and the children are forced out of the bunker due to lack of food.
The Last Man on Earth (2015) is a post-apocalyptic American comedy TV series over four seasons starring
Will Forte. It plays the premise for comedy.
Novels and short stories Mary Shelley's
The Last Man, published in 1826, is set in the end of the 21st century. It chronicles a group of friends, based on
Lord Byron,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others, moving through Europe as a plague kills most of the world's population.
The Scarlet Plague by
Jack London, published in 1912, is set in San Francisco in the year 2073, 60 years after a plague has largely depopulated the planet.
Isaac Asimov's
Nightfall (1941) describes a world with six suns, in constant daylight, except for an eclipse-based night every 2,000 years, leading to mass hysteria and destruction. Written in 1949 by
George R. Stewart,
Earth Abides is the story of a man who finds most of civilization has been destroyed by a disease. Slowly, a small community forms around him as he struggles to start a new civilization and to preserve knowledge and learning. '' by
Stephen King (1978)
Empty World is a 1977 novel by
John Christopher about an adolescent boy who survives a plague which has killed most of the world's population. 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". It was eventually adapted for a 1994 miniseries of the same title starring Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald. The novel was semi-inspired by King's earlier short story "
Night Surf". Also published in 1977,
Graham Masterton's novel titled
Plague, tells the story of a mutated and incurable, as well as fatal, version of
Yersinia pestis sweeping across the United States.
Gore Vidal's 1978 novel
Kalki also involves an apocalyptic event caused by a man-made pandemic. The 1982 novel
The White Plague by
Frank Herbert has molecular biologist John Roe O'Neill exploring vengeance on a global scale when his wife is killed in an IRA car bombing. He creates a pandemic that kills only women. Written in 1984, the novel
Emergence by
David R. Palmer is set in a world where a man-made plague destroys the vast majority of the world's population. The novel was nominated for several awards and won the 1985
Compton Crook Award.
José Saramago's 1995 novel
Blindness tells the story of a city or country in which a mass epidemic of blindness destroys the social fabric. It was adapted into the film
Blindness in 2008. Published in 2003 by
Margaret Atwood,
Oryx and Crake is set after a genetically modified virus wipes out the entire population except for the protagonist and a small group of humans that were also genetically modified. A series of flashbacks depicting a world dominated by biocorporations explains the events leading up to the apocalypse. This novel was also shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize. A sequel,
The Year of the Flood, was published in 2007, followed by
MaddAddam in 2013, the trilogy's conclusion.
Richard Matheson's 1954 novel
I Am Legend deals with the life of Robert Neville, the only unaffected survivor of a global pandemic that has turned the world's population into
vampire zombie-like creatures. The novel has been adapted to film three times:
The Last Man on Earth (1964),
The Omega Man (1971), and
I Am Legend (2007).
Jeff Carlson wrote a trilogy of novels beginning with his 2007 debut,
Plague Year, a present-day thriller about a worldwide
nanotech contagion that devours all warm-blooded life below in elevation. Its two sequels,
Plague War and
Plague Zone, deal with a cure that allows return to an environment that suffered ecological collapse due to massive increases in insects and reptiles.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) is an apocalyptic horror novel by
Max Brooks. The book is a collection of individual accounts of desperate struggle during and after a devastating global conflict against a zombie plague, narrated by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission. It also describes the social, political, religious, and environmental changes that result from the plague.
Emily St. John Mandel's
Station Eleven (2014) takes place in the
Great Lakes region after a fictional
swine flu pandemic, known as the "Georgia Flu", has devastated the world, killing most of the population. The novel won the
Arthur C. Clarke Award in May 2015. The award committee highlighted the novel's focus on the survival of human culture after an apocalypse, as opposed to the survival of humanity itself.
Religious Film The 1970s evangelical horror film
A Thief in the Night along with
its sequels depict a world in which millions of
born-again Christians have been
raptured; casual and liberal Christians, as well as non-Christians, are left behind to live through the
Great Tribulation. They are persecuted and forced by the
one-world government, part of the UN, to take the
mark of the beast or be killed. Hugely influential in the Christian entertainment industry, the film would inspire other works in Christian fiction in general and Christian horror and Christian apocalyptic themes in particular, such as the
Left Behind series. The film was itself influenced by evangelical Christian author
Hal Lindsey's popular 1970 book
The Late Great Planet Earth. The Christian-themed
Left Behind series of sixteen novels published between 1995 and 2007, and four film adaptations produced between 2000 and 2014, posits a world in which the righteous believers have suddenly been raptured, en masse, up to
Heaven, leaving behind an increasingly troubled and chaotic world in which the
Antichrist, foretold in the
Book of Revelation, arises to despotically rule over those unfortunate enough to have been "left behind". He is opposed by newly born-again Christians as the
end of times (
Tribulation) approaches.
War Film and television H. G. Wells adapted his novel
The Shape of Things to Come (1933) into the movie
Things to Come (1936). In the movie, England is reduced to rubble by a prolonged conventional, chemical, and biological war. Survivors are depicted living under the rule of a local warlord who raids his neighbors in an attempt to get his fleet of rotting fighter planes in the air again. At the same time, surviving engineers create a technological utopia. The film
Panic in Year Zero! (1962) tells the story of a
Southern California family's fight to survive the violence and chaos that ensue in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
La Jetée (1962) deals with a time traveler sent back in time to help the people of the post-apocalyptic future rebuild civilization after nuclear war destroys most of the world. It was partially remade in 1996 in the film
12 Monkeys. In 1965 the
BBC produced
The War Game, but it was considered too graphic and disturbing to broadcast at the time; it was only in 1985 that it was shown. It portrays a nuclear attack on Great Britain and its after-effects, particularly the efforts of the
Civil Defence system.
Planet of the Apes (1968) and its first sequel,
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) are 40th century-set post-apocalyptic entries in its original five-film series while
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) is a turn of the 21st century turn of the third millennium post apocalyptic last entry of this series. The other two films between "Beneath..." and "Battle..." were pre-apocalyptic
Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971, pre-nuclear bomb Los Angeles of 'present day') and
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972, also pre-nuclear but this time circa 1991 and with a violent ape revolution).
Genesis II (1973), a television film created by Gene Roddenberry, follows Dylan Hunt, a NASA scientist who begins a multi-day suspended animation test right before an earthquake buries the underground laboratory. Discovered in 2133 still alive, he is awakened by the organization PAX, descendants of NASA scientists who promote peace in the world. This television pilot, if picked up, would have followed Dylan and a PAX team as they reach out to the remains of humanity in a post-apocalyptic world by means of a long forgotten underground sub-shuttle rapid transit system that spanned the world right before the Great Conflict. A second pilot,
Strange New World, also failed to be picked up as a television series. The ABC made-for-TV movie
The Day After (1983) deals with a nuclear war between
NATO and the
Warsaw Pact, focusing on a group of people in the U.S. heartland states of Kansas and Missouri attempting to survive during and after the nuclear exchange.
Testament is a 1983 drama film based on a three-page story "The Last Testament" by
Carol Amen, which tells the story of how one small suburban town near the
San Francisco Bay Area slowly falls apart after a nuclear war destroys outside civilization. The 1984 BBC television film
Threads depicts life before, during, and after the detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb over
Sheffield, England. 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. Many of the survivors eventually band together to destroy Skynet and its army of robots, called "terminators". The series follows resistance leader John Connor and his mother, Sarah Connor, and their adventures before and after the nuclear strike, called "Judgment Day" in the film series. CBS produced the TV series
Jericho in 2006–2008, which focused on the survival of the town after twenty-three American cities were destroyed by nuclear weapons. The Cartoon Network series
Adventure Time (which began airing in 2010) takes place a thousand years in the future, after a nuclear war referred to as "The Great Mushroom War" wiped out humanity. Afterwards, once existent but eventually forgotten magic was recreated and all kinds of creatures took humanity's place.
Tom Hanks's 2011 web series
Electric City is a story based on a post-apocalyptic world. In this world, a group of matriarchs, the "Knitting Society", impose an altruistic but oppressive society to counter the aftermath of a brutal war that brings down modern civilization; however, in time, even this new "utopian" order is ultimately called into question by the inhabitants of the new society. The CW series
The 100 (which began airing in 2014) is a story based on a post-apocalyptic world. After a nuclear war, Earth was uninhabitable and the only survivors were those on space stations which eventually came together to form the Ark; 97 years later on an undeterminable year the Ark is dying and 100 prisoners under the age of 18 are sent to see if Earth is now survivable. There they are faced with the challenges Earth brings and those who survived the nuclear war. The movie
Zardoz is a surreal take on the genre, revolving around a post-apocalyptic future England where a warrior caste called Exterminators worship a giant, floating stone head known as Zardoz, which gives them weapons and ammunition. The movie
The Book of Eli released in 2010. Starring
Denzel Washington and
Gary Oldman, a story of a lone wanderer trying to deliver a book through the wastelands after a nuclear apocalypse. Everyone has to wear sunglasses/goggles due to solar radiation and cannibalism is prevalent, identified by shaky hands. Oldman runs a town with access to water and supplies and tries to take the last copy of the Christian Bible, in braille, from Washington seeking its power. At the time, he does not realize the Bible is in braille.
Novels and short stories Paul Brians's
Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction (1987) is a study that examines atomic war in short stories, novels, and films between 1895 and 1984. Since this measure of destruction was no longer imaginary, some of these new works, such as
Nevil Shute's
On the Beach (1957), which was subsequently twice adapted for film (in
1959 and
2000),
Mordecai Roshwald's
Level 7 (1959),
Pat Frank's
Alas, Babylon (1959), and
Robert McCammon's
Swan Song (1987), shun the imaginary science and technology that are the identifying traits of general science fiction. Others include more fantastic elements, such as mutants,
alien invaders, or exotic future weapons such as
James Axler's
Deathlands (1986). In
Stephen Vincent Benét's story "
By the Waters of Babylon" (1937, originally titled "The Place of the Gods"), a young man explores the ruins of a city in the northeastern United States, possibly New York City, generations after a war in which future weapons caused "The Great Burning". According to some theorists, the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 has influenced
Japanese popular culture to include many apocalyptic themes. Much of Japan's
manga and
anime are filled with apocalyptic imagery. The 1954 film
Gojira (1954, romanized as
Godzilla) depicted the
title monster as an analogy for nuclear weapons, something Japan had experienced first-hand.
Judith Merril's first novel
Shadow on the Hearth (1950) is one of the earliest post-World War II novels to deal with a post-nuclear-holocaust world. The novel recounts the ordeals of a young suburban housewife and mother of two children as she struggles to survive in a world forever changed by the horrors of a nuclear attack. Several of
Ray Bradbury's short stories of
The Martian Chronicles take place before, during, and after a nuclear war on Earth. The people flee Earth and settle on Mars but have constant conflicts with the native Martians. Several of these stories have been adapted to other media.
Andre Norton's ''Star Man's Son
(1952, also known as Daybreak 2250''), is an early post-nuclear-war novel that follows a young man, Fors, in search of lost knowledge. Fors begins his Arthurian quest through a radiation-ravaged landscape with the aid of a telepathic mutant cat. He encounters mutated creatures called "the beast things", which are possibly mutated rats or a degenerate form of humans.
Wilson Tucker's novel
The Long Loud Silence (1952) posits a post-nuclear holocaust America in which the eastern half of the country has been largely destroyed and its surviving inhabitants infected with a plague and barred from crossing the
Mississippi River to try to find refuge in the unscathed western part of the country. 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, which is not expressly told, but strongly hinted at with genetic mutations, glowing ruins, and landscape baked to glass. It 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. The group attempt to remain hidden; when this fails, they must survive during a war between mutants and the fundamentalists while awaiting rescue from members of a distant advanced telepathic human civilization. In
Walter M. Miller Jr.'s
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) a
recrudescent Catholic Church, pseudo-medieval society, and rediscovery of the knowledge of the pre-holocaust world are central themes.
Edgar Pangborn's
Tales of a Darkening World: The Davy Series, written mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, takes place after a nuclear war. The best-known story is the novel
Davy.
Poul Anderson's
Maurai series (1959–1983) also takes place after a nuclear war, and his
Hugo and
Prometheus award-winning story "
No Truce With Kings" takes place after a cataclysmic war. Both show the interactions among various kinds of societies that have developed in the centuries of recovery.
Robert Heinlein's 1964 novel ''
Farnham's Freehold'' follows the story of a group of people that have survived a nuclear explosion. The group survives the attack in a
fallout shelter but are taken to a future in which Africans rule.
Damnation Alley is a 1967 science fiction novella by
Roger Zelazny, which he expanded into a novel in 1969. A
film adaptation of the novel was released in 1977.
Harlan Ellison's novella
A Boy and His Dog (1969) takes place in a world desolated by the nuclear warfare in World War IV. It was adapted into a
1975 film of the same name as well as a companion graphic novel titled
Vic and Blood. In turn, the 1975 film adaptation influenced the
Mad Max films, particularly
The Road Warrior (1981).
Alexander Key's novel
The Incredible Tide (1970) is set years after the Third World War. The weapons used were not nuclear, but ultra-magnetic that tore and submerged the continents. The story was adapted in the anime
Future Boy Conan (1978). Russell Hoban's
Riddley Walker (1980), set in the English county of Kent around two thousand years after a nuclear war, also has religious or mystical themes and is written in a fictional future version of English. 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.
William W. Johnstone wrote a series of books between 1983 and 2003 (35 books all containing the word "Ashes" in the title) about the aftermath of worldwide nuclear and biological war.
David Brin's novel
The Postman (1985) takes place in an America where some are trying to rebuild civilization after the "Doomwar". It was adapted into the film
The Postman (1997).
Orson Scott Card's post-apocalyptic anthology
The Folk of the Fringe (1989) deals with American
Mormons after a nuclear war.
Jeanne DuPrau's children's novel
The City of Ember (2003) was the first of four books in a post-apocalyptic series for
young adults. A film adaptation,
City of Ember (2008), stars
Bill Murray and
Saoirse Ronan.
Video games In the computer game
Wasteland (1988) and its sequels, nuclear war occurred in 1998, leaving a wasteland in its wake. The game centers around a player-controlled party of Desert Rangers.
Wasteland 2 was produced in 2015 and
Wasteland 3 in 2020, both continuing the story of the Desert Rangers.
Fallout, an ongoing series of post-apocalyptic
role-playing games first published in 1997, depicts a world after a series of resource wars that culminates in a massive nuclear exchange between the U.S and China in 2077. The games revolve around "vaults," underground bunkers for long-term survival that are 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.,
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. at a Comic Con in a
Fallout-themed area In
Metro 2033 (2010), a nuclear war occurs in late 2013. Russia was targeted with atomic bombs, causing severe radiation across Mosco and forcing the rest of the people to live underground in the metro stations away from the deadly effects of radiation. Many animals and humans left behind mutated into creatures known as the Dark Ones, who were left outside for the next 20 years. The game is played from the perspective of Artyom, a 20-year-old male survivor and one of the many children brought into the metro right before the bombs dropped. 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. A sequel,
Metro: Last Light, was released in 2013. A sequel to
Metro: Last Light;
Metro: Exodus, was produced in 2019. Nuclear apocalypse followed by a demon invasion is a recurring staple of the
Shin Megami Tensei series. In those games it is generally seen as a major religious event created by or following the orders of
God, an example of this is in the 1992
Super Famicom game
Shin Megami Tensei, in which the Germanic Deity
Thor, following the orders of God, rains
ICBMs on the city of
Tokyo, initiating the second act of the game and setting up for its sequel,
Shin Megami Tensei II. In the franchise, these events are referred to as The Great Cataclysm. 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 despair. In
Doom Eternal, sometime after the events on Mars in
Doom, Earth has been overrun by demonic forces, wiping out most of the planet's population, under the now-corrupted Union Aerospace Corporation. What remains of humanity has either fled Earth or have joined the Armored Response Coalition, a resistance movement formed to stop the invasion, which has gone into hiding after suffering heavy losses. The Doom Slayer, having previously been betrayed and
teleported away by Dr. Samuel Hayden, returns with a satellite fortress controlled by the AI VEGA to quell the demonic invasion by killing the Hell Priests.
Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013) is set in a near future that follows the nuclear destruction of the Middle East. The oil-producing nations of South America form the "Federation of the Americas" in response to the ensuing global economic crisis and quickly grow into a global superpower, swiftly invading and conquering Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico.
Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation (2016) is set during an ongoing Apocalypse, after a Hellgate opens on Earth and a host of demons enter the world. The player controls a group of survivors that found a base to fight back and find a way to repel the invasion. 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. Although many groups of humans tried to survive for some time, both in an underground habitat called Alterna and on a spacecraft called Ark Polaris, all of the attempts resulted in accidents that led to the groups dying out. The DLC
Splatoon 2 : Octo Expansion introduces the character of Commander Tartar, its purpose being to pass down humanity's knowledge to the next dominant species that may rise after the devastation of Earth's biosphere.
Old World Blues is a
Hearts of Iron IV mod set in the
Fallout universe. This mod has been praised for its effective portrayal of the
Fallout series within a grand strategy setting.
My Time at Portia and
My Time at Sandrock (released 2019 and 2023 respectively) are both
farm sim video games that were developed by
Pathea. Both games took place 300 years after most modern technologies were destroyed.
Ultrakill (2020) is set in a world where all of humanity has died out due to various causes in an alternate World War I, leaving behind blood-powered machinery which resides in the game's version of
Hell.
Other Anime and manga Violence Jack (1973), a
manga and
anime series by
Go Nagai, is set in a post-apocalyptic world with corruption and psychotic gangs. It is credited with creating the post-apocalyptic manga and anime genre, depicting its post-apocalyptic world as a
desert wasteland with
biker gangs, anarchic violence, ruined buildings, innocent civilians, tribal chiefs, and small abandoned villages. This was similar to, and may have influenced, the desert wasteland settings of later post-apocalyptic franchises such as the film series
Mad Max (1979) and the manga/anime series
Fist of the North Star (, 1983).
Goichi Suda (Suda 51), who cited
Violence Jack as an influence on his video game series
No More Heroes (2007), stated: "All of the desert-setting titles are actually inspired by
Violence Jack. That came way before '''', so that's the real origin of everything."
Buronson's
Fist of the North Star (1983) is a story about Kenshiro, the successor of the deadly ancient martial art, Hokuto Shinken, in a world destroyed by
nuclear war.
Hayao Miyazaki's manga series
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982), 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 and a "Toxic Jungle" threatens the last of humanity. Nausicaä is the princess of The Valley of the Wind who, rather than destroying the Toxic Jungle, decides to study its flora and fauna in the hopes of co-existing with the forest. The manga and anime series
Dragon Ball Z (1989) and
Dragon Ball Super (2015), sequels to
Akira Toriyama's
Dragon Ball, contain parallel timelines generated by time-travel to the past from an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic future. Two cybernetic humans caused the mass extinction of roughly two-thirds of Earth's human population. Years later, the higher dimensional being
Zamasu, also known as Goku Black, teamed up with the version of himself from the future timeline. They killed all but two of the remaining population, along with an unknown amount of beings from other inhabited planets in that universe.
Battle Angel Alita (1990) is a cyberpunk manga about an amnesiac female cyborg, Alita. It was later adapted into the
James Cameron film
Alita: Battle Angel (2019). The anime and manga
X by
Clamp features a
supernatural apocalypse. In it, there is a battle over the end of the world between the "Dragons of Heaven" who wish to save humanity, and the "Dragons of Earth" who wish to wipe out humanity. The central character,
Kamui Shirō, has to choose which side to fight for. The manga began in 1992 and has been on hiatus since 2003. It has been adapted as an anime film in 1996 and an anime television series between 2001 and 2002. In
Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), the story takes place on an Earth shattered by the Second Impact in Antarctica (referring to the "giant-impact hypothesis" 4.5 billion years ago,
Theia, as the first impact), which caused mass extinctions and wars as well as significant changes to the planet's climate and population. The security agency NERV tries to secure Neo Tokyo from a Third Impact while withholding the true story of the Second Impact from the public and even the protagonists.
Uchuu no Stellvia (2003) describes an Earth after being hit by a large electromagnetic wave from a supernova of a nearby star, where mankind needs to rescue the earth 189 years after the impact from a second wave of matter approaching the solar system. The anime shows a globalized society who have put together to fight this "enemy". In
Black Bullet (2011), the Earth was devastated by an alien race, spreading a virus that transforms humans into some kind of insect. Only the major cities holding back behind big walls of some fictitious material and are under constant threat to be invaded when these walls fail.
Attack on Titan (2009) showcases a similar story, where society has fallen back into a medieval state and humanity has taken refuge behind three massive stone walls that protect them from the Titans, massive naked humanoid creatures who feed on humans. In
Seraph of the End (2012), the world is destroyed by a virus created by humans who kill all humans except for those under 13 years old, and vampires have taken over the Earth using humans for food. In ''
Kino's Journey'', the titular protagonist is a fifteen-year-old girl who forms a link with a talking motorbike named Hermes. Together, the duo explores different places and different nations while appreciating the young beauty of life. Their journey through the post-apocalyptic world and various ruins teaches them about life and its unknown depths. In
Devilman Crybaby (2018) the story describes the downfall of human race due to paranoia towards anyone after Ryo Asuka, the main villain, spreads false information that anyone can be a demon due to dissatisfaction with society. In
Apocalypse Hotel (2025), the series follows the surviving robot staff working in a hotel in
Ginza, a century after humanity left Earth following a disease that left the air poisonous to humans, and taking in guests such as visiting aliens.
Films and literature In
Ayn Rand's novella
Anthem (1938), society has entered a near-
medieval state after a new government forbids any kind of individual thought, even forbidding the words
I and
me. In
Arthur C. Clarke's short story "
The Nine Billion Names of God" (1953), the universe ends when Tibetan monks, making use of a specially-written computer program, finish writing all of the nine billion possible names of God. The story won a retrospective
Hugo Award.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) is a film by
Val Guest about an Earth thrown out of its orbit around the Sun by excessive nuclear testing. It paints a picture of a society ready to believe that humans could destroy the planet, hoping that science could fix what it has broken but resigned to the possibility of irreversible doom. The film
Soylent Green (1973), loosely based upon
Harry Harrison's science fiction novel
Make Room! Make Room! (1966), is set in the dystopian future of 2022, in an overpopulated, heavily polluted world. 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.
Ernst Jünger's novel
Eumeswil's (1977) key theme is the figure of the Anarch, the inwardly-free individual who lives quietly and dispassionately within, but not of society and the post apocalyptic world.
John Crowley's novel
Engine Summer (1979) takes place perhaps a thousand years after "the Storm" destroyed industrial civilization. Surviving cultures seem to be influenced by the 1960s and 1970s
counterculture.
Cormac McCarthy's
The Road (2006) takes place several years after an unspecified cataclysm that forces a father and son to perpetually search for survival. It was
adapted into a film in 2009.
Robert Reed's short story "Pallbearer" (2010) deals with most of the developed world's population dying after a mass vaccination program in which the vaccines were purposefully tainted. The survivors are those who were not vaccinated, often for religious reasons, and their descendants. Most of the developing world does not receive the vaccine, and decades later, large numbers of its refugees are arriving to America's shores. The protagonist survives the disaster as a young boy and has a chance encounter with an elderly scientist and her fanatical younger family members. James Wesley Rawles' novel
Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse (2011) addresses a contemporaneous global economic crash, and focuses on the struggles of a large cast of characters who struggle to survive after what is termed "The Crunch." It covers both the lead up to the economic crash, as well as several years after the crash.
This Is The End (2013) centers on fictionalized versions of its cast in the wake of a global biblical
apocalypse. It is a feature-length
film adaptation of the short film
Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse (2007), also written by
Seth Rogen and
Evan Goldberg, with the short's director, Jason Stone, serving as an executive producer.
Escape from New York and its sequel
Escape from L.A., as well as supplementary materials published as comic books, is set in a fragmenting United States with rampant crime, pollution, and overpopulation. New York City has been walled off and turned into a gigantic maximum security prison after a 400% rise in crime by 1988. The same happens to Los Angeles in 2000, when a massive earthquake floods the San Fernando Valley, isolating L.A off the west coast. Robert Jordan's
The Wheel of Time is set in a fictional post-apocalyptic world with a medieval society. In the world, a system of magic, known as the One Power, is divided into a male half (saidin) and a female half (saidar). 3,000 years before the series, the world was a high tech utopia. When humanity tried to find a magic that both men and women could use, they encountered the Dark One, a Satan-like being able to corrupt human nature and the natural world. A war between the "Light" and the "Shadow", the Dark One and his followers, ended with the Dark One being imprisoned with saidin. However, he corrupted it from within his prison, driving male users of the Power insane and causing them to destroy civilization and geography in what is known as the "Breaking of the World". The era before the Breaking is later remembered as the "Age of Legends", since much knowledge was lost, and many common feats of that time seemed miraculous to the characters of the series.
Games • In the
Gamma World (1978)
tabletop roleplaying game, the reason for apocalypse varies depending on the edition, going from nuclear war to alien invasion to technology gone rampant to the merging of realities caused by the
Large Hadron Collider. • In the
Twilight: 2000 (1984)
tabletop roleplaying game, the setting is five years after World War III began, a conventional war followed by a limited nuclear exchange. • In
Ubisoft's videogame
I Am Alive (2012), America has gone through a massive cataclysm known as "the Event" that destroys most cities and areas. Due to the damage of the aftermath, many people are forced to go without resources, causing citizens to become agitated, violent, and bitter, turning them into savage hunters. • In the
Lisa: The Painful videogame (2014), the world has been turned into a desert wasteland by a mysterious event called the "White Flash". • In the
Nomad Gods (1977) boardgame, the board depicts an area called the Plaines of Prax, that have been blasted by titanic battles between two gods making it uninhabitable. • In
Guerrilla Games'
Horizon Zero Dawn and
Horizon Forbidden West, the world ended due to an event called the "Faro Plague" but life lives on due to an
AI called GAIA.
Music Many musicians have post-apocalyptic themes and imagery in their lyrics. For example,
Muse's album
The 2nd Law (2012) was inspired by post-apocalyptic life in
World War Z, and the event is referred to specifically in the song "
Apocalypse Please" (2003). Post-apocalyptic scenarios were a common theme in the music of
Jefferson Airplane and
Jefferson Starship, most notably the song "
Wooden Ships" and the album
Blows Against the Empire. The
music video for the song "Mankind Man"(1995) by the
Barstool Prophets featured a dystopian view of the future reminisent of
Lord of the Flies and
Mad Max. Likewise, the music video for
The Sisters of Mercy song "
This Corrosion" takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting. ==See also==