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Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction

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Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization, through nuclear war, plague, or some other general disaster.

Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten (or mythologized). Post-apocalyptic stories often take place in an agrarian, non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered elements of technology remain.

There is a considerable degree of blurring between this form of science fiction and that which deals with false utopias or dystopic societies. A work of apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic fiction might also be called a ruined Earth story, or dying Earth if the apocalypse is sufficiently dire.

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[edit] Cultural views on apocalyptic fiction

For the most part, western literature and cinema on the apocalypse or in a post-apocalyptic setting tend to follow American mores, with the exception of British apocalyptic fiction. While American and Western apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction tend to emphasize the fantastic, with the possibility of world-ending meteor collisions, mutants, and jury-rigged vehicles roaming a desolate countryside, British fiction is more pessimistic in tone.

Post-apocalyptic literature was not as widespread in communist countries as the government prohibited depictions of the nations falling apart. However, some depictions of similar-themed science fiction did make it past government censors, such as Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (which was later adapted as the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky), made during Russia's Soviet era, which features the bombed-out landscape and survival-based motives of its characters and was inspired in part by the 1957 accident at the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. Recently, Wang Lixiong's Yellow Peril was banned in the People's Republic of China because of its depiction of the collapse of the Communist Party of China, but has been widely pirated and distributed in the country.

According to some theorists, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in its modern past has influenced Japanese popular culture to include many apocalyptic themes. Much of Japan's manga and anime is loaded with apocalyptic imagery.<ref>Murakami, T.: Little Boy : The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture, Yale University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-300-10285-2</ref> It has, however, also been claimed that disaster - and post-disaster scenarios have a longer tradition in Japanese culture, possibly related to the earthquakes that repeatedly have devastated Japanese cities, and possibly connected to Japanese political history, which includes strict adherence to authority until a sudden and dramatic change. See Meiji Restoration and the earlier ee ja nai ka phenomenon.

[edit] Criticism

The use of post-apocalyptic contexts in movies and the typical accompanying imagery, such as endless deserts or damaged cityscapes, clothing made of leather and animal skin, and marauding gangs of bandits, is now common and the subject of frequent parody.

The number of apocalyptic-themed B-movies in the 1980s and 1990s has been attributed to film producers on post-apocalyptic films working around their low production budgets by renting scrapyards, unused factories, and abandoned buildings, saving them the cost of constructing sets. As a result, many films that would have been rejected by major studios on the basis of script or concept ended up being made, while other stories were adapted to a post-apocalyptic setting following the success of the Mad Max series.

Some apocalyptic stories have been criticized as implausible or as scaremongering propaganda.

[edit] Examples (listed by nature of the catastrophe)

[edit] World War III and Other Conflicts

[edit] Films

Robust 20th Century men help pale nerds and their beautiful women emerge from underground and retake the post WWIII surface from mutants.
Short subject.
An immune survivor of a biological/nuclear war battles plague-altered quasi-vampires bent on erasing all vestiges of science and technology.
A good wizard and his evil brother battle some two millennia after Armageddon.
The effects of nuclear war on a Kansas town.
BBC Television Docudrama.
A Polish comedy.
A late-21st century Earth is devastated by nuclear conflict.
After barely surviving yet another worldwide conflict, mankind rejects all emotion and outlaws all forms of expression which might encourage emotional response.

[edit] Television

[edit] Novels

[edit] Short stories

[edit] Role-playing games

[edit] Other

[edit] Pandemic

[edit] Astronomic impact (meteorites)

[edit] Alien invasion

[edit] Ecological catastrophe

[edit] Cybernetic revolt

See main article: Cybernetic revolt

[edit] The decline and fall of the human race

[edit] After the fall of space-based civilization

[edit] The Sun's expansion

[edit] Religious and supernatural apocalypse (Eschatological fiction)

[edit] Various

  • The 1989 film Slipstream, by Steven Lisberger
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Destructomundo, Podcast covering numerous genres and sub-genres of apocalyptic/post apocalyptic science-fiction, the show often takes an irreverent view of many world ending scenarios.
  • The film Crack in the World
  • The Novels Dies the Fire and The Protector's War by S. M. Stirling, in which a disaster of indeterminate cause (most speculation within the novels concerns an all-powerful outside force ie. aliens or an act of god/gods) causes electricity, combustion engines, and modern explosives to cease functioning.
  • The 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.
  • The video game "Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time", where the evil wizard Ganondorf attempts to take over Hyrule through the spirit realm.

[edit] Not specified

[edit] To be categorized

[edit] References

<references/>

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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