"Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction (or, in some
cases, the more general category speculative 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.

The genres gained in popularity after World War II, when the
possibility of global annihilation by nuclear weapons entered the
public consciousness. However, recognizable apocalyptic novels existed
at least since the first quarter of the 19th century, when Mary
Shelley's The Last Man was published. Additionally, the subgenres draw
on a body of apocalyptic literature, tropes, and interpretations that
are millennia old.

Ancient predecessors
The roots of modern apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction lie in
the apocalyptic literature of the past. Various mythologies and
religions around the globe include stories depicting or predicting an
end to the world and human society. In the ancient Kingdom of Judah,
apocalyptic notions appear in the prophetic literature after the
Babylonian captivity, most notably in the Book of Daniel; they
remained popular in Roman Judea at the time of the birth of
Christianity, and greatly influenced the development and teachings of
the new religion, Jesus himself discussing the issue in the Four
Gospels. Even as the Christian faith spread through the Roman Empire
and beyond, the idea that Jesus would return to his followers during
the end times remained central. The first centuries AD saw the
creation of various apocalyptic works, the best known of which is the
Book of Revelation, due to its inclusion in the New Testament. The
beliefs and ideas of this time went on to influence the developing
Christian eschatology.

Because of its prominence Revelation influenced nearly every
subsequent apocalyptic work in Western culture. However, it was not
the only representative of its literary genre produced during the
period. The corpus of New Testament apocrypha includes Apocalypses of
Peter, Paul, Stephen, and Thomas, as well as two of James and Gnostic
Apocalypses of Peter and Paul. Some of these works continued to inform
the eschatological imagination of Christianity despite their exclusion
from the Bible.

The early Middle Ages saw the development of new apocalyptic works,
such as the 7th century Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, as well as
entirely new concepts, like Islamic eschatology, which is related to
Christian and Jewish eschatology. A later addition is the Prophecy of
the Popes, ascribed to the 12th century Irish saint Malachy, but
perhaps a product of the late 16th century. The 13th century Arabic
novel Theologus Autodidactus written by Ibn al-Nafis was the first
proto-science fiction novel, in which he used empirical science to
explain Islamic eschatology.

The story of Noah and his Ark is also an apocalyptic story focusing on
the apocalyptic event itself as an end to a corrupt pre-apocalyptic
world and on the hope of a better post-apocalyptic one.


Modern works
The first work of modern apocalyptic fiction may be Mary Shelley's
1826 novel The Last Man. The last portion becoming the story of a man
living in a future world emptied of humanity by plague, it contains
the recognizable elements of the subgenre. It is sometimes considered
the first science fiction novel, though that distinction is more often
given to Shelley's more famous earlier novel, Frankenstein.

The 1885 novel After London by Richard Jefferies is of the type that
could be best described as "post-apocalyptic fiction"; after some
sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the
countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-
medieval way of life. The first chapters consist solely of a loving
description of nature reclaiming England: fields becoming overrun by
forest, domesticated animals running wild, roads and towns becoming
overgrown, the hated London reverting to lake and poisonous swampland.
The rest of the story is a straightforward adventure/quest set many
years later in the wild landscape and society; but the opening
chapters set an example for many later science fiction stories.

An apparently forgotten novel is "The Hopkins Manuscript" (1939).The
scenario is that the moon crashes into the Atlantic ocean and the
resulting effect on a small community in the south of England (see
Lucifer's Hammer). It was broadcast by the BBC sometime in the late
1940's. The author was R.C Sherriff whose play "Journey's End" was
performed in London in the early thirties.

The cosy catastrophe is a name given to a style of post-apocalyptic
science fiction that was particularly prevalent after the Second World
War and among British science fiction writers. An early example of
this, however, is the1890 Caesar's Column by Ignatius L. Donnelly
(under the pseudonym Edmund Boisgilbert), where the violent uprising
of the lower class against a plutocratic oligarchy leads to the
destruction of civilization, while the protagonist survives back home
in a now-fortified European colony in the Ugandan highlands.

The term was coined by Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The History
of Science Fiction. A "cosy catastrophe" is typically one in which
civilization (as we know it) comes to an end and everyone is killed
except for a handful of survivors, who then set about rebuilding their
version of civilization. English author John Wyndham was the figure at
whom Aldiss was primarily directing his remarks, especially his novel
The Day of the Triffids. The critic L. J. Hurst dismissed Aldiss's
accusations, pointing out that in the book the main character
witnesses several murders, suicides, and misadventures, and is
frequently in mortal danger himself.[1]

However, "cosy catastrophe" is also used for more limited-scale
disaster stories popular around 1900, like "The Thames Valley
Catastrophe" (where a volcano bursts forth to destroy London) or "The
Four Day's Night" (where smoke from a great fire and fog combine to
create a choking black smog). In this case, the coziness comes from
the limited scale and protagonist survival off somewhere safe and
unaffected.

The Cold War saw increased interest in the subgenres, as the threat of
nuclear war became real. Since this measure of destruction was no
longer imaginary, some of these new works, such as Nevil Shute's On
the Beach and Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, 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. Andre Norton wrote the
definitive, post apocalyptic novel, Star Man's Son (AKA, Daybreak
2250), published in 1952, where a young man, Fors, begins an Arthurian
quest for lost knowledge, through a radiation ravaged landscape, with
the aid of a telepathic, mutant cat. He encounters mutated creatures,
"the beast things" which are possibly a degenerated form of humans,
and this novel set the pattern for many future movie plots. There have
been many retellings of this basic story, yet little or no
acknowledgment is paid to Andre Norton, despite sales of more than 1
million copies of Star Man's Son, for her thematic development, and
popularization of this genre.

A seminal work in this subgenre was Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle
for Leibowitz (1959). Many subsequent stories were clearly derivative
of this novel. Ideas such as a recrudescent Church (Catholic or
other), pseudo-medieval society, and the theme of the rediscovery of
the knowledge of the pre-holocaust world were central to this book.
Paul Brians published Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, a
study that examines atomic war in fiction published in short stories,
novels, and films between 1895 to 1984.

In 1978, Stephen King published The Stand, which follows the odyssey
of a small number of survivors of a world-ending influenza pandemic.
Although reportedly influenced by the 1949 novel Earth Abides, King's
book includes many supernatural elements and is generally regarded as
part of the horror fiction genre. Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) is
a recent work of post-apocalypse fiction. It won the Pulitzer Prize,
 rare for a post-apocalyptic or science fiction book.

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart (1949), deals with one man who finds
most of civilization has been destroyed by a plague. Slowly a small
community forms around him as he struggles to start a new civilization
and preserve knowledge and learning.

Lucifer's Hammer by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven (1977) is about a
cataclysmic comet hitting the Earth, and various groups of people
struggling to survive the aftermath in southern California. The
similarly themed "Footfall" (1985) is about aliens bombarding Earth
using controlled meteorite strikes to exterminate life.

The Postman by David Brin (1985) is set in a time after a massive
plague and political fracture result in a complete collapse of
society. It gives a very unflattering portrayal of survivalists as one
of the causes behind the collapse. The quasi-survivalist "Holnist"
characters are despised by the remaining population. The Holnists
follow a totalitarian social theory idolizing the powerful who enforce
their perceived right to oppress the weak. However later Brin stated
that when he was writing the book survivalist was the best term to
describe the militia movement.

Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse by James Wesley Rawles[2] (the
editor of SurvivalBlog) is a novel about a full-scale socio-economic
collapse and subsequent invasion of the US, which a review has called
"a survival manual dressed as fiction." One of the most popular
survivalist novels, it had circulated in an earlier draft form as
shareware and had nearly 90,000 downloads in the mid-1990s, well
before the Internet became heavily populated.

The Survivalist is the title of a series of paperback novels by Jerry
Ahern, about the adventures of protagonist John Thomas Rourke, in the
United States following a massive nuclear attack. The first few
volumes are set in the near future, and then story jumps (via a
suspended animation experiment) several hundred years in the future,
in the later volumes.

There have also been several video games, such as the Fallout series,
which place the player in a post-apocalyptic setting. The focus of the
story generally revolves around survival in the wasteland that remains
after the Earth is severely damaged by nuclear war.


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 apocalyptic
and postapocalyptic fiction tend to emphasize the fantastic, with the
possibility of world-ending meteor collisions, global warming events,
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 were accepted by 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
filled with apocalyptic imagery.[3] 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.


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 or 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."

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-apocalyptic_fiction
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