The recent success of The Last of Us on HBO made me want to write this very brief essay on post-apocalyptic futures. Maybe this will prompt some of you to try the books or films mentioned below, or suggest more in the comments.
One of the first post-apocalypse genre fiction was Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le Dernier Homme [The Last Man] (1805) which takes place in a bleak future on a dying Earth where mankind has become sterile. Ormus, the so-called “Earth’s God,” tries to force the eponymous last man, Omegare, to father a new breed of men, cannibals doomed to live in eternal darkness, but understandably Omegare, instead, chooses death.
From that point onward, science fiction had no trouble picturing the fate of a doomed Mankind, variously decimated by war (between humans or with other species), disease (natural pandemics or man-made plagues) and natural catastrophes (ecological and cosmic). The variable outcomes, however, make for some truly fascinating reading–or viewing.
At the grimmest end of the spectrum, humanity perishes, as is the case in Le Dernier Homme above and Mary Shelley’s classic The Last Man (1826), the first novel to depict an Earth ravaged by a plague. In Nevil Shute’s justifiably famous 1957 novel, On the Beach (made into a 1959 film), nuclear fallout kills off all of Mankind. More colorfully, a new breed of vampires also close the books on humanity in Richard Matheson’s imaginative I Am Legend (1954), filmed in 1964 with Vincent Price, again in 1971, as The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston (image above), and once more by Francis Lawrence in 2007 with Will Smith.
The next step is to postulate a future where only a few people survive the apocalypse. M. P. Shiel’s 1901 novel, The Purple Cloud, postulates a world-wide catastrophe which only leave a few survivors. It reportedly inspired the classic 1959 film The World, The Flesh And The Devil in which a survivor searches for other survivors in a vacant city vacant. More recent takes on this fascinating theme include Luc Besson’s Le Dernier Combat [The Last Battle] and Lynne Littman’s Testament (both 1983), in which a handful of men and women face the grim prospects of survival after a nuclear war destroyed civilization. A surprisingly low-key variation was the New Zealand SF novel The Quiet Earth (1981) by Craig Harrison (filmed in 1985) in which an advanced physics experiment leaves only a few people wandering a deserted Earth.
More traditionally, if only because of the need to spin a good yarn, many survive the apocalypse, even if civilization itself does not. What ensues is generally ugly as savagery and chaos often replaces law and order. But the stories generally emphasize the brave efforts of a handful to rebuild a better world. Among the novels of this type are The Death Of Grass (1956) by John Christopher (filmed in 1970 as No Blade Of Grass), Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s 1959 Hugo-winning novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, counter-pointed by the “you can survive if you are ready and willing to adapt” philosophy of Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon (also 1959), echoed in Robert Heinlein’s proto-survivalist bible Farnham’s Freehold (1964), Robert Merle’s Malevil (1972; filmed in 1981), Stephen King’s The Stand (1978, rev. 1990; filmed in 1994 and remade in 2020) and David Brin’s The Postman (1985; filmed in 1997).
On the other hand, Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart won the International Fantasy Award in 1951 for depicting survivors who choose to return to a more primitive way of life. Purely filmic works embracing this theme include the 1983 film The Day After about the effects of nuclear war on a Kansas town, Robert Altman’s innovative 1979 film Quintet, George Miller’s notorious Mad Max quarte7 (1979, 1981, 1985 and 2015) and the even bleaker future of the Terminator series (1984, 2001, 2003, etc.).
Finally, one should not forget the worlds where, no matter how bad the post-apocalypse is, the promise of a better future comes true. From the 1933 classic The Shape Of Things To Come by H.-G. Wells to Star Trek’s Federation, a new and better world can be reborn from the ashes of the old. In that vein, one should include Chris Marker’s remarkable short La Jetée (1962), in which the gifts from a better future that will eventually replace the protagonist’s bleak, post-cataclysmic world, help regenerate mankind, and the 1932 novel, When Worlds Collide, by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edwin Balmer, and its sequel, After Worlds Collide (1934) (filmed in 1951) in which several space arks flee to the new Planet Beta when Earth is pulverized by Planet Alpha.
This brief panorama of post-apocalyptic worlds would not be complete without a mention of several comics classics: Judge Dredd’s Cursed Earth (1979) sequence, written by Pat Mills, likely inspired by Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley (1969; filmed 1977), graphically depicts what is left of America after a nuclear war. In Japan, Hayao Miyazaki unfolded a far more ecologically complex post-nuclear Earth in his classic manga Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind (1982-94; filmed in 1984). In European comics, Belgian artist Herman Huppen also portrayed a post-cataclysmic America in Jeremiah (1979-ongoing; filmed 2003-04).