I believe the term preferred is “Post Apocalyptic (Science:optional) Fiction”.
The genre is based on a simple situation – Something bad, a Big Event has happened to Earth as we know it. 99.9% of humanity are dead, or at least, the survivors think that they are 0.1% of the population that is left ( insta-census anyone? ). They have to fend against unknown dangers and a hostile environment. Deal with the after-effects of whatever just happened. Hostility breaking out in the strangest of situations – mostly because they hail from different strata of society, and hence, each would have a distinct mindset about what constitutes a society and what survival has in store for them. And most often – a Big Threat That Looms Large. The climax being how the Big Threat That Looms Large is destroyed, and life comes back to normal – the unknown dangers and the hostile environment being already tamed in the course of the book/movie/series.
I love this particular form of situational fiction. Not just because it pops up from time to time when you least expect it – but because there are an infinite number of possibilities to consider. Different mutations of the scenario, depending on what the scale of the medium is – a short story, a novella, a novel, a movie, a TV series. Look at this way. The writer ( I’ll concentrate on literature, because most of the films I know of this genre are based on books ) has just done away with a lot of humanity. He can concentrate on a very limited number of characters. He can introduce plot twists in every line, having redefined what “danger” is – after all, this is not just a devastated world, this is also a lawless one. On top of it, he is also dealing with the fundamental aspects of society-building. Think of the voyeuristic fun God would have had in the first couple of years after the Great Flood and you get my drift.
Ah, yes. The first of this genre would undoubtedly be the Bible – the Great Flood and Noah’s family being the survivors of the first Holocaust. As a story, that’s a cop-out, because after the Ark comes to rest on Mount Ararat, nothing more is said about Noah’s family, and how they rebuilt the world. Ah,well…..
The first proper work I read, and still the longest, as I remember it, has to be Stephen King’s The Stand. At over a thousand and a half pages, in extremely small print too, The Stand was one whopper of a book. Different interlocking stories, each narrowing down to one epic climax; some extremely well-written characters ( as always), and one scary Villain. King made his book a believable social restructuring and at the same time a spooky showdown between Good and Evil. What I personally enjoyed was the fact that he never gave any explanations about why there were survivors, why it was these particular people who lived through the Super-flu outbreak. Was it something supernatural? Did it have a scientific reason? No one knows, because he does not tell us.
Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Nivens was another well-written book of this genre. Here, the reason behind the Big Thing was a Big Bang, brought about by a comet striking the earth, a comet of the name “The Hammer”. ( well, it was originally called Hamner’s comet, after the guy who discovered it, but the name gets mutilated to the more familiar-sounding Hammer by, who else, a newsreader ) As it usually happens with crashing comets, mankind is all but annhilated, and the survivors have to make do in a world devoid of anything called civilization. What do people do when they have no food? They eat other people. What do people do when they are beset by murderous brigands? They form bands, and go on the offensive themselves. The best thing about this book is that it shows people coming together as they would normally do in an alien situation – by status, by culture and by race.
One of the weirdest books I have read in this subcategory is The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. Humanity – oh sorry, 99.9 percent of humanity – go blind in a single night, ostensibly because of watching a display of celestial fireworks. This wouldn’t be too much of a bad thing, you think, but the trouble runs deeper. You see, biotechnological engineering had created a new plant species called Triffids which initially serve as a lucrative source of oil. Triffids are carnivorous, they have a poisonous sting that can kill a human adult in seconds if they hit an exposed area, and worst of all, Triffids can move. One of the scientists who are working with Triffids makes an ominous comment at the beginning of the book, something like – “If human beings were blind, Triffids would undoubtedly be the next rulers of this planet.” This prophetic condition rendered true, it remains to see whether the scientist’s prediction is correct, and how the survivors manage to hold their own against the Triffids. Best of all, the book ends in a very open-ended way, in a chapter termed “Strategic Withdrawal”. No, it’s not what you think.
One of the best comic-book series in recent times, Y The Last Man, by Brian K Vaughn and Pia Guerra, deals with an earth where, inexplicably and very violently, all y-chromosome bearing mammals – in short – males, die. With the exception of a young escape artist named Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand. You might wonder if this guy has been singled out just so he had a name that started with Y, which the creators could use – but trust me, this book is good. Every issue leaves you with two simultaneous questions – “What the Hell just happened?” and “Where in the whole wide world is this leading to?”. A lot of sub-questions pop up on the way – you wonder why the sole male survivor has to be this smart-alecky geek, you wonder which woman is going to bed Yorick first, you wonder about who’s good and who’s bad. I was fortunate enough to read 16 issues at one go in a single night, and the remaining four quite recently, again in a night. I eagerly ( and patiently, because I have no choice ) wait for the next instalment.
A movie that inteleaves this genre with popular horror is 28 Days Later. Alex Garland ( The Beach) wrote the script, and he manages to balance the two subcultures pretty well. On one hand, you sympathize with the protagonists, all of them, even the “bad” ones. You are repulsed by the Infected, and yet, on two occasions, you cannot but pity these mindless ( really? ) creatures – the antithesis of the traditional lumbering zombies. It is never made clear throughout the movie about what the Rage virus does to humans, or what the Infected do to humans ( chew their guts, chomp their brains, lust for blood, WHAT? They just keep flailing their hands about and running at glass windows. ) or what the humans are doing, other than the few protagonists we see onscreen. The second half is brilliant, the first half being limited to hauting shots of an empty city ( was that really London? ) Watch the DVD for maximum effect, it has three alternate endings and a director’s commentary that rocks!
Other books of this genre that I have read, and which come to mind at the moment – Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which is a neat twist on Survival Theory and vampirism, Philip K Dick’s Dr Bloodmoney, Harlan Ellison – A Boy and His Dog, George R Stewart – Earth Abides. Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold and Tunnel in the Sky, the latter of which deals with a motley group of terrans stranded on a remote planet and their struggle to create a society. Again, my prerogative – I included this because it seems like a perfect example of what I was pointing at – a new society being created against insurmountable odds. There is even a Big Threat That Etc here, called Stobors.
A friend tells me Nevil Shute’s On The Beach belongs to the same genre, not read this yet. Someone also pointed out that even The Matrix can be seen as post-apocalyptic sci-fi. I disagree, because The Matrix does not deal with immediate after-effects of the Big Event. Waterworld – maybe, because I have not seen that either, sounds the same as William Brinkley’s The Last Ship. Another unread one is James Morrow’s This is the Way the World Ends.
Anything else that you might suggest?
