Friday, August 26, 2016

You, Me and the Apocalypse (2015-) TV series

A refreshing British comedy with very dark moments (violent murders) in which a group of related and unrelated misfits come together in a bunker in Slough, England, to wait out the impact of a comet/asteroid. This TV series premiered in the UK in September 2015 and in North America in January 2016. In addition to being set in Slough, other locations include Rome, Italy, and New Mexico, USA.

Thursday, January 21, 2016

The Remaining (2014) movie

Imagine the Christian "Rapture" event as a horror film and you have The Remaining, a 2014 Christian-horror movie. Combining elements of cinéma vérité, mainly the handheld camera, the film follows a group of 20-somethings after the events foretold in the Bible's Book of Revelation unfold following a wedding reception. The movie is graphic in some of its imagery. As with many of these movies based on someone "documenting" the events with a video camera, the end of the film leaves many questions unresolved.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Seveneves (2015) novel

Seveneves (2015) by acclaimed Seattle author Neal Stephenson is set in the near future. It opens with the explosion of the moon by an unknown agent. Earth has about a year to prepare itself for its utter destruction as the moon pieces rain down. Only those humans in outer space, deep in the ocean (think nuclear submarines) and survivalists in deep underground Arctic mines will remain alive for the next 5,000 years. While not his most challenging read, the story is mostly satisfying though not without some obvious questions around how any human society, especially one trapped in outer space, could actually survive for 5,000 years.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse (2014) anthology

Edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse (Holstein, Ont.: Exile Editions, 2014) is an anthology of 23 stories exploring possible scenarios on Canadian soil after the world ends.

Friday, August 28, 2015

The Dead Lands (2015) novel

The Dead Lands (2015) novel by Benjamin Percy is an imaginative retelling of Lewis and Clark's journey across the west, except this time the setting is a post-apocalyptic North America where people have been killed off by a superflu and nuclear warfare. The intrepid future explorers, Lewis Meriwether and Mina Clark, set out from a walled version of St. Louis, Missouri, known as The Sanctuary.

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Will the world end on October 7, 2015?

Yet another (to be) mistaken Biblical prophecy has popped up with a specific date as to when the world will end: October 7, 2015.

Friday, April 3, 2015

The Future and Why We Should Avoid It (2014) non-fiction book

The Future and Why We Should Avoid It: Killer Robots, The Apocalypse and Other Topics of Mild Concern (2014) by Scott Feschuk consists of his witty columns from Maclean's magazine. You may or may not want to take this seriously, with cheek in hand.

Station Eleven (2014) novel

Emily St. John Mandel's novel Station Eleven sees the world depopulated by a plague. The work is set in two timelines, the period before the plague and twenty years after. The novel has been reviewed as part thriller, part dystopian future commentary.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

The Last Man on Earth (2015-) TV series

Given time, all things are possibly in TV-land, including a romantic comedy of post-apocalyptic proportions. Starring Will Forte as Phil Miller, who believes himself to be the last human on the planet after a virus epidemic, The Last Man on Earth is a promising and fresh comedy that debuted on the Fox Network on March 1, 2015.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? (2014) non-fiction book

Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?: A Neuroscientific View of the Zombie Brain by Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek was published in 2014 by Princeton University Press. The title is a play on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which formed the basis for Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982). The authors are neuroscientists and members of the Zombie Research Society. The book is intended to be taken seriously and as satire. The last chapter includes several survival tips for surviving the zombie apocalypse.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Domain (2001) novel

Steve Alten's 2001 novel Domain about the Mayan Long Count Calendar "prediction" that the world would end on December 21, 2012 was well ahead of the spate of novels that started appearing the closer we approached 2012. Domain intermixes so-called ancient mysteries that are essentially unconnected with the 2012 doomsday scenario. It would not be giving too much away to say that the aliens did it. The novel also contains maps and photographs along with lengthy quotations from a fictional archaeologist's journal whose son, deemed mentally ill, is the protagonist. Domain, which ends in 2013, is the first of a trilogy known as, likely for marketing purposes, the "Mayan Prophecy series". The second novel is Resurrection (2004) and the third is Phobos: Mayan Fear (2011).

Saturday, January 5, 2013

2013: The End of Days or a New Beginning? (2008) non-fiction book

Marie D. Jones' 2013: The End of Days or a New Beginning?: Envisioning the World After the Events of 2012 is a hodge-podge of the ridiculous and the sublime as far as the apocalyptic goes. If a doomsday scenario was ever in the public consciousness over the past one to two thousand years, you can expect to read about it here, from the prophecies of Nostradamus to Edgar Cayce, from West Nile Virus to honeybee die-off.

The 2012 Story (2009) non-fiction book

The 2012 Story: The Myths, Fallacies, and Truth Behind the Most Intriguing Date in History (2009) book by John Major Jenkins, an independent Mayanist, who's credited with discovering the galactic alignment that coincides with the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar on December 21, 2012. Jenkins does not subscribe to the doomsday view of 2012 and champions the transformation and renewal philosophy. You can find more information about his viewpoints at Update2012.com and The Center for 2012 Studies.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

2012 Ice Age (2011) TV movie

2012 Ice Age from 2011 has to be one of the worst disaster TV movies ever made. A massive series of volcanic eruptions in Greenland causes an ice shelf to detach and head to North America "really really fast." Those pesky glaciers seem to have a mind of their own. Canada gets hit first by this icewall turned glacier that seems to disobey the laws of physics every minute. The scientist father of the family, played by Patrick Labyorteaux, can't seem to figure things out. His stock answers to questions from his wife and son about what's happening around them are phrases like "I don't know", "maybe", "it's possible". This TV movie is so bad it's actually worth watching, from the giant triangular pieces of glacier blown up by missile strikes from jet fighters that mostly land point first to the dreadful small plane flight with the computer-generated icing of its wings, a sad tribute perhaps to the 2012 movie with John Cusack. There are also echoes in here of The Day After Tomorrow.

Annihilation Earth (2009) TV movie

Beware the supercollider network, for it will destroy the world or at least a good chunk of it. Annihilation Earth, a 2009 TV movie filmed in Bulgaria for the Syfy network, stars Marina Sirtis (you may remember her as Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series and movies) and Luke Goss. The basic plot is that the terrorist attack on a global network of supercolliders creates a black hole inside the Earth. Of course there's no known science that can stop a black hole from consuming all mass and energy around it, so you can probably guess how this ends.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

The Mist (1980) novella

Stephen King's 1980 novella The Mist, originally published as a short story of the same title and later a 2007 movie, contains a far bleaker ending than what was depicted in the movie, though that too was pretty horrific. The movie pretty well follows the novella up until the point at which the group of characters including the "hero", David Drayton, leave the supermarket to try and escape. The impression you are left with in the novella is that The Mist has enveloped all of Massachusetts and possibly even more of the New England states so that the end of the world may very well be at hand. The Mist is in many ways a precursor to Stephen King's epic novel Under the Dome (2009), except in the latter there are no extra-dimensional monsters. Quoting Stephen King, the Wikipedia entry on Under the Dome notes that the novel "concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they've always belonged to." This is exactly what happens in both the novella and movie versions of The Mist.

Seattle Superstorm (2012) TV movie

A Soviet Union Cold War experiment gone bad may spell not only the end of Seattle, Washington, but also the world in the 2012 apocalyptic thriller Seattle Superstorm. First broadcast in Canada on April 7, 2012, this TV movie gives new meaning to the phrase, The family that fights the apocalypse together, stays together. Not only were the effects about as believable as those in many 1950s and 1960s mutant monster movies from Hollywood and Japan, but the plot was atrocious and the acting just passable. Not to give away too much, but how was it that the key Soviet scientist involved in the experiment just happened to turn up in Seattle the day the orbiting craft carrying a substance that triggered the near-apocalypse re-entered the atmosphere and was shot down by a U.S. Navy battleship?

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Stonehenge Apocalypse ( 2010) TV movie

A completely ludicrous and unbelievable doomsday scenario, the 2010 TV movie Stonehenge Apocalypse literally starts off with a bang when an underground archaeological dig in Maine, which appears to have uncovered something left by the ancient Egyptians, triggers an energy surge and causes a mysterious movement of the monolithic stones at Stonehenge, England. And it's all downhill from there, beginning with the lone conspiracy theorist who flies to England to start his own investigation into one of the Mayan pyramids at Chicen Itza which also mysteriously moves and turns into a nuclear bomb-like exploding volcano.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Robopocalypse (2011) novel

Here we go again: robots (intelligent machines) revolt and begin the extermination of humanity. Haven't we had one too many doomsday movies on this theme already? I guess if its a meme, a formula and it works, why not. Daniel H. Wilson gives his novel Robopocalypse an authentic touch since he has a PhD in robotics from the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and had previously publish a non-fiction guide called How to Survive a Robot Uprising, possibly modeled on Max Brooks' 2003 handbook The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead.

 According to this report from The National Post,
The story is set no more than a decade in the future, and at the centre of it all is Archos, a powerful artificial intelligence that orchestrates the entire uprising from the depths of a radioactive cavern in Alaska. The novel begins after the war is over, when a leader of the human resistance discovers a black box on the war, filled with accounts of the various heroes. The transcripts of these stories take us back to the pre-war world, and then lay out the uprising as it unfolded.
Someone named Steven Spielberg even optioned the movie rights before Dr. Wilson had completed it. If all this sounds very familiar, just watch the four Terminator or the Matrix trilogy movies. You might also want to dig up Colossus: The Forbin Project, a 1970 movie, that is also eerily similar to Robopocalypse.