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.

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?

Endworld: Doomsday (2009) novel

David Robbins' 2009 novel Endworld: Doomsday is the first in "an explosive series of survival in a postapocalyptic age".

One Second After (2009) novel

William R. Forstchen's 2009 novel One Second After is set in an idyllic North Carolina town where his hero, a retired military officer who teaches history, turns survivalist in the wake of a electromagnetic pulse from a atmospheric bomb that destroys our fragile computerized world. Some but not all of his novel is plausible as the U.S. military has long known about EMP devices and supposedly much of their gear, particularly in command and control structures, is hardened against this kind of force.

A Culture of Conspiracy (2003) non-fiction book

Professor Michael Barkun tackles millennialism and conspiracy theorists in his 2003 non-fiction book A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America.

The Passage (2010) novel

The Passage (2010), a lengthy, rambling novel by Justin Cronin, combines some familiar apocalyptic plot elements into an end of the world odyssey. We have a military-induced virus that turns people into vampire-like creatures, beginning with test subjects who are soldiers in an underground installation (shades of Resident Evil), we have errant nuclear bombs going off and we have a future earth, largely depopulated, but with enough survivors to carry on.

Sins of the Assassin (2008) Novel

Sins of the Assassin (2008) by Robert Ferrigno is the second of a trilogy set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic United States. The first novel is Sins of the Assassin and the third novel is Heart of the Assassin. The novels bear some superficial resemblance to Jeff Carlson's Plague Year, Plague War and Plague Zone novels.

Southland Tales (2006) movie

The ensemble 2006 movie Southland Tales starring former wrestler Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson is set in a post-nuclear-bomb USA, Los Angeles, specifically and in particular the Venice Beach area. It's a very weird tale indeed with echoes of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) and The 6th Day (2000).

A Boy and His Dog (1975) movie

The 1975 post-nuclear apocalyptic movie A Boy and His Dog stars a young (obviously) Don Johnson as Vic, a loner wandering the desolated United States of 2024 after World War IV. He's accompanied by his telepathic dog Blood (voiced by Tim McIntire, who also co-wrote the music) who helps him ferret out a woman and food. The movie is based on a novella by acclaimed science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.

The End of the World (1998) book

Edited by Lewis H. Lapham with Peter T. Struck, The End of the World (1998, c1997) is an anthology of essays, memoirs, and extracts from historical writings about events that were considered apocalyptic at the time of their occurrence. The first of these is the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh from around 3000 BC. The book is divided into three parts:

1. The Ruins of Empires


2. The Fall of Nations


3. The Twentieth Century: The End in a Void

The last part includes reference to and information from the Rapture Index.

There is also an "End Times" table with predicted dates for the end of the world. This table does not include the supposed Mayan calendar prediction of the world's end in 2012 AD.

Bring on the Apocalypse (2008) anthology

George Monbiot's anthology Bring on the Apocalypse: Essays on Self-Destruction (2008) is a collection of his scathing commentaries on the ways we're heading into the toilet tank of mutual, self-assured destruction.

Doomsday Clock moved back by one minute

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock back by one minute on January 15, 02010 according to this CNN.com report.

The Book of Eli (2010) movie

Denzel Washington stars in the 2010 post-apocalyptic movie The Book of Eli. His character Eli, a former Kmart employee, is protecting a book with information that can assist in the rebuilding of civilization, at least that of the nuclear war devastated United States through which he's been traveling for three decades. The book is The Book, a King James Bible. Traveling alone he encounters bandits a la the Australian post-apocalyptic trilogy movies Mad Max and a warlord (Gary Oldman) who's been looking for his own copy of the Bible so he can use it as a weapon to control more minds and places.

There's an unusual twist at the movie's end, so I won't spoil it by giving away the finish, but there is hope for humanity, ironically found in Alcatrez Prison on an island with a ravaged San Francisco landscape for a backdrop.

One of my criticisms of the movie is that given the level of bomb damage, it seems unlikely that anyone would even still be alive or that individuals such as Eli or Oldman's character, whose name is Carnegie, would not have succumbed to radiation sickness long before. In a voiceover Eli indicated that survivors had spent up to a year underground after the war.

As the movie opens we see what appears to be a kind of nuclear snowstorm falling, at least that was my interpretation, and Eli's character is there in a gas mask with no other protection other than his clothes. A while later and he's out of this forest and into a desert-like landscape.

One interesting thing is that although there are young people around, we see very few children. In one poignant scene in the town controlled by Carnegie that Eli visits, a shopkeeper asks him if he has any toys with which to barter the recharging of his portable long-life battery that powers Eli's iPod.

It's also odd that there's virtually no vegetation and we also see no evidence of underground or indoor farming activities, so just how and where are all these people getting their essential food groups? Given the level of violence in the film and the several hints and mentions of cannibalism, I was surprised not to see anyone munching on human flesh, something we see plenty of in horror films, especially of the zombie variety.

The Aftermath (1982) movie

The Aftermath (1982) is a direct-to-video movie about two astronauts who return from a mission to find a gang and mutant-infested Los Angeles as the result of a nuclear war.

Path of Destruction (2005) TV movie

Nanobots unleashed after an accident on an oil drilling platform threaten to destroy the world by producing bad weather, bad acting and bad special effects in the 2005 TV movie Path of Destruction. Somehow the United States military is also to blame, but then they've always been an easy target.

The Day After (1983) movie

The chillingly realistic docu-drama The Day After (1983) depicted a nuclear missile exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. Some of the most compelling scenes are of the Minuteman missile launches from silos in Kansas. Jason Robards, Jobeth Williams, John Lithgow and Steven Guttenberg were among the stars of this terrifying and haunting film directed by Nicholas Meyer and written by Edward Hume. Unlike the TV series Jericho, no punches were pulled in showing the devastating impact a nuclear attack would cause. At the end of the movie we are cautioned that an actual attack would have caused much more destruction than seen in the movie.

Fallen Earth computer game

With its tag line of Welcome to the Apocalypse, the Fallen Earth online, multiplayer computer game promises hours of doom-ridden gameplay in the 21st century after a combination of a deadly virus and nuclear weapons nearly destroy all of humanity.

The 13th Immortal (1957) novel

Robert Silverberg's 1957 novel The 13th Immortal is set in the post-apocalyptic future of the 26th century which followed the Years of the Freeze (2062-2527). On this far future Earth, 12 immortal humans have divided the world into 12 dukedoms. The title refers to the mystery of a 13th immortal human on the Antarctic continent. The 13th Immortal, written when Silverberg was 21 and originally published by Ace, was reissued in 2004 by Dorchester Publishing (New York, NY) in collaboration with Wildside Press under the latter's Cosmos Books imprint (ISBN 0-8439-5951-7).

Jericho (2006-2008) TV series

The Jericho (2006-2008) TV series was not quite the end of the world but it was the end of life as you know it in the United States, which was subjected to devastating nuclear attacks by unknown forces. Skeet Ulrich starred in this unusual drama in which survivors in a Kansas town came to grips with life after the nuclear apocalypse. Somehow the weather conditions never seemed to turn against them, which was the most unbelievable part.