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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Doomsday Clock

The Doomsday Clock was conceived by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago and made its first appearance in 1947. The clock conveys in a very graphic way the number of minutes left before humanity destroys the world with nuclear weapons. Since 2007 the clock has been set to 5 minutes before midnight. The Wikipedia entry on the Doomsday Clock contains many more fascinating details, including how the clock has been incorporated into popular culture.

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.

Mad Max (1979, 1981, 1985, 2015) movies

The movie that brought Australian actor Mel Gibson to an American audience, Mad Max (1979) is set in a desolate, post-apocalyptic Australia where gasoline and oil are the new currencies. The sequel was titled Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) and the third film was called Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). The third film co-starred Tina Turner. The fourth film, also directed by George Miller, was called Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and starred Tom Hardy as Max Rockatansky and Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa. A fifth film, again with George Miller directing, is in the works and currently titled "Mad Max: The Wasteland."

For further details about the film and its background see the Mad Max Wiki.

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).

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) movie

The Day the Earth Caught Fire, a 1961 British movie, was co-written, directed and produced by Val Guest, better known for his movie The Quatermass Xperiment. The film's doomsday scenario has the Soviet Union and the United simultaneously exploding nuclear bombs with devastating consequences: the Earth's axis is not only tilted to produce bizarre weather patterns due to the shift of the equator, but the Earth's orbit is also changed and it's sent on a path towards the Sun. The movie, in glorious black and white, is notable for the red tinted sequences to simulate the heat of a truly scorched Earth. The film also has some great effects of a dried up Thames River in London, England.

Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction (2003-) bibliography

Paul Brians, a Professor of English at Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, first published in 2003 an online "comprehensive survey of fictional depictions in English of nuclear war and its aftermath" titled Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction.