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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Fallout computer game series

The first Fallout computer game was released in 1997, Fallout 2 was released in 1998 and Fallout 3 was released in 2008. The game is set in the 22nd century but the world resembles what we imagined a post-nuclear world war would look like in the 1950s.

On the Beach (1957) novel

Australian author Nevil Shute's On the Beach published in 1957 during the first decade of the Cold War capitalized on Western fears of a nuclear war that would destroy North America and pollute the rest of the world with deadly radiation. The bulk of the novel is set is Australia.

A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) novel

Considered one of the finest post-nuclear apocalyptic novels, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., can be tedious at times. But if you have not read any doomsday fiction before, this is not necessarily the work to start with. The beginning is a lot better than the middle and conclusion.