Shades of Grey (2009) novel

Jasper Fforde's highly imaginative and satirical look at a post-apocalyptic world organized around color scheme is one of the few novels to take a lighthearted approach to doomsday. In Shades of Grey, Fforde slowly reveals the strange workings of the Colortocracy that rules Chromatica, the world that exists after Something That Happened and where to be a Yellow, Red, Blue or any of the other acceptable colors, even Grey, defines one's sole being.

Novels of the Change series by S.M. Stirling

The Novels of the Change series by S.M. Stirling are set in the 2020s (for example, Change Year 22) of North America, part of a brilliantly imagined post-apocalyptic world.

The novels are:

The Sword of the Lady (2009)

Blind Faith (2007) novel

According to the Amazon description of Ben Elton's 2007 novel Blind Faith, he "imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a confessional sex-obsessed, self-centric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty, ignorance is wisdom and privacy is a dangerous perversion."

Life After People (2008) documentary

The History Channel documentary Life After People (2008) may be based on Alan Weisman's 2007 book The World Without Us. The computer graphics in this TV account, imagining how ecosystems will recover and weather and lifeforms will break down humanity's greatest and strongest structures, are excellent.

The World Without Us (2007) book

Alan Weisman's non-fiction book The World Without Us (2007) either spawned a mini-industry of imagining Earth without humans or it tapped into a meme that's probably been floating around for a while, taking the popular science fiction theme of the last person on Earth to its ultimate conclusion. Weisman does not impose a doomsday scenario, rather his work is based on a thought experiment, examining how ecosystems would recover should humanity suddenly and totally disappear. He is not concerned with how or why this might happen, just that it does and how the world would move on and over the remains of a human-populated globe.

City of Ember (2008) movie

The tween novel City of Ember: The First Book of Ember (2003) by Jeanne DuPrau appears to have translated well into a movie adaptation starring Bill Murray as the Mayor of Ember, with the two young protagonists played by Saoirse Ronan in the role of Lina Mayfleet, a messenger, and Harry Treadaway as Doon Harrow, who works in the underground Pipeworks. Tim Robbins is the other big star and he plays Doon's father, Loris Harrow, an inventor of gadgets and contraptions.

I was particularly struck by the ominous, opening voiceover: "On the day the world ended the future of mankind was carried in a small metal box." The City of Ember reminded me throughout of the computer game Fallout 3 and the Vault where people lived and didn't know that there was a post-nuclear holocaust world outside.