Jump to Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

While zombie stories are most definitely a (very popular) sub-genre unto themselves, another supernatural type of apocalypse is described in Iain Rob Wright’s Hell On Earth books that begin with THE GATES (I think currently there are six of them). Perhaps this series better embodies the supernaturally-caused apocalypse better that even zombie fiction. In Wright’s series, the apocalypse is caused by someone somehow opening the titular gates and releasing an apocalypse of biblical proportions upon humanity. This series comes complete with the religioius overtones one might expect from such a calamity!

Yet another supernaturally charged apocalypse is described in Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series, where a decent percentage of humanity just disappears because of the Rapture as they interpreted from Revelation in the Bible. The “righteous” are taken up to heaven, leaving the rest of us behind to deal with the aftermath society suffers in those good folks’ absence. Regardless of one’s beliefs, I have to admit that the first few of these were pretty fun, and were made into a movie starring Kirk Cameron (which I probably will never watch).

We can’t really discuss a post-apocalyptic world without at least touching on the events of Marvel’s INFINITY WAR and ENDGAME movies, where a big purple alien acquires magic stones and a bunch of heroes from around the galaxy fight to keep him from doing what he is trying to do with them—cause half of all life to disappear, just sort of cease to exist. Kind of like the Rapture, now that I think of it, except that these folks didn’t go to their just reward in Heaven, they simply vanished. The world is changed dramatically by the disappearance of all these people, of course, and as we probably all know by now, our heroes spend the second movie doing everything they can to bring them all back, which causes its own issues. Marvel tries to “science-speak” some explanation for the event, but really, it’s a supernatural cause.

Marvel’s Infinity Saga kind of crosses over into the next type of apocalypse, and that would be a disaster caused by aliens! Seems like this would be an obvious subject of an apocalyptic and/or post-apocalyptic novel. Yes, it’s unlikely—but that doesn’t stop it from being fun!

BATTLEFIELD: EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard might be a slog to read, but it was definitely a defining example of the alien apocalypse. I’d define this type of story to be something to do with aliens acting to destroy humanity, maybe because they want our planet. There have been plenty of books and movies about this, notably INDEPENDENCE DAY, where Aliens attack and humans have to band together from the far reaches of a decimated (not literally) United States to attempt to defeat them. Currently I’m reading Rod Little’s Sons Of Neptune series, where human-like aliens have decided that they need the Earth for themselves, and they want to keep all the infrastructure that humans have already built. To accomplish this, they’ve done a bit of genetic manipulation, turning humans (and dogs) into reptilian predatory creatures. It’s an interesting concept, enough so that I’m reading on beyond the first book in the series.

Perhaps my favorite in this genre is Edward W. Robertson’s Breakers series. I thought it was going to be a run-of-the-mill apocalyptic pandemic series, but then aliens popped up—aliens who introduced the organisms responsible for killing most of humanity (except, of course, for the ones who somehow are immune). When you think about it, the idea that this sort of disease has extraterrestrial origin makes a lot of sense. Like I said earlier, viruses of earthly origin usually would not be so lethal. Viruses (and other parasitic microorganisms) evolutionarily are designed to survive, and killing their hosts is not an effective way to continue their existence. Whereas, an engineered pathogen would not necessarily have evolved to survive. The combination makes a great deal of sense.

In my next post, I’m going to get to another of my favorite post-apocalyptic settings, and one of my favorite apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic books—that would be an impact from an extraterrestrial object like the dinosaur-killer. You’ll have to wait for it, though. Maybe tomorrow!

Read Part One Here:

Read Part Two Here:

So we move to the sub-sub-genre that perhaps can most easily blend the post-apocalyptic subgenre with the horror genre—the zombie apocalypse! Judging by the number of books written about the battles between undead zombies and the remaining humans, it is one of the most popular sub-genres. I have to admit, for a long time the idea of zombies didn’t interest me. My first experience with the sub-genre was probably seeing the black and white version of Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD—approximately a hundred times! So many times that I was kind of bored with it. I’m afraid that the experience of seeing that film a lot on television, with commercials, probably jaded me to the entire sub-genre.

Even though I was never the biggest fan of this sub-sub-genre, I later found out that zombies can be pure fun! The dead coming to life, or some facsimile of that event, can straddle the line between, and blend together, the horror and PA genres. I think the first stuff I read was indie fiction from Amanda Hocking (remember her?), and I liked it. It was kinda epic, written over more than one book—like so much PA fiction is. Others took that formula and followed it. Scott Nicholson’s name comes to mind. Piperbrook, Clausen and Evans wrote epic zombie apocalypse series. Honestly there are too many to mention. A lot of early indie fiction writers latched onto the sub-sub-genre to write in.

Probably because it sold.

Zombie PA fiction can pull in some of the tropes of other sub-genres of PA fiction, especially the infectious disease apocalypse. M.P. McDonald does a pretty cool job pulling together the tropes from the apocalyptic pandemic and the zombie sub-genres with her Sympatico Syndrome books. People are behaving like zombies but it is due to a virus, and as usual for me, the really interesting parts are reading about how her characters deal with the aftermath.  There are plenty of others, also. One of the first I read in this sub-genre was Bobby Adair’s Slow Burn series, and in it, people were infected. Except some of the infected did not become zombies—not exactly, at least. They were the titular “Slow Burns,” humans who retained their humanity while having some of the physical manifestations of the zombies of this story’s world, including an elevated normal body temperature. (I flew through the Slow Burns, but finally petered out somewhere around eight or nine books into the series.)

It can also be supernatural, or of an unexplained origin. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the seminal George Romero film, has the dead crawling out of graves and arising from the newly-dead. It was implied that the cause of these zombies was some sort of radiation from a space probe returning from Venus, but I certainly never got that from that first classic film. Being the first of its kind to have any sort of mass awareness, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD gave us the model for the zombie apocalypse for many years.

Other supernatural causes include voodooism and old curses. THE MUMMY’s titular character is sort of a zombie, I think, although the story is more a horror story and less an apocalyptic tale. I can’t some up with an example, but reanimated corpses can feature in some voodoo mythology.

WORLD WAR Z, both a novel by Max  Brooks and a movie starring Brad Pitt, is another of the most popular of a crowded sub-sub-genre. Though I didn’t get it from the movie (and haven’t read the book), apparently the back story cause is a virus. Same with the extremely popular TV series THE WALKING DEAD and all of its spinoffs—viruses cause the zombie apocalypse. In FALLOUT, there are zombies, seemingly created by the radiation from the world-ending nuclear apocalypse. (There is a lot going on in FALLOUT, besides zombies!)

One Reddit poster summed up possible causes as follows: “Bio-Engineering, Space Rabies, Alien Parasite, Black Magic Voodoo, etc etc.” And I think that pretty much follows along with everything I’ve talked about above (and below).

Even YA fiction gets into the act! One of my favorites was Howard Odentz’s DEAD (A LOT) series, where the zombies are created by a parasite and have some unique characteristics (I won’t spoil it for potential readers). This one inspired me to write a bit of fan-fiction set in Odentz’s world (but in a different part of the country), and I had a blast writing it! I tried my hand at one where my main character was a zombie, with his own mind trapped somewhere within the zombie urges, but it didn’t go anywhere. (WARM BODIES, a movie starring Nicholas Hoult, did a fun light treatment of the subject with a safe resolution of the problem of the zombie-human relationship!)

While zombies are super popular, and seem to be a common apocalypse and post-apocalyptic setting, we still have more to explore—in my next post!

(Read Part 1 here.)

In the last entry, I talked about pandemics and diseases of a scale so large that there are few people left. We saw the reality of a pandemic in 2020, and while it was horrifying and life-changing, it certainly was not on the scale of the fictional pandemics from King, McCammon, et al. And perhaps that PA cause is a bit overdone? I hope not, because I’m writing two of them.

Fortunately for the PA fiction afficionado, there are many other ways for the world to end. Another issue we are dealing with in our real life is climate change, the resistance to believe it is happening and even if it is, that humans can do anything about it or have any responsibility for it. So this makes it a fertile ground for fictional treatments.

Environmental disasters are one of the larger categories of PA fiction today. One of the earlier ones I’m aware of (and I’m probably missing a lot of them) was shown in the film THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW. If you haven’t seen it and don’t want to know what happens, don’t read on.

The environmental disaster in that movie is rapid climate change, a topic that is controversial in the political and social (if not within the science) communities. It’s this denial that makes it such a potent source of material for PA fiction writers. When the movie was made, we were used to hearing the terminology “global warming” instead of “rapid climate change” so this movie definitely gave viewers something else to look at. In the movie, instead of the Earth warming up, it freezes. Their premise is fun but does not hold much water scientifically, I’m told. Still, some of the ideas behind it are valid. What we were calling “global warming” did not mean that the entire planet experiences endless summers. It’s an unfortunate term because small increases in global temperatures lead to changes in ocean currents, in salt concentration of the oceans, in changes in weather patterns that can lead to extreme conditions. Is it happening? I’ll leave that to individuals, but I choose to believe the scientists, because I like to think I am a scientist, in a way. 

Kelly L. Greene has written several different PA series, most dealing with (from what I’ve read so far) environmental disasters which kill off significant numbers of our population. She has flooding, extreme weather, and a host of other situations leading to these events. What I like about Greene’s stories is that she focuses on the humans left behind. Really, does it even matter what the reasons are? Not so much to the survivors. They still behave like humans behave—good, bad, and indifferent.  

Stephen Baxter wrote a series about people leaving the planet to look for a new home for humanity due to extreme environmental changes. ARK is about the journey through space, and it is science fiction at its finest. FLOOD is about what happens here on Mother Earth, and while it has the rigors of SF, it has the trappings of good old PA fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson, in his 40-50-60 DAYS series of books, also tackles environmental disasters with a SF writer’s rigor and discipline as to what is possible and what isn’t. 

Sometimes it’s fun to approach things with SF writers’ discipline—it’s like a thought experiment that can be cautionary about our outlook on our real life.  But sometimes it’s fun to throw science to the wind and just tell the story you want to tell. I believe that SF writers are, by their very nature, philosophers of a sort. They are taking real-world facts and extrapolating them forward to explore possible futures. They often have an agenda beyond just telling a story, and I think that can be extremely interesting to consider one set of possible consequences to how we choose to deal with today’s issues.

Can PA fiction deal with things like this? Absolutely, as shown by Baxter and Robinson. But does it have to, in order to be entertaining? I don’t think so. Facts sometimes get in the way of a fun story. Stories, by their nature, are “lies” in that the events described are fictional! I think most good stories use these falsehoods to tell a story that illustrates a larger (or sometimes not so large) point that the author is trying to make. Not to mention that often, we do not understand the world around us, nor do we understand everything that occurs in that world. Some things are false—until they are true! (Hard SF is not really like this, but even there, writers use tropes like FTL travel, which is pretty accepted to be impossible in any scenario…impossible, until it’s NOT!)

The comment I’d leave one with is that we can entertain and make people think without being strictly factual and within the realm of possibility. Maybe that means that we leave the SF genre, or at least the hard SF sub-genre) and move into those genres that aren’t as rigorous on those points. Maybe we move a bit into…

Horror?

Our next sub-sub-genre will come as no surprise to horror writers. But I’ll argue that it is every bit as post-apocalyptic as disease and environmental disaster apocalypses. Of course I’m talking about the zombie apocalypse!

To be continued…