Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction

“By the Waters of Babylon” is a story set in a post-apocalyptic world narrated by the son of a village priest named John. John learns from his father how to collect metal from the Dead Places and how to purify it so it can be used by his people. When he becomes comfortable doing this by himself, John decides that it is time for him to go on his journey. John dreams that he is destined to take a journey to the Place of the Gods, a trip forbidden by his people. After traveling for eight days, John…

The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau is a science fiction novel about a post apocalyptic city called Ember, that is under the earth's crust. The people who live in this city have never seen the outside world and only know what was left for them by “the builders”. Ember is run by a generator but it is beginning to fail. There are blackouts and the city is beginning to feel anxious, and they are trying to figure out how to solve it. Lina and her friend Boon are looking to save Ember with a document…

Road and its Large Cultural Impact in a Short Period of Time A man forced to go to his limits to protect the last glimmer of hope in his world, the story of The Man in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road contributed to the birth of the ever-growing post-apocalyptic genre. Set in a time where the world is a place of depravity, The Man and The Boy are the two glimmers of hope. The journey down the perilous road to their idea of salvation inspired not only the other in the novel, but a large quantity…

stringent post-apocalyptic society, emphasis on surviving. As strange as that sounds it is the basis for many of the books that have captivated Young Adult Literature in the past couple of years. While dystopian books have been seen throughout literature for almost a century now, with books like 1984 and Brave New World, only recently have the books made a stride into Young Adult Literature, and end up dominating the genre. Though the question remains: how has or why has dystopian fiction…

The Hunger Games written by the American novelist Suzanne Collins is the first book in The Hunger Games Trilogy. The book is a science fiction dystopian novel where the setting takes place somewhere in the future. While the exact time, year or date is not revealed, it’s assumed that the story takes place at least hundred years or more in the future. One of the reasons that the story is set in the future is the technology. In the novel the technology is very similar to our current technology, but…

Zombie fascination after World War II The recent fascination with the apocalypse and zombie scenarios can be traced back to the advent of nuclear warfare during World War II, as argued by Stanford literary scholar Angela Becerra Vidergar. After the destructive events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the horrific violence of the Holocaust and World War II, human collective visions of the future were drastically altered and the disturbing realisation of human capacity for mass violence was brought…

Station Eleven explores the idea of what it means to be human when the infrastructure of society has crumbled to pieces. Mandel achieves this by creating scenes that show how her characters are attempting to find their place as humans in the post-apocalyptic landscape. A landscape that seems to be thriving even after the loss of millions of lives. Mandel also demonstrates how these characters’ attempt to hold on to past artifacts as a way of connecting with what the world had once been. This…

Arthur C. Clarke couldn’t have chosen a better title for this brilliant science fiction short story. I’m a sucker for a story with a good title. “The Nine Billion Names of God" revolves around Tibetan Buddhist monks who plan to put together a list that consists of all the names of God. The story opens with Dr. Wagner-- he is asked to work on an automatic sequence computer (Mark V.) that can carry out letters by the lama. They need a computer with letters, so they can write the names of God.…

to the idiosyncrasy of the novel. On the contrary The Road is extremely detail oriented which immensely contributes to the overall theme and tone of the book in addition to putting the reader in the characters shoes. The Road is a fiction piece about a post apocalyptic desolated world centered around a boy and a man trying to fight through constant fear and inhumane…

such a popular theme in the media. Most often, the post apocalyptic narrative shows up in genres like dystopian fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. Recently, I finished reading a dystopian fiction by Emily St. John Mandel entitled, Station Eleven. Although I don't actively read dystopian fiction, the few that I have read were impressionable, and Station Eleven was not much different. The story moves back and forth between two worlds, pre and post collapse, wherein a deadly epidemic left…