The 1997 Kevin Costner vehicle The Postman is set in a dystopian version of the year 2013, where wars and plagues have caused society to revert to a pre-technological state. Heck, they don’t even necessarily have to be good. There’s a million ways to tell the story of the end of the world, and I’ll happily consume them all. They might simply be a quiet meditation on a slowly-dawning yet unstoppable end, like Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On The Beach, a scientifically-incorrect-by-modern-understanding but nonetheless-stirring story of the last people still alive on Earth after a nuclear winter, awaiting the eventual arrival of their own demise in the form of a radiation cloud. Jemisin’s epic, sprawling Broken Earth trilogy, set in a far-off future where the Earth itself has turned on its inhabitants and unleashes generations-long “seasons” of destruction. They might be fantastical allegories, like N.K. John Mandel’s superb and haunting Station Eleven, which follows a roving Shakespearean theatre troupe traveling between sparsely populated towns years after a fast-moving pandemic killed 99% of the world’s population. ( The Road is a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer in the category of “books I absolutely loved and will never read a second time.”) They can nestle in the empty hollows of the aftermath, like Emily St.
They can be razor-sharp and unrelentingly dark narratives, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a story of a man and his young son traveling through a world whose skies have been blackened and cities reduced to ash by an unspecified cataclysm. Despite the flood of bad news that seems to bear down on us from all sides twenty-four hours a day, I’ll still devour a book or movie that shows what things would be like if the news were even worse. In recent years, I have become somewhat begrudgingly accepting of the fact that the former is likely impossible, whereas the latter seems more and more possible every day.
There are two genres of popular fiction that I’m an absolute sucker for: I love stories involving time travel, and I love stories involving the apocalypse. I can’t get enough of the end of the world.
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