Apocalyptic Aftermath

Time has stopped. You can hear the death throws of civilization and technology in the distance as they struggle to take in breath, slowly dying away in rust and ash, blowing away in the hot desert wind. You secure the scarf wrapped around your head and apply dark goggles to your face in order to block out the radiation that surely still seeps up from the ground and filters down through the damaged ozone. The scabs on your hands never heal, and the hair on your head is almost gone, but you cast your gaze to the horizon and smile. Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization due to a potentially existential catastrophe such as nuclear warfare, pandemic, extraterrestrial attack, impact event, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics, supernatural phenomena, divine judgement, climate change, resource depletion, zombies or some other general disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten (or mythologized). Post-apocalyptic stories often take place in an agrarian, non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered elements of technology remain. There is a considerable degree of blurring between this form of science fiction and that which deals with dystopias.The genres gained in popularity after World War II, when the possibility of global annihilation by nuclear weapons entered the public consciousness. However, recognizable apocalyptic novels have existed at least since the first quarter of the 19th century, when Mary Shelley's The Last Man was published.