NEW SCIFI HUMAN APOCALYPSE SERIES

If we could turn back the clock, heaven on Earth – or at least a utopia – might be achieved. Perhaps because it has escaped from it, much of modern western society has internalised the idea that our agrarian past represented a lost utopian era.

But the societies that arise from disasters are ultimately stronger and more human for their return to simpler ways of being. Mandel and King reflect on the cost of losing our technology in lives lost. In Station Eleven and The Stand it’s the complexity of modern life, including our over-reliance on science and technology, that cause many of our problems. Mandel’s focus on a troupe of Shakespearean actors gives some sense of what she most values in our world – the intellectual, the cultural, and the simple. A virus obliterates most human life the survivors must fight to regain some sense of society. Its apocalyptic narrative shares elements with some of the genre’s great stories, including Stephen King’s masterpiece The Stand. Heroic actions might improve the world temporarily, but it will always return to basic inequalities.Įmily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven has been gathering awards and plaudits within and beyond science fiction. Whether such futures tend to the utopian or dystopian, their message is equally bleak: we cannot escape from our human nature. The Silo is any modern metropolis, from high to low life, with all the miracles and dirt in between. In common with stories such as The Hunger Games, featuring the artificially maintained state of Panem with its numbered sectors, the Silo is a way for Howey to hold a mirror up to contemporary society. As in the 1976 film Logan’s Run, humanity has survived by retreating to a mysterious underground city, the Silo, 140 storeys deep.

NEW SCIFI HUMAN APOCALYPSE SERIES

Hugh Howey’s Silo series – arguably the first breakout hit of the self-publishing revolution – offers a much less positive vision of the post-apocalypse world.

Octavia E Butler’s Parable of the Sower also features the US after economic collapse, and charts the emergence of a new religion of empathy and love.

Philip K Dick’s Dr Bloodmoney follows a post-apocalyptic United States as it rebuilds a society altered by a leap forward in human evolution. Science-fiction writers have long explored the possibility of new, possibly better worlds, emerging from the apocalypse.

New scifi human apocalypse