Most popular articles for January 2024:
Looking for some post-apocalyptic story ideas and scenarios to fuel your next writing project? You’ve come to the right place. We’re about to take a deep dive into the world of apocalypse fiction. We’ll also be exploring some fresh ideas for a post-apocalyptic novel or short story.
Readers and writers alike flock to post-apocalyptic fiction when they want to envision a world beyond our own. This literary genre combines elements of science fiction and horror, often with thrilling results.
Despite the hundreds of post-apocalyptic stories that have been published over the years, there’s still room to innovate. Unexplored scenarios and concepts leave the door wide open for speculative fiction writers.
And with everything going on in the world today, these stories are more relevant than ever before. They resonate with us. There has never been a better time to start writing an apocalyptic novel.
Top 9 Post-Apocalyptic Scenarios in Fiction
Below, you’ll find a list of post-apocalyptic scenarios often found within books and movies. You’ll also find some fresh ideas and “story starters” you can use to break new ground within your own fiction.
1. Alien Invasion
In the alien invasion post-apocalyptic story, intelligent beings from another planet or solar system attack Earth, ending life as we know it. Cities lie in ruin. Humanity has been eradicated. Small bands of survivors remain, scratching out an existence in a harsh, post-civilization world.
The alien apocalypse type of story has fascinated readers for many years, just as space itself fascinates us. Our discovery of other planets and solar systems has provided endless fuel for our collective imagination. Is there intelligent life out there? And if so, how might it view us here on Earth? Would it be hostile?
The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, exemplifies this type of post-apocalyptic scenario. Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers is another early example within this subgenre.
Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave gives readers a more modern take on the alien invasion post-apocalyptic scenario, with a female teenage protagonist. Another more recent example of this subgenre is After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, by Nancy Kress (pictured above).
Ideas for writers: The real story here is not the alien invasion itself, but how humans respond to it. That’s where the real drama lies. That’s what we can relate to, as humans. Sure, the invasion / attack / annihilation is entertaining in a flashy kind of way. But there has to be something more for the story to work. Science fiction and horror writers exploring this theme could start by asking some tough questions. How would humans adapt to a life without civilization, a life without laws or government? How would you behave in that kind of world?
2. Astronomical Catastrophe
In this type of post-apocalyptic fiction, the world is either partly or wholly destroyed by an asteroid, a comet, a burst of gamma rays, or some other extraterrestrial force.
Many authors have explored the meteor / asteroid post-apocalyptic scenario in the past. But we don’t see it as much today, at least not in the classical sense. This idea has evolved, thankfully.
Today, a lot of science fiction writers are exploring the “space disaster” subgenre in new ways, creating new doomsday scenarios we haven’t seen before.
Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson, tells of humanity’s desperate efforts to save itself following the disintegration of the moon.
Ideas for writers: Space is big. Really big. It’s so big that we can scarcely wrap our minds around it. So there’s a lot of room for innovation, and many ways to create a post-apocalyptic scenario. A short list, for starters: Solar flares. A dying sun. A shift in gravity. World-devouring black holes. For more ideas, check out this impressive list on the Astronomical Society of the Pacific website.
3. Disease / Pandemic / Outbreak
It’s strange writing about disease outbreaks as a post-apocalyptic fiction scenario, at a time when the very real coronavirus is dominating the news. Art imitates life!
In the outbreak / pandemic story, a highly contagious and deadly pathogen wreaks havoc on humanity. Writers of science fiction and apocalypse stories often turn to this theme because (A) we can relate to it and (B) it’s versatile.
Realism makes these stories more engaging and, in some cases, more terrifying. The versatility of it enables writers to create their own post-apocalyptic vision of a future existence.
Mention “outbreak fiction,” and many people think of Michael Chricton’s The Andromeda Strain. In that novel, scientists race to contain a deadly pathogen from outer space that hitched a ride to Earth on one of our space probes.
Andromeda wasn’t the first outbreak story. But it was one of the most successful. The 1969 sci-fi thriller became a bestseller and spawned both a movie and a TV miniseries.
Side note: Daniel H. Wilson, mentioned below, wrote a sequel called Andromeda Evolution. That book came out in 2019, fifty years after the original. Some things never go out of style.
Ideas for writers: Want some ideas for writing a post-apocalyptic plague story? Just watch the news. Deadly viruses and antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” aren’t the stuff of fiction. In Andromeda, the deadly microbe came from space. In Justin Cronin’s The Passage, a vampiric virus jumped from bats to humans. Ask yourself: What haven’t we seen before, in terms of civilization-ending plagues? And what kind of story do you want to tell? Once you know that, you can create your own affliction to support your storytelling goals. For more ideas, check out this article on author Dan Koboldt’s website.
4. Environmental Catastrophe
We tend to think of post-apocalyptic fiction in terms of asteroid strikes, zombies and nuclear war. But there are “softer” types of apocalypse as well, scenarios that unfold gradually over a longer period of time. The environmental apocalypse is one example.
There are many variations of this post-apocalyptic theme. Massive plant death could lead to a collapse of the world’s food supply. Chronic, ongoing drought could cause water scarcity, societal collapse, and tribalism. Climate change could make much of the world uninhabitable. Et cetera.
Climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” is starting to break out of the broader environmental umbrella to become a genre all of its own. Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 is a prominent example of this emerging subgenre.
Ideas for writers: What will the world be like 100, 200 or 1,000 years from now, from an environmental standpoint? And how might it change the way we live? To get your speculative wheels turning, check out this article on sustainable floating cities as a response to rising sea levels.
5. Machine, Robot or AI Uprising
This is a broad category of post-apocalyptic fiction that includes all scenarios in which manmade robotic or machine creations rise up against their creators.
The Matrix is a good example from the film world. As for books, Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse explores the AI uprising doomsday scenario.
Machine-based post-apocalyptic fiction borrows much from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written more than a century before the first computers. In Frankenstein, a human creates an inhuman “thing” that brings tragedy to its creator’s life.
With robot uprising apocalypse scenarios, humans create technologies that ultimately turn against them with tragic results. Different execution, but similar themes.
Ideas for writers: I’ve written a separate article that explores AI takeover scenarios, and the different ways they could affect humanity. It’s a must-read for science fiction writers, or anyone who is interested in future technologies and how they shape our world.
6. Disaster
“Nature gone wild” is another post-apocalyptic fiction scenario employed by writers. It overlaps with the environmental / climate category mentioned above, but also stands alone. Instead of the gradual apocalypse of climate fiction, the natural disaster doomsday scenario happens with a bang.
In The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, the planet is scorched by some inexplicable firestorm. We don’t really know what caused it, but it sets the stage for a brutal story about love, loss and survival.
In the wake of that catastrophe, a man and his young son must navigate a treacherous, post-apocalyptic landscaped populated by thieves and murderers. McCarthy left the firestorm vague, choosing not to shed light on it. That made for a stronger story, in my view. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007.
So that goes to show you, you don’t have to explain your apocalyptic event in great detail. It’s okay to create mystery around it, and your story might be better that way.
Ideas for writers: This kind of catastrophe could be global or local, depending on the kind of story / novel you want to write. We talked about a global scenario above, used in The Road. A localized version might be a supervolcano eruption, as in the novel Ashfall by Mike Mullin; a series of massive earthquakes unfolding in a chain reaction; a tsunami unlike any the world has seen before. You get the idea.
7. Nuclear Holocaust
Two or more nuclear-armed powers unleash fire and fury on one another, and the world as we know it vanishes in a flash. This kind of post-apocalyptic scenario was all the rage in the 1950s and 1960s, largely due to tensions associated with the Cold War. People couldn’t get enough of these stories.
In 1987, Robert McCammon wrote a chilling entry in the nuclear holocaust / apocalypse subgenre. His epic Swan Song occurs during a nuclear winter following a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union.
I haven’t seen many writers using this post-apocalyptic scenario in recent years. Maybe it’s too scary to explore. Or maybe people have forgotten (willfully or otherwise) that we do still live in a nuclear age, an age when individual nations have enough firepower to destroy all life on Earth several times over.
Ideas for writers: In a full-scale, global nuclear war, survivors would likely be reduced to a kind of tribal or medieval existence. There would probably be some form of nuclear winter, with global temperature decline. The sun would disappear behind a perpetual ash cloud, killing plant life. The question is, how does one survive in such a world? How does one adapt? Writers who want to explore this kind of post-apocalyptic story idea would do well to read Swan Song, mentioned above. And if you really want to know what might happen to the Earth following a nuclear war, check out this scientific study and projection. (It gets technical, so you might want to stick to the abstract and summary portions.)
8. Reproductive Failure
In some stories, the “apocalypse” comes from humans themselves. The Children of Men, by P.D. James, is a good example of this type of story. Blurring the lines between post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, Children tells of a near-future world where women can no longer produce offspring following a worldwide infertility pandemic.
The Children of Men, and other stories like it, share similar themes with the other books and categories on this list. They envision a world unlike our own, a world where humanity has been pushed to the brink and forced to adapt.
James’s novel also gives the reader a sense of hope, in the bleakest of times. That’s another common trait among these stories. Regardless of what kind of post-apocalyptic scenario you explore, as a writer, there has to be some spark of light in the darkness. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Ideas for writers: A global infertility pandemic would essentially give humanity a countdown toward extinction. At some point, there would be no children left, no babies, just an aging population headed toward oblivion. How do you think people would deal with such a world-ending scenario? I think some would accept it with a kind of stoicism, while others would go mad grappling with the idea. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood created a world where the few fertile women left served as childbearing slaves for the powerful. Talk about vision! What ideas might you come up with for this post-apocalyptic scenario? Check out this article about a slow-moving infertility crisis, and then accelerate it for story purposes. What might the world look like in that fictional yet realistic scenario?
9. Zombies
Ah yes, the undead. They come last in this list of post-apocalyptic doomsday scenarios due to alphabetization. But they’ve earned a special prominence within the realm of science fiction and horror.
Zombies could fall under the “disease / outbreak” category mentioned above. After all, the zombie affliction is usually spread in ways that are familiar to us. It spreads via saliva, just like the common cold or flu.
But let’s be honest. Zombies deserve their own doomsday category. Thematically, they are very different from the typical outbreak or pandemic story.
In zombie fiction, the disease itself is a threat. But the carriers of the disease are the real terror. That, combined with the immense popularity of the zombie genre, puts it into a separate class of post-apocalyptic fiction.
There are too many popular zombie novels to name here. But there’s one in particular I’d like to mention, for those who haven’t read it. In the 2010 novel, The Reapers Are the Angeles, Alden Bell manages to combine the post-apocalyptic horrors of zombiedom with a southern gothic literary style. And somehow it works. I read that book years ago, and I still think about Temple from time to time.
Ideas for writers: Like the other apocalyptic scenarios above, zombie stories work best when they focus on the human side. Shuffling flesh-eaters can be thrilling. I get that. But there has to be something more than the undead — something human. In a separate article, I’ve offered some suggestions for innovating within the zombie genre. There you’ll find a wealth of ideas to get your creative juices flowing.