In the literary world, there are few genres more captivating and cathartic than the apocalyptic genre. Normally consisting of a dominant set of heroes against an impending doom that is usually out of the protagonist’s control, apocalyptic literature deals with how characters deal with the unchanging fact that their world is about to be reshaped. However, the mode of the apocalypse varies from place to place. Hence, there are many subgenres of apocalyptic literature.
Before the 1900s, divine judgment was a common theme for apocalyptic work. Ancient myths and legends, such as Noah’s Deluge from the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, have characters that survive and deal with the consequences of a decimating flood because of a wrathful pantheon of deities. Later on, when John the Revelator was exiled on the Isle of Patmos, he wrote Apocalypse, which is included in today’s Bible as the final book of the New Testament: Revelation. The Book of Revelation, along with various apocryphal sources from the Gnostics, talked greatly on the end of the world and how the earth’s denizens would react with the repercussions of this great cataclysm.
With the ushering in of the 1900s, authors took another swing at the apocalyptic genre, creating 3 new distinct categories, all based on different types of disasters. The first to become popularized was the fear of extraterrestrial destruction. This was initiated by none other than Edgar Allan Poe in his 1839 short story, The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion. In this story, 2 souls in the afterlife discuss the destruction of Earth via a comet that wipes out Earth’s nitrogen and ignites the remaining oxygen into a global inferno. Later in the century, H. G. Wells infamously wrote his 1898 classic War of the Worlds, a tale in which aliens from Mars invade Earth, wiping out the majority of the human race with their superior technology.
The second genre, biological destruction, is similar to extraterrestrial destruction because of the fact that most of the factors involved could not be controlled by humans. However, biological destruction works do not seek extraterrestrial causes for the apocalypse; they look here on earth for the reason. A popular variety of biological destruction is a pandemic that kills the bulk of humans on the planet. First commercialized in M. P. Shiel’s 1901 piece The Purple Cloud, the disease-caused apocalypse quickly drew attention, spawning such great titles as George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), and Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1984). Later on, this genre grew to include biological warfare. Another, more recent, form of biological destruction is the zombie apocalypse genre, which deals with a world-wide rising of the undead in a crusade against the living. This is epitomized in Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend, and has continued to inspire modern-day apocalyptic authors today.
The most recent of the apocalypse genres is the technological disaster. Stemming from fears that technology will either fail or rule our lives, these literary works focus on the negative factors of automated systems. E. M. Forster’s story The Machine Stops recounts a frightening future in which humans are entirely dependent on machines to operate; the story delves into a situation where these machines fail to work anymore. This genre continues with Harlan Ellison’s short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which tells the story of a man attempting to escape an omnipotent artificial intelligence in a bunker. However, as the decades ensued, a new technological terror reared its ugly head: nuclear warfare. Such works on nuclear holocausts describe the recovery of civilization after a major nuclear mishap, whether it is a nuclear power plant failing or, more commonly, the result of nuclear warfare. This is exemplified by works like The Folk of the Fringe by Orson Scott Card, which tells the story of a small group of Mormons struggling to survive after a nuclear attack during World War III. The technological apocalypse genre differs from extraterrestrial or biological apocalypses because in these cases, humans had direct control over the outcome of the apocalypse; being the creators of the technology, humans directly caused their own suffering and destruction. Many authors use this clause to include a collective guilt in addition to the themes of death and despair.
It has always been a fascination of humans to speculate on the end of the world, and apocalyptic fiction is a primary outlet for this interest. Even today, the speculations of Nostradamus and the astronomy of the Mayans fuel continued debate on the apocalyptic nature of the year 2012. But, whether it is destruction by asteroid, zombies, or nuclear meltdown, our global yet morbid enthrallment to our own demise continues to permeate our literature, and will continue to do so until we face our own apocalypse. It's entertaining now, but such literature begs the question: how would you react in such a predicament?
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