Apocalypse Then & Now

Our fascination with the End of the World certainly predates modern publishing (and even predates the Great Flood and Revelations), but the volume of "Apocalypse literature" seems to have literally exploded in the past few years (thanks, Kindle!). This speaks to the increasing popularity - and continued commercial opportunity, but when publication volumes were low, did writers reflect the general anxiety of their times, or were they simply inspired by an earthquake or volcanic eruption to spin a tale? Was Armageddon their focus, a setting, or simply a plot device?

This isn’t a philosophical thread, but for hundreds of years now, “Apocalypse fiction” has therapeutically spun tales about every type of disaster imaginable – nuclear war, viral outbreaks, sun flares, asteroid impacts, giant radiated flora and fauna, alien invasions, the Rapture, ecological or social collapse, and now increasingly – the rise of the undead. 

The first example of Apocalypse fiction was actually the first science fiction novel ever: Theologus Autodidacticus, by Ibn al-Nafis, written in the 13^th century. For this physician-philosopher, the Apocalypse was simply a means to his end: a philosophical rebuttal. The next surviving example of Apocalypse fiction wasn't for another 700-odd years. ln Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) we get our first intimate – and grim – examination of life in humanity’s last days (after a plague). Our first alien invasion was of War of the Worlds, but H.G. Wells also portended the inevitable decline of man’s era in The Time Machine. Why did human civilization fail? Perhaps for no reason at all except that all things must come to an end.

Things picked up in the 1900s: a volcanic eruption sent a cloud of cyanide gas into the atmosphere (The Purple Cloud, by M.P. Shiel), the sun exploded (The Night Land, W.H. Hodgson), the machines rose (R.U.R., the play by Karel Capek that gave us the word “robot”), and of course - there was war, lots and lots of war.

A brave soul on Wikipedia actually attempted to collect and classify all Apocalypse-themed media out there: novels, short stories, poems, songs, films, television programs, and even video games. I wondered if grouping the literature on that list and portraying it visually might tell us something about literary trends: did they reflect the real anxieties of the time, greater cultural trends (e.g., movies), or simply market forces?

To be clear, the Wikipedia list is imperfect and incomplete. This is no criticism of the list's editor, as there’s no easy way to capture the recent explosion in zombie fiction (literally thousands of titles are on Amazon with publishing dates from 2010) or track down the countless short stories appearing in decades’ worth of pulps (or the more respectable pages of Omni). Despite these limitations, I went ahead and extracted the Apocalypse prose, poetry, comics, and plays, grouped them into broader categories (e.g., giant asteroids, exploding suns, sun flares, etc. are together under "Celestial Bodies" and the Rapture-related fiction is under "Supernatural" together with ghosts, demons, etc.) and graphed the past 70-odd years below:

Graph showing publication trends (number of titles) in Apocalypse fiction: 1940-present (source: Wikipedia)
(NB. pre-1940 volumes are too low and post-2009 volumes are too high)

Because of its inherent incompleteness, I would take the booming interest in Apocalypse fiction that this graph suggests with a grain of salt. If there’s a tale to tell, it’s that the spikes in some sub-genres do coincide with the anxieties of our collective conscience (something I touched on in my previous post). I’ve illustrating this by mapping a few seminal events alongside their sub-genres to show the apparent spike in publication volume.

Looking at the “War” line in pink, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the publication of World War III-related fiction spiked following multiple Soviet “victories” and Ronald Reagan’s subsequent tough talk. Similarly, the anxieties spurred on by the AIDS epidemic created a lot of plague-related tales (and unfortunately manifested itself as irrational prejudice against innocents like Ryan White, who was barred from his school so he wouldn't "infect" anybody).  You can be sure bird flu and hoof & mouth also did their part. Finally, the multiple environmental events that led to the establishment of Earth Day gave us all sorts of juicy possibilities for writers to portray the coming, inevitable collapse of our climate.

The success of the ground-breaking leaders in each sub-genre (subjectively, I would say War of the Worlds, On the Beach, Day of the Triffids, A Canticle for Liebowitz, Childhood’s End and now World War Z) spurred on loads of copy cats: just take a look in Amazon.com how many “Zombie Survival Manuals” are out there following Max Brooks' efforts. This site has a good, definitive list of modern Apocalypse fiction. In each instance, the writers on that list deliver "the well told tale" through character-driven stories of the survivors, reflections on the end of the human era, and gripping descriptions of the how the End arrived.

My only anxiety? Who’s going to continue updating that Wikipedia entry if we’re all gone?


- Chris