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Novels and short stories
Mary Shelley's The Last Man, published in 1826, is set in the end of the 21st century. It chronicles a group of friends, based on Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and others, moving through Europe as a plague kills most of the world's population. The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, published in 1912, is set in San Francisco in the year 2073, 60 years after a plague has largely depopulated the planet. Isaac Asimov's Nightfall (1941) describes a world with 6 suns, in constant daylight, except for an eclipse-based night every 2000 years, leading to mass hysteria and destruction. Written in 1949 by George R. Stewart, Earth Abides is the story of a man who finds most of civilization has been destroyed by a disease. Slowly, a small community forms around him as he struggles to start a new civilization and to preserve knowledge and learning.
Empty World is a 1977 novel by John Christopher about an adolescent boy who survives a plague which has killed most of the world's population. Originally published in 1978, Stephen King's The Stand follows the odyssey of a small number of survivors of a world-ending influenza pandemic, later revealed to be the man-made superflu "Captain Trips". It was eventually adapted for a 1994 miniseries of the same title starring Gary Sinise and Molly Ringwald.[38] The novel was semi-inspired by King's earlier short story "Night Surf". Also published in 1977, Graham Masterton's novel titled Plague, tells the story of a mutated (and incurable as well as fatal) version of Yersinia pestis sweeping across the United States. Gore Vidal's 1978 novel Kalki also involves an apocalyptic event caused by a man-made pandemic.
The 1982 novel The White Plague by Frank Herbert has molecular biologist John Roe O'Neill exploring vengeance on a global scale when his wife is killed in an IRA car bombing. He creates a pandemic that kills only women. Written in 1984, the novel Emergence by David R. Palmer is set in a world where a man-made plague destroys the vast majority of the world's population. The novel was nominated for several awards and won the 1985 Compton Crook Award.
José Saramago's 1995 novel Blindness tells the story of a city or country in which a mass epidemic of blindness destroys the social fabric. It was adapted into the film Blindness in 2008. Published in 2003 by Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake is set after a genetically modified virus wipes out the entire population except for the protagonist and a small group of humans that were also genetically modified. A series of flashbacks depicting a world dominated by biocorporations explains the events leading up to the apocalypse. This novel was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. A sequel, The Year of the Flood, was published in 2007, followed by MaddAddam in 2013, the trilogy's conclusion.[39]
Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend deals with the life of Robert Neville, the only unaffected survivor of a global pandemic that has turned the world's population into vampire zombie-like creatures. The novel has been adapted to film three times: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007). Jeff Carlson wrote a trilogy of novels beginning with his 2007 debut, Plague Year, a present-day thriller about a worldwide nanotech contagion that devours all warm-blooded life below 10,000 feet (3,000 m) in elevation. Its two sequels, Plague War and Plague Zone, deal with a cure that allows return to an environment that suffered ecological collapse due to massive increases in insects and reptiles.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) is an apocalyptic horror novel by Max Brooks. The book is a collection of individual accounts of desperate struggle during and after a devastating global conflict against a zombie plague, narrated by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission. It also describes the social, political, religious, and environmental changes that result from the plague.
Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014) takes place in the Great Lakes region after a fictional swine flu pandemic, known as the "Georgia Flu", has devastated the world, killing most of the population. The novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in May 2015.[40] The award committee highlighted the novel's focus on the survival of human culture after an apocalypse, as opposed to the survival of humanity itself.[40]
James Dashner's The Maze Runner trilogy (2009–11) takes place after sun flares have scorched the earth. As a result, the governments of the world released a virus to kill off some of the world's population to save resources. The virus turned out to be highly contagious, and it made you lose control of your mind until you were an animal inside your head. This led to it being nicknamed, "The Flare". The series was made into movies by 20th Century Fox, with The Maze Runner released in 2014, The Scorch Trials in 2015 and the third in the series, The Death Cure in 2018.
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