Wells – towards the end of the book the Time Traveler witnesses the Sun's expansion, causing the death of all life on Earth. Richard Jefferies – the nature of the catastrophe is never stated, except that apparently most of the human race quickly dies out, leaving England to revert to nature The novel Erewhon's section " The Book of Machines"
Lord Byron - describes the end of life on Earth after the Sun's extinction Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville – regarded as the first story of modern speculative fiction to depict the end of the world
You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources. This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, is dystopian fiction, not apocalyptic fiction. Apocalyptic fiction is not the same as fiction that provides visions of a dystopian future. For example, Armageddon and Deep Impact are considered disaster films and not apocalyptic fiction because, although Earth or humankind are terribly threatened, in the end they manage to avoid destruction. A threat of an apocalypse does not make a piece of fiction apocalyptic. Īpocalyptic fiction does not portray catastrophes, or disasters, or near-disasters that do not result in apocalypse. Apocalypticism is the religious belief that there will be an apocalypse, a term which originally referred to a revelation of God's will, but now usually refers to belief that the world will come to an end very soon, even within one's own lifetime. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten (or mythologized).Īpocalypse is a Greek word referring to the end of the world.
Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster.