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The end of the world has a long pedigree in western literature, in the modern sense going at back at least to the Martians of H.G. Wells.
The appeal of an apocalypse is easy to see. In dramatic terms, there's nothing worse than the end of the world and, provided the story assumes at least a few survivors, it provides the writer with a more or less blank slate for social satire, adventure, horror or the romance of Starting Civilization Over and presumably Better, according to the writer's idea of what "better" means. And of course, the reader can live the adventure vicariously, assuming himself (I suspect the genre is more popular with men than with women, and with young men especially — how better for a teenaged boy to prove his mettle than to survive and prosper when all around him has been destroyed? How easy it is to imagine oneself a hero without the bothersome constraints of a complex and intellectually demanding society?) to be one of the few survivors, one of the brave, the smart, the strong.
It takes no great insight into human psychology to presume that adolescent power-fantasy lies at the heart of a great part of such stories. Nevertheless, most that I have read at least pay lip-service to the idea that the destruction of civilization, along with billions of human lives, is in fact a tragedy, no matter that the survivors have a great time — feeling "more alive" than ever, as in John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids.
If adolescent male power fantasies are at the heart of the disaster novel genre, there is more than a little irony in the fact that Ayn Rand's shamelessly didactic and very long (at around 645,000 words) novel, Atlas Shrugged, was written by a woman.
Published in 1957 and set at some vague point in the relatively near future, Atlas Shrugged depicts a world falling apart, with the United States as the last country to still hold a vestige of capitalism. But it is a country under seige by corrupt businessmen and union leaders, self-serving government officials and ordinary scum and cowards. Rand pulls no punches in including the vast majority of the human race as being moral and intellectual cowards at best, and active promoters of death and destruction at worst.
Railroad heiress Dagny Taggart is one of the few competent "men" (from the perspective of the early 21st century there is something really archaic in Rand's use of man and men to refer to human beings in general, but since it is her usage, I will follow it here) in a world seething with corruption and malice.
( Yes folks, it's another long one and most of you probably aren't interested; I'll spare your friends' page. )
The appeal of an apocalypse is easy to see. In dramatic terms, there's nothing worse than the end of the world and, provided the story assumes at least a few survivors, it provides the writer with a more or less blank slate for social satire, adventure, horror or the romance of Starting Civilization Over and presumably Better, according to the writer's idea of what "better" means. And of course, the reader can live the adventure vicariously, assuming himself (I suspect the genre is more popular with men than with women, and with young men especially — how better for a teenaged boy to prove his mettle than to survive and prosper when all around him has been destroyed? How easy it is to imagine oneself a hero without the bothersome constraints of a complex and intellectually demanding society?) to be one of the few survivors, one of the brave, the smart, the strong.
It takes no great insight into human psychology to presume that adolescent power-fantasy lies at the heart of a great part of such stories. Nevertheless, most that I have read at least pay lip-service to the idea that the destruction of civilization, along with billions of human lives, is in fact a tragedy, no matter that the survivors have a great time — feeling "more alive" than ever, as in John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids.
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Published in 1957 and set at some vague point in the relatively near future, Atlas Shrugged depicts a world falling apart, with the United States as the last country to still hold a vestige of capitalism. But it is a country under seige by corrupt businessmen and union leaders, self-serving government officials and ordinary scum and cowards. Rand pulls no punches in including the vast majority of the human race as being moral and intellectual cowards at best, and active promoters of death and destruction at worst.
Railroad heiress Dagny Taggart is one of the few competent "men" (from the perspective of the early 21st century there is something really archaic in Rand's use of man and men to refer to human beings in general, but since it is her usage, I will follow it here) in a world seething with corruption and malice.
( Yes folks, it's another long one and most of you probably aren't interested; I'll spare your friends' page. )