The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [1]
The noted French astronomer, Camille Flammarion, wrote one of the first major novels of worldwide disaster, La fin du monde (1894), better known as Omega: The Last Days of the World, where a vast comet not only destroys life on Earth but also on Mars. H.G. Wells almost destroyed all life in "The Star" (1897) but salvation was at hand thanks to the Moon. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for creating Sherlock Holmes, combined the ideas of a plague and cosmic disaster in The Poison Belt (1913), where he has the Earth pass through a toxic belt in space. M.P. Shiel had used a similar idea in The Purple Cloud (1901), when a volcano releases a mass of poisonous vapour from deep within the Earth. Wells developed another form of Armageddon when human life is threatened by the arrival of the Martians in The War of the Worlds (1898).
There were the inevitable apocalyptic stories following the First World War. Edward Shanks saw the end of civilization in The People of the Ruins (1920), while in Nordenholt's Million (1923) J.J. Connington showed how science might bring civilization back from the brink of an ecological disaster. Interestingly, one of the earliest stories to consider how civilization might crumble through an over-reliance on technology was written as far back as 1909 by E.M. Forster in "The Machine Stops".
The Second World War and the detonation of the A-bomb inevitably brought forth many stories of a nuclear holocaust such as The Long Loud Silence (1952) by Wilson Tucker, On the Beach (1957) by Nevil Shute and, perhaps the best known, Dr Strangelo-ve (1963), the Stanley Kubrick film based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George. The Cold War saw a rise in disaster novels generally, particularly in Britain, where The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham, The Death of Grass (1956) by John Christopher, White August (1955) by John Boland and The Tide Went Out (1958) by Charles Eric Maine created what veteran British SF author Brian Aldiss later termed the "cosy catastrophe". J. G. Ballard established his reputation with a quartet of disaster novels based on the four elements of air, water, fire and earth: The Wind From Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964) and The Crystal World (1966).
The welter of catastrophe novels and films grew exponentially with the approach of the millennium. Life on Earth is all but wiped out by a comet in Lucifer's Hammer (1977) by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. We see how isolated survivors cope in a post-holocaust world in The Postman (1985) by David Brin and in The Gate to Women's Country (1988) by Sheri S. Tepper. Sea levels rise in The Road to Corlay (1978) by Richard Cowper and the United States is flooded in Forty Signs of Rain (2004) by Kim Stanley Robinson, while Stephen Baxter drowns the Earth in Flood (2008). Greg Bear has aliens systematically destroying the solar system in The Forge of God (1987). In The Stand (1978), a genuinely apocalyptic novel, Stephen King has most of humanity wiped out by a virulent flu strain, whilst a man-made plague destroys civilization in David Palmer's Emergence (1984). There's a combined nuclear and ecological holocaust in Mother of Storms (1994) by John Barnes, while a major cosmic catastrophe causes climate change in Charles Sheffield's Aftermath (1998). Most recently Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), which won a Pulitzer Prize, presents a very bleak vision of a world all but destroyed by some unexplained catastrophe. Recent TV series such as Survivors, Deepwater Black and Jericho and films such as Deep Impact, the Terminator series and Armageddon continue to stimulate our thoughts and fill our minds with apocalyptic imagery.
All of which goes to show the popularity and enormity of the field and the richness of its history, and created something of a challenge in assembling this anthology. I had considered including many of the classics of the genre but found there was so much new fiction being produced in the last ten years or so that I only