List of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction

This is a list of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction works, sorted by the nature of the catastrophe portrayed.

Nuclear holocaust
survivor, Florida

"The Walker in the Dust" By Russell Ackerman, available on Google Books. One man searches for meaning in the wasteland after the death of his wife, finding it in unexpected places.

Novels

 * The 13th century novel Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafis
 * The 1901 novel The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel, in which a volcanic eruption flood the world with cyanide gas.
 * The 1946 novel Mr. Adam by Pat Frank depicts a world in which a nuclear power plant explosion renders the entire male population infertile.
 * The 1956 novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher, which was made into the film No Blade of Grass, in which a virus that destroys plants causes massive famine and the breakdown of society
 * The 1961 novel The Wind from Nowhere by J.G. Ballard - First published novel. World destroyed by increasingly powerful winds
 * The 1962 novel Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, which presents a dying Earth where vegetation dominates and animal life is all but extinct. Originally published in the United States in abridged form as "The Long, Hot Afternoon of Earth."
 * The 1962 novel The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard Climate change causes flooding.
 * The 1962 novel The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess Global over-population and famine leads to mass chaos
 * The 1962 novel The World in Winter (UK)/The Long Winter (US) by John Christopher in which a decrease in radiation from the sun causes a new ice age.
 * The 1963 novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, in which all the water on Earth becomes Ice-Nine
 * The 1964 novel The Drought by J.G. Ballard A super drought evaporates all water on earth.
 * The 1964 novel Greybeard by Brian Aldiss, in which the human race becomes sterile
 * The 1964 novel Time of the Great Freeze by Robert Silverberg Another ice-age has engulfed the earth. A group from New York travels over the ice to London in the year 2650.
 * The 1965 novel A Wrinkle in the Skin (The Ragged Edge(US)) -John Christopher - Civilization destroyed by massive worldwide earthquakes
 * The 1966 novel The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard Jungle in Africa starts to crystallize all life and expands outward
 * The 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, which was made into a 1973 film Soylent Green directed by Richard Fleischer, showing a world where humanity had become massively overpopulated, and a vague ecological disaster is creating a growing dust bowl, and the entire economy is collapsing.
 * The 1969 novel The Ice Schooner by Michael Moorcock which is set in a new ice age on earth
 * The 1972 novel The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, in which the United States is overwhelmed by environmental irresponsibility and authoritarianism.
 * The 1972 novel The End Of The Dream by Philip Wylie.
 * The 1973 novel The Bridge by D. Keith Mano presents a world dominated by a global environmental fascism, where the government ultimately promotes the extinction of the human race by enforced mass suicide, so as to ‘save’ the environment.
 * The 1976 novel The HAB Theory by Allan W. Eckert, in which the stability of the Earth comes into question.
 * The 1976 novel The Winter of the World by Poul Anderson, in which civilization and a new species has emerged from a deadly Ice Age that has destroyed all previous life.
 * The 1981 novel The Quiet Earth written by Craig Harrison and the film adaption by the same name
 * The 1983 novel The Last Gasp by Trevor Hoyle
 * The 1984 novel In the Drift by Michael Swanwick (also an alternate history story), in which the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor incident resulted in a very large release of radioactivity, devastating the Northeastern U.S.
 * The 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, in which the dystopia is fueled by rampant infertility caused by pollution.
 * The 1986 novel Nature's End by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka.
 * The 1989 novel Stark by Ben Elton.
 * The 1991 novel Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn, in which space-based civilization exists despite the government's wishes during an ice age.
 * The 1993 novel The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk
 * The 1993 novel Deus X by Norman Spinrad, the results of global warming
 * The 1993 novel This Other Eden by Ben Elton in which the earths population is forced to live in Biodomes for 50 years while the environment recovers from mankind's actions.
 * The 1995 novel Mother of Storms by John Barnes - where a tactical nuclear strike in the North Pacific releases massive amounts of methane, spawning worldwide super hurricanes.
 * The 1995 novel Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason in which a microbe consumes all materials based on petroleum.
 * The 1998 novel Aftermath by Charles Sheffield, in which Alpha Centauri goes supernova and causes cataclysmic climate change
 * The 1998 novel Dust by Charles Pellegrino, in which all the insect species on Earth die out, and the ecology crashes as a result
 * The 1999 novel The Rift by Walter Jon Williams.
 * The 2003 novel Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
 * The 2003 novel Clade by Mark Budz
 * The 2003 novel The Secret Under My Skin by Janet Mcnaughton, set in a period following a technocaust, when scientists were blamed for environmental disasters and taken to concentration camps.
 * The 2004 novel Crache by Mark Budz
 * The 2004 novel The Snow by Adam Roberts, in which the world is buried under kilometres of unnatural snow.
 * The 2005 novel First Ark to Alpha Centauri by Abdul Ahad, in which world governments in the 23rd century build and launch a 12-mile long generation starship to Alpha Centauri to escape a global Ice Age threatening the future of humanity.
 * The 2006 novel Small-Minded Giants by Oisín McGann
 * The 2006 novel Return by Clayton J Elliott - in which ecological and social unrest leave a world fighting to find a new relationship to the earth. An anti-technology novel
 * The novels Children of Morrow and Treasures of Morrow by H. M. Hoover, set in California several centuries after pollution all but wiped out the human race
 * The novel trilogy Snowfall by Mitchell Smith (Snowfall, Kingdom River, and Moonrise) in which North America has retreated into hunter-gatherer societies and military kingdoms some 500 years after an apocalyptic ice age.
 * The novels Mara and Dann, Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter by Doris Lessing Set in a future ice age. Other Lessing novels like Memoirs of a Survivor and Shikasta deal with apocalyptic themes.
 * The Greatwinter trilogy in which an ancient whale species recreated through a genetic experiment turns out to have been telepathic, and the whales issue a telepathic call which cause most of humanity and other large land mammals to walk into the oceans and drown.
 * The 2008 novel Flood by Stephen Baxter, Huge underground oceans start leaking to the surface, lifting sea levels by thousands of metres over several decades.
 * The 2008 novel Mai Shangri-La by Robert J. Rubis(Amazon) in 2030 climate has "flipped", world sea-levels have risen 7 meters, and the survivors struggle to fashion new lives from the remnants of industrialized society.
 * The 2009 novel The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, in future Thailand, calories are the most needed energy source, a unexpected girl struggles to live like as she wants.
 * The 2010 novel Drain by Davis Schneiderman, where Lake Michigan empties of water, mysteriously, and a end-of-time cult occupies the lakebed, waiting for a reflooding of the zone by the power of giant Worm.

Television

 * The 1970 Dr Who serial Inferno in which attempts to tap the Earths core for power leads to a volcanic apocalypse.
 * The 1971 TV series Timeslip The Year of the Burn Up  - Terraforming causes global warming
 * The 1976–1979 TV series Ark II - pollution devastates humanity
 * The 1981 adaptation of The Day of the Triffids based on the book by John Wyndham
 * The 1993 animated series Cadillacs and Dinosaurs
 * The 1998–1999 anime series Cowboy Bebop in which a man made disaster has caused earth's moon to fragment, resulting in a constant rain of meteor strikes on the planet and forcing humanity to move out into the solar system.
 * The 2003 television movie Encrypt
 * The 2004 television movie  Day of Destruction where Chicago is suffering from a series of tornadoes from numerous changes occurring in the climate. This series was followed in 2005 by The End of the World
 * The 2004 mini series 10.5 and its 2006 follow up 10.5: Apocalypse In which a series of Earthquakes tears America apart, separating the West Coast from the rest of the USA.
 * The 2006 Anime series Innocent Venus Set after the world population and economy is devastated by simultaneous hyper-hurricanes.
 * The Captain Planet two-parter Two Futures, in which the character Wheeler gets a glimpse of what could happen if damage to the environment was allowed to continue unchecked
 * The 2008 Doctor Who episode "The Poison Sky"
 * The 2009 ABC Special Earth 2100 explore the future if humans do not take actions to help the eco-system that can prove to be disastrous. Lucy, the speaker, explains about this world and wonders how she was one of the lucky humans to have survived.

Other

 * The 1952 short story The Birds by Daphne du Maurier, made into the 1963 film The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock - in which birds begin launching spontaneous mass attacks against mankind
 * The 1973 collection of short stories Flight of the Horse by Larry Niven
 * The 1977 short story The Screwfly Solution tells the tale of a virus which turns males into female-hating psychopaths when sexually aroused.
 * The 1986 short story The End of the Whole Mess by Stephen King in which a distillate of a Texas aquifer, originally harvested and distributed worldwide to reduce human propensity for violence—curses humanity with premature Alzheimer's disease and senility.
 * The 1993 console game Secret of Mana takes place long after a time of environmental collapse that destroyed the world's older advanced civilizations.
 * The 1994 console game Final Fantasy VI (named Final Fantasy III during initial American launch of the game) features a plot twist in where villain Kefka moves magical statues out of their intended alignment, which in turn causes the balanced fictional world to fall into ruin (and for Kefka to become its new god while protected by the powers of the same statues).
 * The 1994–2006 Japanese manga series Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, set in a peaceful post-cataclysmic Japan, after an untold environmental disaster.
 * The 2002 video game The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, in which a flood has decimated the fictional world of Hyrule.
 * The 2002–2003 anime series Overman King Gainer, which depicts humanity living in domes after an ecological disaster.
 * The 2005 short story The Garden Where My Rains Grows by Brian Keene, set in a post-apocalyptic world where it started raining one day and never stopped.
 * The 2005–2006 anime series Zoids: Genesis where an earthquake triggers a series of worldwide natural disasters that devastate Planet Zi.
 * The 2005–present radio sitcom Nebulous by Graham Duff, in which much of the world was destroyed by an event known as "the Withering".
 * The 2006 anime series Ergo Proxy by the Japanese production company Manglobe, in which an undefined global ecological disaster has decimated the surface of the Earth, and the small remaining human population lives in isolated, city-state dome complexes.
 * The 2006 PC game, Battlefield 2142, in which a new ice age renders most of the Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable. Wars are fought over the remaining habitable land.
 * The Command & Conquer: Tiberian series of games in which a radioactive, self-replicating alien crystal known as Tiberium has rendered most of the Earth's surface uninhabitable.
 * The game Dark Sun from TSR
 * The Game Darkwind: War on Wheels
 * The 2001 console game "Final Fantasy X", where an advanced civilization is destroyed by a supernatural being, causing a perpetuating cycle of destruction and temporary peace through a millennium, and causing the rest of the game's world to live a technologically backwards life.

Film

 * The 1965 film Alphaville
 * The 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project
 * The 1984–2009 Terminator series
 * The 1985 animated film Starchaser: The Legend of Orin
 * The 1989 film Gunhed or Ganheddo
 * The 1989 film Moontrap
 * The 1992 film American Cyborg: Steel Warrior
 * The 1995 film Screamers
 * The 1996 film Omega Doom
 * The 1999–2003 Matrix series
 * The 2003 animated film Galerians: Rion
 * The 2004 film I, Robot
 * The 2004 film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
 * The 2005 animated short 9 and its adaptation (see below)
 * The 2007 animated film Meet the Robinsons
 * The 2009 animated film 9

Literature

 * The 1872 novel Erewhon's section The Book of Machines
 * The 1909 short story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (emphasizing machinery instead of computers)
 * The 1919 story The Mind Machine by Michael Williams
 * The 1921 play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, notable for coining the term 'robot'.
 * The 1926 story The Metal Giants by Edmond Hamilton
 * The 1929 story Automata by S. Fowler Wright
 * The 1931 short story The War of the Giants by Fletcher Pratt
 * The 1934 short story Rex by Harl Vincent
 * The 1935 short story Nightmare Number Three by Stephen Vincent Benet
 * The 1947 short story With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson
 * The 1948 short story The Brain by Alexander Blade
 * The 1951 The Last Revolution short story by Lord Dunsany
 * The 1954 short story Slaves To The Metal Horde by Milton Lesser
 * The 1954 short story Answer by Fredric Brown
 * The 1963 comic books series Magnus by Gold Key Comics
 * The 1966 novel Colossus by Dennis Feltham Jones
 * The 1967–2005 Berserker series by Fred Saberhagen
 * The 1967 short story I Have No Mouth by Harlan Ellison
 * The 1967 The Cyberiad is a series of short stories by Stanisław Lem
 * The 1968 novel The God Machine by Martin Caidin
 * The 1969 novel Plan for Conquest by A.A. Glynn
 * The 1971 Moderan series by David R. Bunch
 * The 1972 novel Night of the Robots (aka Regiments of Night) by Brian N. Ball
 * The 1973 short story "Trucks" by Stephen King
 * The 1981 novel Robot Revolt by Nicholas Fisk
 * The 1981 Uncanny X-Men story arc, "Days of Future Past" by Chris Claremont & John Byrne
 * The 1985 novel The Adolescence of P-1 by Thomas J. Ryan
 * The 1989 short story La Rebelión de los Robots in Spanish by Alberto I. Balcells
 * The 1993 novel Computer One by Warwick Collins
 * The 1994 novel The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams
 * The 1995 Comics Tales of the Jedi: Dark Lords of the Sith Great Droid Revolution
 * The 1996 short story from Star Wars saga Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88 by Kevin J. Anderson
 * The 1977–1996 Galaxy Express 999 manga series
 * The 2003 Robota an illustrated book by Doug Chiang and Orson Scott Card
 * The 2002–2004 Legends Of Dune trilogy (part of the Dune universe)
 * The 2002 novel Dune: The Butlerian Jihad by Kevin J. Anderson
 * The 2003 novel Dune: The Machine Crusade by Kevin J. Anderson
 * The 2004 novel Dune: The Battle of Corrin by Kevin J. Anderson


 * The 2003 The Matrix comic books
 * The 2004 manga Deus Vitae a series created by Takuya Fujima
 * The 2005 book How to Survive a Robot Uprising a semi-satirical book by Daniel H. Wilson
 * The 2005–2007 Lego Exo-Force comics and books

Gaming

 * Earthsiege and sequels, from Sierra Entertainment.
 * Neuroshima, the Polish role-playing game from Portal Publishing.
 * I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream from Cyberdreams
 * GURPS Reign of Steel a setting for the GURPS role playing system.
 * Mega Man X series, a video game series created by Capcom and Keiji Inafune
 * ''Robotron 2084 created by Williams
 * Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun's expansion pack Firestorm from Westwood Studios.
 * Deus Ex, which features, as part of its plot, a conflict between a Friendly AI and a non-friendly one
 * System Shock by Looking Glass Technologies and its sequel System Shock 2, which also incorporates elements from Alien invasion theory.
 * Galerians a PlayStation video game developed by Polygon Magic
 * Descent 3 a PC game developed by Outrage Entertainment, which explains that mostly mining robots attacked by an unknown virus and now attacking people.
 * the Choose Your Own Adventure book The Computer Takeover by Edward Packard
 * The Mechanoid Invasion (and its source books, supplements and sequels) was the first role-playing game from Palladium Books, conceived and written by Kevin Siembieda.
 * Splicers a role-playing game set in the midst of a war between humans and a worldwide computer intelligence.
 * Gunlok is a squad based action adventure computer game developed by Rebellion.
 * Planetarian: Chiisana Hoshi no Yume is a Japanese post-apocalyptic visual novel and video game.
 * KKND2: Krossfire is the sequel to KKnD, as part of its plot, Series 9 are advanced farming robots that have taken it unto themselves to destroy all life.
 * Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel as part of its plot, the AI Calculator a fusion of computers and human brains sent army of robots to attack the world.
 * Too Human an Xbox 360 video game by Canadian developer Silicon Knights.
 * Red Alarm a game for the Nintendo Virtual Boy video game console.
 * Rise of the Robots a fighting game
 * Vertical Force a vertical shoot-em-up scroller game, with two layers for Nintendo's Virtual Boy video game system.
 * RayForce, a Japanese scrolling shooter arcade game.
 * RayCrisis, a prequel to RayForce.
 * Toxic and Toxic 2, a flash game by Nitrome Limited about a character in a yellow hazmat suit attempting to free the world from a race of robots with a variety of bombs.
 * Outlive, a real-time strategy. Earth created robotic lifeforms allegedly to mine Titan's resources, though in reality they were to be used as a secret army. When the plan surfaced, the World Council lost power but the robots returned and occupied the planet in the name of their creators.
 * Mass Effect, an RPG/action game. The Quarians accidentally created AI by upgrading their robotic servants until they gained sentience. On realizing their mistake they attempted to destroy the Geth but were ultimately defeated and driven from their homeworlds.

Music

 * The Flight of the Conchords song "Humans Are Dead"
 * the Hazel O'Connor song The Eighth Day
 * The 1998 Fear Factory album Obsolete
 * The Tokyo Police Club song "Citizens of Tomorrow"
 * The self-titled album by The Protomen.

The decline and fall of the human race

 * The latter part of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895)
 * The 1939 cartoon short Peace on Earth by Hugh Harman, in which animals rebuild a post-apocalyptic world after humanity has fought wars to the point of extinction.
 * The novel At Winter's End (1988) by Robert Silverberg
 * The poem Bedtime Story from Collected Poems 1958–1970 by George Macbeth
 * Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series
 * The novel The Camp of the Saints (1973) by Jean Raspail.
 * The novel The Bridge (1973) by D. Keith Mano presents a world dominated by a global environmental fascism, where the government ultimately promotes the extinction of the human race by enforced mass suicide, so as to ‘save’ the environment.
 * Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End
 * The novel City (1952) by Clifford D. Simak
 * Friday by Robert A. Heinlein, which portrays human society on a future Earth as slipping into a gradual, but inevitable, collapse.
 * Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut. After an ambiguous eradication of the human species, several people on a cruise to the Galápagos Islands get stranded there. Much to the dismay of the only male left, the women of the island continue the human species for thousands of years where they evolve into seal-like creatures.
 * Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
 * The 1974 John Boorman film Zardoz
 * The Japanese manga Biomega, NOiSE, Blame! and Net Sphere Engineer by Tsutomu Nihei
 * The Japanese manga and anime The Big O, where humans apparently suffered mass amnesia 40 years prior and are afraid to leave their city, Paradigm. It is a sort of mecha/apocalypse subclass of its own; the protagonist has to battle mechanical beings and other robots who are trying to destroy the remnants of the human race.
 * The Cartoon Network/Adult Swim animated parody of the barbarian/post-apocalyptic genres, Korgoth of Barbaria
 * The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King
 * The 1979 Australian movie Mad Max depicts a declining civilization.
 * Michael Haneke's film Le Temps du Loup (The Time of the Wolf), following a family through the (French?) country side after an undefined catastrophic collapse of civilization.
 * The movie A.I. depicts human extinction after 2000 years.
 * The manga/anime series Wolf's Rain takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where constant conflicts between nobles leaves whole parts of the earth uninhabited, cities in ruins, and technology rare. Only the nobles possess futuristic ships, and the richest have domed cities where the debilitated earth can still support life. A second apocalypse ends the series, with a presumable renewing of the planet.
 * The song In the Year 2525 by Zager and Evans, which describes, stage by stage, the decline of the human race. Covers the 26th, 36th, 46th, 56th, 66th, 76th, 86th and 96th centuries.
 * The television series The Future Is Wild, which uses computer animation to simulate the sort of creatures that may evolve from present-day animals. In the world depicted in the series, the human race either has become extinct or has left Earth. The reason is not given.
 * The short story "To Serve The Master" By Philip K. Dick
 * The 2006 film Children of Men, where the human race has become infertile.
 * The 1984 film 1990:The Bronx Warriors In 1990 the Bronx is declared a No Mans Land after a catastrophic uprising.
 * The 1997 film The End of Evangelion, in which all humankind are reverted to a "primordial soup" and merged into a single consummate being.
 * The The House of the Dead series of video games. Scientist Dr. Curien finds a way to reanimate the dead, though not without disastrous results.  Later in the series' timeline, Caleb Goldman uses the undead in his mission to destroy the human race and protect the Earth from further destruction by humans.
 * The 2006 novel Return by Clayton J Elliott - in which ecological and social unrest leave a world fighting to find a new relationship to the earth. An anti-technology novel.
 * The 2007 film Tooth and Nail Post-apocalyptic movie where a group of survivors, called Foragers, take cover in an old abandoned hospital where the group attempt to re build society. All we know of the apocalypse is that man "Ran out of gas", but not in the sense of oil, just that our time was up.
 * The 2001 video game Pikmin and its sequel, the 2004 video game Pikmin 2, is set on an unnamed planet simply called as the planet of the Pikmins, habited by animals and plants. Although it is unnamed in-game, several cutscenes shows it as Earth, or at least a very Earth-like planet. Further hints is man-made objects in both games like the Abstract Masterpiece, a bottle cap, and the Remembered Old Buddy, a R.O.B., as well as the stage based on the Pikmin planet in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Distant Planet, which its data refers to as Earth.
 * The 2004 film Idiocracy takes the premise that with no natural predators to thin the population of the world, evolution simply rewards whoever can pass on their genes the fastest, who are depicted as sexually promiscuous drunken brutes. The average IQ is 80 by 2100, 60 by 2200, and 40 by 2505.

Monsters and biologically altered humans
See also Zombie apocalypse

After the fall of space-based civilization

 * Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke
 * Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda series
 * Yukito Kishiro's Battle Angel Alita
 * The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
 * The Dragon Masters, by Jack Vance
 * Dan Simmons's Endymion & The Rise of Endymion
 * ''The Mote in God's Eye by Niven & Pournelle
 * Yasuhiro Nightow's Trigun
 * The PlayStation video game Xenogears
 * Red Dwarf, the British Science-Fiction Sitcom
 * Star Man's Son 2250 A.D. by Andre Norton
 * Transfusion by Chad Oliver
 * Larry Niven's Ringworld, an expedition from earth to find a futuristic planet, a ring surrounding a star, results in the members finding that a meteor puncture in the ring's floor and power failure caused the cities to break apart and civilization to collapse.
 * The Last Legionary series by Douglas Hill, in which a lone soldier fights to bring down the organisation which unleashed a deadly radiation against his planet, killing all his people and rendering the planet uninhabitable.
 * The computer game Supreme Commander is set at the end of a thousand year long war, called the infinite war, between two separate factions of humans and a race of cyborgs.
 * Homeworld- a small human civilization on the desert planet of Kharak on the edge of the galaxy is brought to the brink of extinction for violating a forgotten 5000-year old treaty forbidding them from developing hyperspace technology. The survivors, however, are fortunate to have the use of the recently-completed Mothership - a large colony vessel meant to take them back to their ancient and forgotten homeworld near the center of the galaxy, Hiigara.  The game was succeeded by sequels Homeworld: Cataclysm and Homeworld 2.
 * Space Viking by H. Beam Piper.
 * Resurrection Planet by Lucas Cole. The Second Coming has brought peace on Earth, but the Revived Roman Empire still exists in the outer universe and, as it prepares for one last counterstrike against the Messiah, it desperately needs to maintain ore mining on distant province Sybaris.  Seemingly the last refuge for evil, Sybaris is a place where the "dead do not stay dead for long."  A 'facilitator' is dispatched to investigate—and subdue—the deadhead uprising, if it truly exists.  This novel is possibly the first to directly link its plot to the Millenium—the rule of the Messiah on "Old Earth."

Expanding or Dying Sun

 * The 1895 novel The Time Machine. Towards the end of the book The Time Traveler witnesses the Suns expansion, causing the death of all life on Earth.
 * The 1912 novel The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, in which the Sun burns out and the last of humanity is sheltered in an arcology from the hostile environment and the creatures adapted for it.
 * The 1945 short story Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke
 * The 1971 short story Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven.
 * The 1974 film Where Have All The People Gone? A solar flare destroys virtually all of the human population. One family has survived, and endeavours to travel across America to their family home.
 * The 1976 novel A World Out of Time by Larry Niven
 * The 1980 novel The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe Followed by The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1981), The Citadel of the Autarch (1982), and The Urth of the New Sun (1987).
 * The 1981 novel The Quiet Earth by Craig Harrison Adapted into the 1985 movie of the same name.
 * The episode "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars", of J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5
 * The episode "The End of the World", of the television series Doctor Who
 * The novel Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke in which the last survivors of Earth arrive at a distant colony unexpectedly.
 * The comic series Just a Pilgrim by Garth Ennis
 * The video game "Tetris Worlds"
 * The poem "Darkness" by Lord Byron describes the end of life on earth after the sun's extinction.
 * The movie "Last Night" by Don McKellar, which follows the lives of several individuals as they cope with their final six hours on Earth before the apparent incineration of the Earth by the sun (the cause of the apocalypse is never directly stated).
 * The short story "Finis" by Frank Lillie Pollock where a second sun's light incinerates the Earth.
 * The 2007 movie, Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle. The film follows a spaceship crew in the year 2057 who are tasked with reigniting Earth's dying sun.
 * The 2009 movie, "Knowing" tells of a story where the end of the world, caused by a solar flare erupting onto the solar system, is accurately predicted.

Religious and supernatural apocalypse (Eschatological fiction)

 * The 1908 novel Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson.
 * The 1953 short story The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke, taken from the short story collection of the same name.
 * The 2009 apocalyptic fiction series Dominion by Compasse, a supernatural thriller with religious and geopolitical themes. Through seven books, 'the secret language of music has been discovered', and becomes a powerful force in this end-times scenario. Published by Sacrata Dei Press.
 * The evangelical Christian film series 1972 A Thief in the Night, sometimes referred to as the Mark IV films.
 * A series of films made in the 1990s and 2000s by Cloud Ten Pictures
 * The young adult book series Countdown by Daniel Parker, in which a demon wipes out the entire human population save for teenagers.
 * The Deadlands: Hell on Earth role-playing game, in which the Earth is reduced to a haunted, radioactive wasteland as a result of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ravaging the planet shortly after an eldritch nuclear war.
 * The End of the Age, by Pat Robertson
 * The book and film series Left Behind, concerning the Rapture.
 * The novels Black Easter and The Day After Judgment by James Blish, in which a black magician brings about the end of the world by releasing all the demons from Hell.
 * The Power of Five series by Anthony Horowitz
 * 1995. The sci-fi anime Neon Genesis Evangelion in which mankind's unearthing of a being known as Adam brings about Second Impact, a catastrophic shockwave which destroys Antarctica and subsequently leads to the extinction of thousands of organisms, the destruction of much of the civilized world, and the deaths of billions. Millions more die from the social and economic troubles which follow this impact and the ensuing wars.
 * 2007-Ongoing . Rebuild of Evangelion- remake of the anime series. The first of the four films, Evangelion: 1.0- You are [Not] Alone, debuted in 2007, with the second part, 2.0- You Shall (Not) Advance, debuting in 2009.
 * The film The Rapture (1991)
 * The 1989 novel The Dead, by Mark E. Rogers. Combines themes of the rapture and zombies.
 * The zombie novels The Rising and its sequel City of the Dead by Brian Keene. Rather than the zombies being an infection, as in most zombie fiction; these zombies are reanimated by demonic entities, the sisquisim, from the Old Testament.
 * Brian Keene has also written The Conqueror Worms which is a very Lovecraftian tale of one of the last survivors on earth. In the novel, the world floods causing several monsters appear, mainly gigantic, maneating earthworms.
 * The novel Shade's Children by Garth Nix, in which a group of extradimensional beings invade earth and cause all human adults to vanish.
 * The manga and subsequent anime movies and TV series Silent Möbius by Kia Asamiya. The story is set in a Blade Runner-style world which has been invaded by demonic beings.
 * The novel The Taking, by Dean Koontz in which a malevolent demonic force kills off the majority of the human race.
 * John Shirley's 2000 novel Demons revolves around a demonic invasion of Earth.
 * The Third Millennium (1995) and The Fourth Mellennium (1996), by Paul Meier
 * The Tribe 8 role-playing game, in which sadistic demons invade (and conquer) the Earth.
 * The Clamp anime X/1999 in which the seven Dragons of Heaven battle the Dragons of Earth to save the world.
 * Hellgate: London – computer game released in 2007, where demons and humans are in constant struggle on earth.
 * The Doom series of computer games, in which demons invade a human base on Phobos (changed to Mars in Doom 3) and then move on to Earth.
 * The 2006 film Pulse and its 2009 sequel Pulse 2: Afterlife.
 * The Shadow of Yesterday role-playing game, in which the unification of all people in a fantasy world under a single, supernatural language results in the destruction of a world by what is presumed to be an asteroid that becomes that world's new moon, one that eclipses the sun for a week out of each month.

Unspecified phenomena

 * The 1885 novel After London by 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 1914 novel Darkness and Dawn by George Allan England, in which two characters wake from suspended animation and find that some great disaster has torn an enormous chasm in the Earth and created a second moon.
 * The Starlost is a Canadian-produced science fiction television series devised by writer Harlan Ellison and broadcast in 1973 on CTV in Canada and on NBC in the United States.
 * The 1975 novel Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany.
 * The 1978 short story "Trucks" by Stephen King. An unknown phenomenon makes Earth's machines turn against mankind. It was later made into the movie Maximum Overdrive which added an alien invasion subplot.
 * The 1978 novel "False Dawn" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Two humans searching for a way to survive in toxic wasteland.  Republished in 2001.
 * The 1985 picture book Baaa by David Macaulay, in which the human race has somehow gone extinct, leaving sheep to take over the world. The sheep's civilization winds up displaying the same array of economic troubles, overpopulation, and crime, and after a while they too become extinct.
 * The Dayworld series by Philip Jose Farmer, in which the reasons for the Dayworld dystopia seems to be a combination involving overpopulation, ecological catastrophe, some sort of disaster that rendered petroleum unusable, and World War III. This is hinted at in the second book, Dayworld Rebel.
 * The 1987 novel In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster.
 * The 1994 novel Vanishing Point by Michaela Roessner. Life in Silicon Valley 30 years after the mysterious and spontaneous disappearance of 90% of the world's population. The Winchester Mystery House ("The House") serves as a focal point for parallel universes and inexplicable energies that are changing the world and its post-Vanishing children.
 * The Emberverse series novels by S. M. Stirling, in which a disaster of indeterminate cause (most speculation within the novels concerns an all-powerful outside force, often facetiously referred to as "Alien space bats") causes electricity, combustion engines, and modern explosives to cease functioning.
 * The series of novels set in the world of Wraeththu by Storm Constantine, in which humanity is replaced as the planet's dominant species by a race of mystic hermaphrodites. War and plague ravage the human population, but no single cause is specified.
 * The 1988 novel Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan, set in a cyberpunk world following a vaguely described natural cataclysm.
 * Ongoing comic series Wasteland takes place roughly 100 years in the future, where North America is a dustbowl and lacking modern technology.
 * The 1997 movie Alien Resurrection features a deleted scene (restored to the film in the Alien Quadrilogy box set) in which Ripley and the other survivors land the Auriga in a devastated Paris. The cause of the destruction is never made clear, but presumably there was a war.
 * The 2006 film Android Apocalypse, cause of apocalypse unknown
 * The 2006 video game Mother 3, in which a small group of humans escape to a post-apocalyptic utopia after the "old world" is destroyed. While the game never explains what happened to the "old world", they say that the humans were the ones that caused its destruction.
 * The 2006 novel Guardando la fine del mondo by Riccardo Deias, set in alternative world and time... link to year 2012.
 * The 2006 novel "Night Work" by Thomas Glavinic, in which a man wakes up to find that everyone else has disappeared.
 * The 2009 film The Road, based on the 2006 novel of the same name.
 * Desolation: Post Apocalyptic Fantasy Roleplaying, a 2008 RPG from Greymalkin Designs.
 * The 2004 Flash movie "Salad Fingers" (although a 'great war' is mentioned, it may not be the cause of Salad Fingers' dwelling being in a dilapidated, post-apocalyptic state)
 * The 2009 album "Songs From The Floodplain" by Jon Boden
 * The 2009 French film Les derniers jours du monde epicts the story of a man, Robinson, who travels across France and Spain during the end of the world.
 * The 2008 TV documentary film, Life after People, and the spin-off, Life After People: The Series, document life on earth where the human race had gone extinct. The shows doesn't mention on a cause of the extinction of humans.