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After The End
Narrator: The world was plunged into an abyss of nuclear fire and radiation... but it was not, as some had predicted, the end of the world. Instead, the apocalypse was simply the prologue to another bloody chapter of human history. For man had succeeded in destroying the world. But war... war never changes.
-Fallout 3 Introduction

5 out of 6 of our shows agree the Earth sucks in the future.
-Adult Swim

Something hugely nasty has happened to humanity. Be it nuclear war (which was once very popular but has gone out of vogue, in part due to The Great Politics Mess Up), plague (which currently seems to be the most popular), or Alien Invasion — most of humanity is gone.

The result is generally that you have the remnants of humanity either fighting to survive or trying to escape to somewhere else.

Often results in a Scavenger World full of Ghost Cities, or at least plenty of Schizo Tech and Lost Technology, maybe even Weird Science. People inevitably degrade down to Disaster Scavengers and Crazy Survivalists.

If you're really lucky you may get a Cosy Catastrophe, in which case its best to be friendly and humane, but also adaptable and brave. Actually that's not a bad personality in real life.

If things have started to recover, may result in a Divided States Of America, a Dystopia struggling to survive, or a Days Of Future Past with a Future Imperfect attempt to recreate happier times.

In any post-apocalyptic story set after the release of Mad Max, it is almost assured that the obvious and natural way for the world to look after a civilization-destroying cataclysm is "the Australian Outback". There is no need to explain this. Global catastrophe turns the world into Australia. It just follows logically.

Related, if not quite the same, is the period immediately after the fall of Rome; most Film and TV set in this time tend to depict it as a time of post-apocalyptic savagery. In fact, while there was a significant increase in banditry and piracy, most areas were peaceful most of the time.

Compare Just Before The End, End Of An Age, And Man Grew Proud.

Examples:

Live Action TV
  • Battlestar Galactica
    • Doubly so in the 2000s version.
  • Jeremiah
  • Jericho
  • Survivors
  • Whoops
  • Ark II
  • Red Dwarf, though it diverges wildly, being, not after the end of Earth, but after everyone on the spaceship Red Dwarf died, except Lister, who was in stasis. Since it's 3 million years after, the characters assume that all other humans are deceased.
    • The first episode was actually titled "The End". Take that as you will.
  • The Starlost takes place on a generation ship launched from an Earth that was destroyed by some unspecified disaster shortly afterward.
  • Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry made together three separate pilot movies for essentially the same series premise: Genesis II, Planet Earth, and Strange New World.
  • Star Trek itself could be considered an "After The After The End" story - centuries before the show, humans almost destroyed themselves in a nuclear war, but then climbed their way back up to become greater than they were before.
  • Two American TV movies made in the early 80s, Testament and The Day After, both attempted to dramatize the horrors of a nuclear war and its aftermath in as realistic a fashion as possible.
  • The UK equivalents are The War Game (1965, broadcast 1985) and Threads (1984). Both build up to and feature a full-scale thermonuclear holocaust, then - Threads in particular - keep going and get worse.
    • Threads continues to scare those who watched it almost 25 years ago.
  • Cleopatra 2525.
  • The fourth season finale of Babylon Five shows Earth being bombed back into the Dark Ages about 500 years after the end of the series only to emerge as Vorlon-like creatures a million years later.

Western Animation
  • The Flintstones is debated whether the characters are truly prehistoric or post-apocalyptic, trying to mimick past modern conveniences.
  • Ralph Bakshi's Wizards.
  • Surprisingly common in Saturday morning adventure series intended for children:
  • Parodied in Futurama, in which Fry, believing that he has somehow been frozen for another thousand years, finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world; as it turns out, it's just contemporary Los Angeles.
    • Note that in Fry's first millennium freeze, aliens in flying saucers came and leveled civilization on Earth, from which it rose again. Twice! One of which was apparently time-traveling Bender's fault.
  • Titan AE mostly takes place after Earth was blown up by aliens, and humans are a minority searching for a home in the vastness of space.

Anime

Film
  • The Matrix
  • The Land Before Time is, in fact, After The End for the dinosaurs, although whether or not it's their final extinction is never made clear.
    • The too-numerous-to-count direct-to-video sequels would suggest that it's not for the universe's lack of trying, considering everything it's thrown at them so far.
  • The Disney film Dinosaur is similar, and is clear on the subject, explicitly showing the meteors falling.
  • Planet Of The Apes, and the various sequels and TV series based off it.
  • Equilibrium
  • Mad Max and its sequels.
  • Nearly any zombie movie franchise with enough sequels will eventually have an "after the apocalypse" sequel. Day Of The Dead, Land Of The Dead, Resident Evil: Extinction, and presumably any future sequels to 28 Weeks Later
  • WALL-E (They recover by the end credits.)
  • Children of Men
  • Waterworld
  • Cyborg
  • In Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, much of the earth has been reduced to a desolate wasteland by a nuclear holocaust, inhabited by mutants. The surviving humans (or rather, their descendants) live in isolated, hi-tech cities. In the TV series that followed, however, the Earth was depicted as being much more hospitable.
  • Taken to an extreme in The Time Machine where Alexander travels to the year 802701, where humanity has started over and split into the normal-looking Eloi and the savage Morloks, and then again to the year 635427810, where the latter has taken over the planet.
  • The second half of the 1984 nuclear war drama "Threads" takes place in a nuclear wasteland - post-apocalypse England, which is populated mostly by ill and dying people, people scared to the point of total paranoia, and corrupt military and government officials. The narrator implies that things are MUCH worse in the US and Russia. Eventually the film fast-forwards to 10 years after the nuclear war, where the new generation is made up of thuggish, possibly retarded teenagers and sickly, often insane adults. And it's implied there may not be a generation after that as a girl's reaction to the baby she's just delivered suggests that it's horribly deformed.

Video Games
  • The sequels to the video game Half Life take place on an Earth devastated by alien invasion.
  • Fallout and its sequels take place in a world that's been ravaged by global thermo-nuclear war. Most of the world is a desolate wasteland, and of the few places that haven't been destroyed most are either highly toxic, radioactive, or inhabited by the worst scum of humanity. See the quote at the top of the page.
  • The House Of The Dead III takes place after the "world collapse", a Zombie Apocalypse brought about by The Virus thought to be unleashed by EFI.
  • The second half of Final Fantasy VI, which completely alters the world map and jumps forward a year in time...not to mention having one of the most depressing 2D cinematics of all time.
    • Technically, Final Fantasy VI goes through this twice: the War of the Magi, set long before the start of the game, ripped the world apart so badly it took mankind 1000 years just to rediscover steam.
  • Advance Wars: Days Of Ruin (AW: Dark Conflict in Europe) takes place after a meteor storm that wiped most of mankind.
  • The Visual Novel Planetarian takes place in a future world that is slowly dying after a devastating war that killed off most of humanity.
  • The Shin Megami Tensei Series all takes place after the end of the world, for the most part. The nuclear apocalypse occurs about a fourth of the way through the first game When God sends Thor to own Japan.
    • Shin Megami Tensei: Nocture starts the game by ending the world. You spend the rest of the game rebuilding it in your image.
  • Deus Ex: Invisible War takes place 20 years after the Great Collapse triggered by JC Denton, yet in that time, civilization has returned to its pre-collapse level. See Apocalypse Not.
  • Happens so many times in the original Mega Man timeline that eventually people stop keeping track.
    • Actually, no. The X and Zero series, while Darker And Edgier, were definitely not After The End. The ZX series takes place in a world that's actually recovered from the crap the last two series went through for the most part, and the only real one could be said to be Legends, and and even that one is questionable. A REAL After The End is shown in Star Force 2 with the Apollo Flame "second quest", where Geo discovers an alternate universe which demonstrates what would have happened if Lady Vega's plans had actually succeeded. And it's probably the darkest in the entire series, par none, considering every human on the planet has been killed off. The HSQ goes straight through the roof here.
  • Homeworld
  • 2300 A.D. in Chrono Trigger.
  • Phantasy Star III and Phantasy Star IV do this. It's heavily disguised in III, but it becomes apparent relatively early in IV.
  • Etrian Odyssey is established as being one of these in the intro... but the exact nature of the world Before The End is intentionally left vague at first.
  • Mother 3, though you wouldn't think so until a certain plot twist.
  • Between Halo 2 and 3 the Covenant have captured and laid waste to Earth in their search for the Ark.
  • The Post-Apocalypse era after the aliens created a Temporal Paradox and brought about The End Of The World As We Know It in Duke Nukem: Zero Hour.
Literature
  • Novel examples include Alas Babylon, by Pat Frank, and Stephen King's The Stand and Cell. All three of these open right before something world-endingly nasty occurs (nuclear war, viral bioweapon, and mysterious cell-phone-transmitted brainwipe, respectively).
    • Robert Mc Cammon's Swan Song is yet another post-apocalyptic novel with fantasy/horror underpinnings.
  • Another example by Stephen King would be The Dark Tower novels, whose world has been devastated so many times in so many different eras that reality itself is starting to break down. This trope is largely present in the final book, when Roland ventures into the tower, and King tells the reader they can finish there, or continue on. The "after-ending" involves Roland going all the way back to near the beginning of his quest, but this time, he has the knowledge (and a certain item) to finally complete his quest.
  • More fantasy-oriented novels include Hiero's Journey and The Unforsaken Hiero by Sterling Lanier, Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, and Starman's Son (a.k.a. Daybreak - 2250 A.D.) by Andre Norton (all of which were credited as influences of the RPG Gamma World).
  • Another early example is Earth Abides, by George Stewart.
  • The Tripod series by John Christopher deals with a post-alien invasion future where the only humans not turned into zombie-like slaves are young children.
  • There is an entire subgenre of Fantasy/Science fiction referred to as Dying Earth, named after the writings of Jack Vance. Often, these works have a sword and sorcery feel, but with clear hints that this is the future. The above show Thundarr is definitely of this mold.
  • Mortal Engines takes place after the Sixty Minute War, a conflict so devastating it caused centuries of geological instability and fundamentally changed the geography of the Earth (the North American continent is glassed, and severed from South America through the complete obliteration of Central America). The human race is forced into gigantic mobile cities.
    • And just to make it more of a Used Future, the cities then consume all surface resources and have to eat each other.
  • In Olaf Stapleton's First and Last Men, 99% of Humanity is wiped out in a huge geological upheavel, with humanity thrown back to the stone age and forced to crawl back to dominance over several million years, and evolving into the 2nd, 3rd, etc Men. Eventually Earth has to be abandoned when the Moon comes crashing down, and later Venus, Man's new home, is threatened and must be abandoned for a final home on Neptune. The book ends with the 17th (Last) Men awaiting the end as the Sun threatens to go nova.
  • Mark S. Geston's first two novels are set in decaying future worlds, some thousands of years after an unspecified carastrophe. In Lords of the Starship a scheme is devised to revitalise the economy of a dying country by using its resources to build a seven-mile long spaceship. Once the ship is built a huge battle is fought over it, then the ship turns on its engines and fries the armies who are fighting over it - and then destroys itself. It has all been a hoax by a Mordor-like country, aimed at depopulating and demilitarizing the rest of the world. Out of the Mouth of the Dragon takes places some centuries later when the world's ecology is in its death throes. A young man sets off to prove himself as a soldier, only to realize that there are no noble causes left to fight for. By the end of the book he seems to be the last man alive sustained by prosthetic body parts, and as the world slowly dies and the sun goes out he realizes that his prosthetics may keep him alive forever in a dead world.
  • Cormac Mc Carthy's novel The Road is an After The End book most notable for being dark, brutal and, at its core, optimistic.
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter Miller, is an interesting version of this trope. The storyline spans over a thousand years, beginning in a post-nuclear war Dark Age. The second part is set in a second Renaissance, with the re-flourishing of scientific knowledge, and the third and final part is set in the equivalent of the contemporary age. The novel concludes with a second nuclear war. One assumes the cycle is due to start again, though, as human beings are by now capable of interstellar travel and at least some of them get off Earth before the bombs land.
  • Second Apocalypse takes place two thousand years after the First Apocalypse. Large parts of the continent are still wasteland.
  • S.M. Stirling's "Dies the Fire" series begins with a mysterious "Change" in the laws of physics that abruptly makes all powered machinery (even steam engines) inoperable and explosives inert. (To date the cause of the Change has never been revealed and, without high-tech equipment, even scientific research to discover it is impossible; the default explanation is "Alien Space Bats.") Before long most of humanity dies of starvation and the survivors have to rebuild society on a low-tech basis. "Ethnogenesis," the emergence of new cultures, ensues. One state, founded by SC Adians, is modeled on Medieval Normandy; another, founded by Wiccans or neopagans, consciously imitates a Medieval Scottish clan; etc. Large areas are inhabited only by cannibals who have forgotten about civilized culture entirely. The new states are often at war with each other, using armor, swords and bows.
  • "By the Waters of Babylon" by S. V. Benet. Remarkable because it depicts what feels like a world post-atomic-war, complete with ideas of what would and would not be safe to handle after the end—only it was written in the 1930s.
  • World Made by Hand, by James Howard Kunstler, is set in a future where industrial civilization has collapsed simply from petroleum depletion and resultant stresses on socioeconomic systems. (Terrorists also destroyed Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles with nuclear bombs, but there was never any all-out nuclear war.) This is one of a fairly new genre of post-oil novels
  • In the Pendragon novel, The Pilgrims of Rayne, Bobby discovers that the tropical island paradise of Ibara is actually Veelox after three hundred years have passed. The rest of Veelox is a crumbling wasteland and the people not living in Ibara aren't much better than animals. In Raven Rise, Third Earth could probably also fit this trope well.
  • Zoology of the Future series by Dougal Dixon.
  • The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, who liked this sort of thing, is about a society recovering after a catastrophe, which the hyper-Christian characters call "The Tribulation" and is implied to be a nuclear war/disaster. In the protagonist's community, any living thing showing signs of genetic abnormality is considered a Satanic abomination, including human beings.
  • David Gemmell's Jon Shannow trilogy is a postapocalyptic series, with elements of The Wild West
  • The Gold Eagle adventure series Deathlands takes place in a post-WW 3 United States plagued by crazed mutants and power-hungry barons.

Comic Books
  • Y The Last Man is a comic series that takes place in a world where a biological event has wiped out half the mammals on Earth; specifically, the males. The main character and his monkey, plus a few exceptions, are the last living y-chromosome carriers, and since our protagonist's fiancée was in Australia at that time and he's still loyal to her, things are nowhere near as rosy as that scenario might suggest. The civilization of the world falls into chaos as infrastructure and industry collapse (not so much because women can't run things, but because there aren't enough of them, and even fewer with the necessary training) but, a few years into the series' real-time run, the all-female society has more-or-less started to function again.
  • Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth. This Jack Kirby series had Schizo Tech run rampant and Funny Animals ruling feudal nations. Done by DC Comics, although it didn't originally tie into The DCU.
  • Killraven was set in a world where the Martians from The War Of The Worlds came back in the '90s and won this time. It focused on one of the few free human rebels and his attempts to overthrow the alien scourge.
  • The Esperanto comic book 10 Jarojn Poste ("10 Years After") is set after a devastating nuclear war; the subsequent plague of male sterility, from which only a few men are immune, threatens humanity with extinction.
  • Judge Dredd is set After The End where outside of a few giant city-states (and a Lunar colony, for some reason), the entire is a barren radioactive desert filled with bizarre mutants. A lot of other 2000AD sci-fi stories are set After The End, actually.

Tabletop Gamess
  • Twilight 2000. The canonical example of an RPG which plays the post-apocalypse setting deadly straight and right at the latter end of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism, without using it as an excuse to have supernatural weirdness or mutants.
  • Deadlands: Hell on Earth features a pretty straightforward nuclear war. Oh, and then the bombs turned out to be fueled by angry spirits, too. And then the Horsemen Of The Apocalypse appear. And then it gets really bad.
  • As noted above, Gamma World is set on an Earth which, centuries after some ill-defined global catastrophe, is populated with mutants of every mental and physical stripe, sentient animals and plants, insane malfunctioning robots and even humans. The players are strongly encouraged to not to take this very seriously.
  • In the backstory of Warhammer 40000, roughly around the 25th millennium, humanity's golden age was brought to a halt by "soulless" robots known as Men of Iron, and humanity descended into in-fighting until the God-Emperor managed to reunite much of humanity. However, the Imperium of man is now beset from the outside by aliens and demons and from the inside by mutants and heretics, and technological progress has effectively stagnated, with the "tech-priests" of the Adeptus Mechanicus content to seek the remnants of lost technology rather than invent new technology.
    • Humanity's golden age was brought to an end by the Horus Heresy, where fully half of the human race turned to worshipping demons and wiping out the other half. The God-Emperor was permanently injured in a lethal duel with their leader, Horus (in a way, the Emperor's son), to the point that he is only kept alive by an extremely complex life support device. Since then, it has stood on the brink of destruction for 15000 years... and considering that it has been said there are flaws in the device beyond repair, it may be coming soon.
      • For the majority of humanity, the "Dark Age of Technology" was a greater golden age than the height of the Imperium, but the attitudes and lifestyles of that era are not well regarded by the Imperium. The Horus Heresy occurred 5,000 years later, in A.D. 30,000, and some, including Tzeentch, one of the four main Chaos Gods, that if the Emperor dies, he will be reborn as a full-blown god, destroy the Chaos Gods, and lead humanity to eternal victory.
      • Until then, the latest edition explicitly refers to the 'current' time as the Time of Ending, and at least a dozen different doomsday scenarios are fast approaching. That Deus Ex Machina had better come soon...
      • Not likely. In the grim darkness of the future there is only war, remember?
      • Known apocalypses in the Warhammer 40000 'verse: The Age of Strife, at the end of the Dark Age of Technology; the Horus Heresy, at the end of the Great Crusade; the Age of Apostasy, following the First Age of the Imperium; and, arguably, the Time of Ending, which is going on right now. After each one, humanity recovered; after each, the recovery was less complete, and society became worse. Note that there are quite likely at least a few apocalypses that have simple not been named.
  • Battle Tech (Although the 'end' happens after humans have colonized space).
  • Exalted takes place after 3 different Ends, and is set at End Of An Age.. First was the Primordial War (named after the Primordials, the creators of the universe, who lose), involving the extinction of scores of civilizations and races; most of Creation was burned up by a sore loser's last act before surrendering. Then the [[Atlantis First Age]], was ended by the Usurpation. Lastly, a plague made by a ghost of a Solar killed in the Usurpation, and powered by the corpse/ghost of a killed Primordial, killed 90% of the population, and was followed by a invasion of Fair Folk, who succeeded in unmaking half of Creation (by area).

Machinima

  • From the second half of season 3 onwards, Red Vs Blue is set roughly 800 years in the future after a bomb "destroys the present":
    Simmons: We're in the future numbnuts.
    Tucker: Aren't we in the present right now? Aren't we always in the present?
    Simmons: (to Grif) Unbelievable. He can't cope with the loss. He's in denial.
    Grif: That is so sad.

Web Comics
  • Blade Of Toshubi is set on a future Earth where the only humans survive in arks orbiting Earth while animals have been artificially 'evolved' into sentient bipeds.
  • Similarly, the "Aylee" arc from Sluggy Freelance shows an Alternate Universe where "ghouls" have overrun the earth, with most of humanity's survivors living in orbital spaceships.
  • Magical Misfits is set in the far future after magic returned & killed some humans while changing others into creatures of mythology.

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