The Remnant / Literature

• In 1983: Doomsday, the Union of Sovereign Socialist Republics is formed from what remained of the Soviet Union that survived Doomsday.

• Aubrey-Maturin offers various iterations of this, particularly involving the British-American War of 1812 — sailing ships may have been at sea for months, and not be aware of current events; this can be further complicated by two ships having different sailing dates, and hence different notions of the situation. Averted, in that this is a well-known problem and sometimes results in awkward stand-offs while the situation is resolved.
• In Andre Norton's The Beast Master, the villains turn out to be a detachment of the same aliens who found out too late that nuking Terra into radioactive sterility wouldn't save them from Terra's colonies. The war's been over for a year or so, but they're trying to make new trouble on a colony planet.
• In David Eddings' The Belgariad, the country of Arendia has been torn by civil war for millennia, largely due to their race's absurd devotion to Honor Before Reason. The Asturians continue to mount pointless insurrections against the crown, despite the fact that the Mimbrates won the war long ago and the Asturian Duchess is also the Queen.
  • The main problem with the Mimbrates and Asturians, aside from the Mimbrates treating their landed gentry opposite numbers as no better than serfs, is that neither side will talk to the other. When, after some outside prodding, they do, and the point of the queen also being Asturian nobility is mentioned, tensions ease noticeably.
  Queen: "You mean that there have been centuries of strife over a technicality?"
  Noble: "... It is rather Arendish, isn't it?"
• Black Tide Rising: After the Zombie Apocalypse gets into full swing, the US military is quickly reduced to a handful of submarines and isolated pockets of soldiers and Marines, all reporting to a small group of officers holed up in the SAC bunker in Omaha. The rest of the world's militaries aren't in much better shape.
• In Brothers in Arms, the villain is one of these for the Komarran resistance, rather to Miles Vorkosigan's frustration:
  Galen: The revolt must not die.
  Miles: Even if everybody in it dies? 'It didn't work, so let's do it some more'? In my line of work, they call that military stupidity. I don't know what they call it in civilian life.
• James Blish’s Cities in Flight includes the Vegan Orbital Fort, a hold-out from a long-past war which has become a sort of legend in its own right.
• Son of Magic (a short story in The Camp Half-Blood Series) tells us what happened to the leftovers of Kronos' army after the events of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Alabaster is one of the few pro-Kronos demigods that doesn't regret their choice to serve the Titan King and as a result he's excluded from Camp Half-Blood. He still hasn't given up his fight with the Olympians and Percy (even if he never sees them in the story).
• Challengers of the Unknown: The antagonists are a few hundred Nazis who fled to a South American country and want to conquer it for a new Reich.
• In Cthulhu Armageddon, the government of New Arkham styles itself as the official United States Remnant. However, since its control only extends to New Arkham itself (a pre-Rising military base converted into a burgeoning city) and the surrounding territory (some small towns and villages), no one really takes the claim all that seriously.
• The Divide 1980: In an Alternate Universe where the Axis powers won World War II, a group of soldiers and scientists have spent decades in hiding working on a super weapon to defeat their occupiers. However, they've become more complacent and stagnated than the other La Résistance groups and are reluctant to use their weapon.
• Down to a Sunless Sea: A civilian version is featured. When word of the nuclear war is announced to the passengers on the plane the main action takes place on, two diehard Soviet diplomats and their KGB bodyguards take the news of their country’s fate poorly and try to hijack it. For added irony, the actual military forces who survive (most notably some SAS soldiers also onboard the plane, two Russian aviators who picked up the population of the home village of one in cargo plane and then tried to fly somewhere safe, and the soldiers at the soldiers at the Antarctic McMurdo station who weren’t Driven to Suicide by despair) all avert this by being helpful and sympathetic characters who never entertain any delusions of grandeur or ideas of continuing their old government.
• In The Dreamside Road, the Liberty Corps is partially the militarized remnant of the IHSA. Some of its officers are survivors from the earlier organization and most of their technology and gear was scavenged from the ruins of the International Hierarchia or the League of Earth's Nations' other assets. Only their armor is new.
• Emberverse features the United States of Boise, founded by U.S. Army officer Lawrence Thurston, which is the only major faction trying to preserve the old system of government. Thurston considers Boise to the "provisional Capitol" of the country, but none of his neighbors acknowledge Boise's authority and, to their credit, Thurston and his government don't try to force it on them.
• Evolution:
  • "The Last Burrow" depicts the Antarctica ecosystem 55 million years after the Cretaceous impact, where small lemming-like primates compete with the last non-avian dinosaurs to have survived the Cretaceous impact, including the descendants of Muttaburrasaurus, Leaellynasaura and Allosaurus, with a Koolasuchus thrown in somewhere.
  • In "The Kingdom of the Rats", Eastern Africa is the last place where the animalistic posthumans exist, which in turn are the last primates. In most of the world, they were outcompeted and driven to extinction by the increasingly dominant and diverse rodents; in Eastern Africa, which had rifted off from the rest of the continent before the rodent radiation fully took place, was the only place where they had enough time to adapt into new niches and compete efficiently with the rodents when these eventually arrived there as well.
• Ex-Heroes: A few military units survive the zombie apocalypse.
  • Cerberus is the inventor and pilot of a DARPA suit of Powered Armor and, along with the survivors of a platoon of marines that were escorting her (including Mauve Shirt Billie Carter), take part in the defense of the Mount and the fight against nearby zombies.
  • The Unbreakables are a unit of Super Soldiers in training, accompanied by lots of regular soldiers, including another Cerberus-trained pilot. They have evacuated thousands of civilians, but only in a regional area, and are also taking orders from a presidential bunker. Actually, they're only being brainwashed into thinking that their corrupt superior is saving civilians and taking orders from the president. Once the brainwashing is shaken, the remaining soldiers join the survivors at the Mount.
• Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series:
  • "The Merchant Princes": Trader Mallow is curious when he notices the sun-and-spaceship symbol of the Galactic Empire in a nation called the Republic of Korell. He goes off on his own to establish how close the Foundation is to the collapsing empire. The old empire is using the buffer of nations to attack the Foundation.
  • "The Mule": The first Galactic Empire used to rule every inhabited planet in the galaxy. By the time of this story, 300 years since the founding of Terminus, their rule has been reduced to twenty agricultural planets, and lost even the capital planet of Trantor. When the story's protagonists visit Neotrantor, the new capital, the senile Emperor Dagobert IX is under the impression that his Empire is as strong as ever, treating the Foundation as just another world within the Anacreon Province of a galaxy-spanning Empire. It's implied that this is the final end of the first Galactic Empire, being absorbed offscreen by the Mule between this story and the next.
• In Gimlet Mops Up by W.E. Johns, Gimlet and his crew take on the Werewolves, Nazi terrorists continuing to fight after the end of World War II.
• By the end of Guns of the Dawn, the army in which the protagonist is fighting has become this without realising it. Fighting in an inaccessible area, they don't realise that their forces elsewhere have collapsed and that they are now encircled. They're persuaded to surrender, but still gain a lot of praise from the citizenry for being the last survivors — which becomes important when the fugitive king tries to use the protagonist, now as much of a war hero as you can get in a defeated country, as the centre of an uprising. The king's own band, however, is not so much a remnant of his old forces as a new gang of bandits he has recruited through bribes.
• Hellboy: In the short story "Of Blood, Of Clay" by James A. Moore, the homunculus Roger has to try to reason with a golem that was created by the Jewish underground during WWII and is now rampaging through modern-day Berlin. Either it doesn't know that the Nazis it was created to kill were defeated decades ago, or it just doesn't care.
• Honor Harrington: Most of the Government in Exile forces of the People's Republic of Haven are really a cross between this and pirates. Haven itself had to deal with a few remnant forces themselves while it was conquering its neighboring star systems. Henri Dessouix, a prominent member of the Great Escape from the Prison Planet, was a heroic version of this, having served on a ship that refused to surrender after their planet was enslaved and spent the next few months attacking Haven ships before being captured.
• The Hunger Games: District 13 is a morally grey version of this, having avoided subjugation along with the other 12 rebelling Districts through the threat of their nuclear arsenal, and bidding their time for the next 75 years, waiting for an opportunity to go to war with the Capitol again.
• The Harry Turtledove Short Story "The Last Article" (where The Bad Guy Wins World War II) begins with the British troops in India surrendering and being rebuked for fighting four years after the Nazis conquered England.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Saruman qualifies in a round-about sense, in that he is a former 'Evil Overlord' , but reduced to a pathetically small scale after his armies are routed and he is cast out from Isengard. He spends the remainder of the series running the Shire into the ground, turning into a sort of bandit leader with a mob of 'ruffians'. He is stabbed in the back (completely literally) by his servant at the end.
  • It's also said that after Sauron's defeat, his human allies such as the Haradrim and the Easterlings continued fighting against Gondor for at least a while, although it's less out of loyalty to their old boss and more out of fear and hatred of Gondor, over the actions of their Numenorean ancestors, who ruthlessly colonized them as described in The Silmarillion.
  • While hard to believe given the threat they pose to the Middle Earth, Sauron is this to his former boss, the Dark Lord Melkor/Morgoth. While Mordor's army of hundreds of thousands of orcs, plus trolls, wargs, easterlings and the nine Nazgûl might seem impressive, it's nothing but a sad shadow of Morgoth's forces of billions of orcs and entire armies of balrogs and dragons.
• In Red Justice, a book set in the Justice League franchise, the Justice League ends up facing Red Justice, a group of superpowered Soviets who had been in hibernation and believe The Cold War is still going on when they awakened.
• In "Okuyyuki", Captain Reilly goes to Iraq expecting to fight Saddam's army, but ends up facing these instead: diehards, Islamic volunteers and various disorganized remnants. However, he sort of gets his wish eventually when he runs into an unusually well-equipped and powerful stay-behind unit.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin:
  • House Targaryen is this at the beginning of the series, after the Targaryen dynasty was dethroned fifteen years earlier in a civil war.
  • The Brotherhood without Banners, the pro-Robert splinter cell encountered in A Storm of Swords. An interesting case as they start off as La Résistance, but become The Remnant after their principled leader dies and they get a vengeance crazed replacement.
  • The Sons of the Harpy wage a shadow war against Dany's rule because she outlawed slavery in Meereen and they want it back.
  • The Free City of Volantis sees itself as the Remnant of the Valyrian Freehold and once tried to restore it under its leadership but failed.
  • The Golden Company are mercenaries composed largely of descendants of losers of the Blackfyre Rebellion.
  • The Targaryens themselves are merely the only survivor of forty dragonlords, the nobles who presided the Valyrian Freehold. They were also far from the most powerful, but the extinction of the other dragonlords enabled them to prosper. The only other known dragonlord family name is Belaerys, mentioned briefly in The World of Ice & Fire. Houses Velaryon and Celtigar, who also live in Westeros, are descended from Valyrians but not dragonlords.
• Once you get past all the Sweet Polly Oliver spoofing, the main protagonists of the Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment discover that they almost qualify as this trope due to their army being on the verge of defeat and arguably in the wrong of the conflict.
  • They then use this discovery in a very effective ruse involving a press release.
• Out of the Dark: the aliens who eliminate Earth's central authority in a Decapitation Strike have to deal with numerous factions of lingering military forces (sometimes joined by civilian survivalists) around the globe for the rest of the novel, eventually getting so fed up with them that they're preparing to just destroy the planet before being defeated by an Outside-Context Problem vampires.
• A central trope in the Sandokan series:
  • The title character is the legitimate Rajah of Lake Kini Balu, who lost his throne, his father and entire family due a British-supported rebellion. After barely surviving he assembled a pirate crew and brought it to Mompracem, quickly becoming The British Empire's chief annoyance due his success in raiding their trade and the increasing power of the Tigers of Mompracem.
  • The Tigers of Mompracem become their own remnant twice: first near the end of the first novel The Tigers of Mompracem, when the British and other European states with holdings in the Indian Ocean, having decided the Tigers were becoming an actual threat, launched a joint expedition that decimated the pirates and chased them off their island; after Sandokan returned to Mompracem with a new and stronger crew off-page he eventually abandoned piracy, but halfway during The King of the Sea they're once again attacked by the British (manipulated by Suyodhana's son) and chased off Mompracem, though this time they're in the state to fight back with the title ship (the mightiest warship in the world, that they aquired too late to defend Mompracem) and spend most of the novel attacking British trade. By Sandokan Fights Back they have retaken Sandokan's ancestral homeland, and after the British sell it to the Sultan of Varauni they retake Mompracem in Return to Mompracem.
  • In The Pirates of Malaysia, having entered in conflict with James Brooke the Rajah of Sarawak, join forces with the nephew of his dispossessed predecessor Muda Hashim to depose the White Rajah. Brooke also left behind a remnant, who by the time of The King of the Sea has put his nephew Charles (Brooke's actual successor in real life) back on the throne.
  • After the destruction of the Thuggee cult at Sandokan and Tremal Naik's hands in The Two Tigers, a handful of survivors, armed with their immense treasure and led by the son of their defunct leader Suyodhana, acts to take their revenge on the Tigers. They're the ones who bribe and threaten enough British officials to have them launch the attack on Mompracem in The King of the Sea, and show up in person with a flotilla of warships crewed mostly by mercenaries at the end of the novel, defeating Sandokan... Only for Suyodhana's son to disband the group due falling in love with Tremal Naik's daughter.
  • In Quest for a Throne Sandokan and the Tigers depose Sindhia, the mad rajah of Assam, and put in his place Surama, Sindhia's cousin and the wife of Sandokan's pal Yanez. Some of Sindhia's followers survived, helping the White Rajah of Lake Kini Balu in Sandokan Fights Back (and proving far more effective than the now senile White Rajah) and attacking directly Surama in The Brahman.
• In Shadows of Dreams, a Psilon battleship from the Vague War days arrives to a small human colony, having spent the intervening century or so at relativistic speeds (its hyperdrive was damaged in the previous battle). Since the crew isn't aware that the war is long over and that the rest of their race have isolated their area of space and refuse to interact with outsiders, they intend to complete their original mission: to capture the military outpost that used to be where the colony is now. The colony has almost no means of defending itself, especially from the most advanced race in the galaxy. Later on, though, the protagonist realizes that the crew must be aware of how much time has passed and that their orders no longer make sense. And yet they fully intend to continue, possibly as a sort-of last hurrah (plus, the fact that there's a human colony there likely means that their side didn't win).
• Sixth Column: The book follows four soldiers and three army researchers safely hidden in a research bunker during the invasion of the United States. They consider a series of hit-and-run attacks with the weapons in the bunker before realizing this would get thousands of hostages executed. Instead, they scheme to undermine the new regime with a Scam Religion.
• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch, a small fleet of Jem'Hadar warships, led by Kitana'klan, continue to wage war on the Dominion's rivals for several months after the peace treaty is signed. Ashamed of their species' failure to take the Alpha Quadrant, they're determined to renew the fighting even against the will of the Founders. Three months after the conflict's conclusion, they attack Deep Space Nine, destroying the starship Aldebaran with all hands and damaging the starship Defiant. They are in turn attacked by the loyal Jem'Hadar Taran'atar, who was en route to Deep Space Nine as an envoy on the orders of Odo. He defends the station with his own warship, and eventually foils a secondary plot by Kitana'klan to destroy the reactor core.
  • In the pre-relaunch series of books, Station Rage involves Sisko and Odo stumbling upon a hidden room on Deep Space Nine containing the last surviving members of the Crescent Order, an old Cardassian military unit left over from a war that ended eighty years earlier. After Garack revives them from stasis, the holdovers mistakenly believe that "Terok Nor" has been occupied by a hostile force, and set about trying to force Sisko and his crew out.
• In the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels set in the Legends continuity, the Empire (referred to as the "Imperial Remnant") continues to be the major antagonist despite the Emperor himself dying in the Battle of Endor. (When people wonder why in various Expanded Universe stories, it's pointed out that if the entire ruling council of the New Republic was killed in an attack...they'd be replaced by people who probably wouldn't be as good at the job; hardly a crushing blow.) Fifteen years later, they are reduced to less than a hundredth of their former strength, and there are still politicians and commanders who refuse to give up — even though the Supreme Commander notes that the average Imperial citizen probably realized it years ago, and decides on his own to arrange for Peace Conferences with the New Republic so that the Empire could survive to rise again, one day.
• The Sympathizer: South Vietnamese anti-Communist expatriates living in California after the fall of Saigon decide to raise an army to reconquer their homeland (briefly seeking recourses from another South Vietnamese officer who refused to flee with the Americans and have also been fighting a minor guerrilla war) . It's made clear that they are driven by unhappiness over their newly reduced status as refugees in the United States. Their tiny little band is wiped out as soon as it crosses the Mekong River from Laos into Vietnam.
• In Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan encounters two feuding groups of Knights Templar, neither of whom know that the Crusades are over.
• Harry Turtledove
  • The short story "After the Last Elf is Dead" has the garrisons of several fortresses remain loyal to the elven king and continue to fight back against impossible odds long after their liege's demise. All of them are defeated, but they instill some Villain Respect in the Noble Top Enforcer.
  • The short story "The Phantom Tolbukhin" has former Soviet general Fyodor Tolbukhin leading a small, desperate group of Russian soldiers in guerrilla resistance actions against the Nazis several years after the Nazis win World War II (in an Alternate Universe).
• The linked novels To Arms! To Arms in Dixie! and The South Will Rise Again by J.T. Edson feature US secret agent Belle Boyd encountering a conspiracy by the Brotherhood for Southern Freedom—a sinister band of renegades—to restore the South to its prewar glory.
• Captain Nemo, the villain/Anti-Hero of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island is an exiled Indian prince continuing to fight the Sepoy Mutiny.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has him continue this, despite ostensibly working with British intelligence; his descendents continue this, to the point that his grandson Jack is his universe's equivalent of Osama bin Laden.
• In Victoria, elements of the old regime's military forces hold out slightly longer than the Federal Government itself, but soon cease to offer any meaningful resistance to the victorious rebels. Many of their personnel are then implied to join the New Confederacy and other successor states, once the collapse is complete, where they continue to cause trouble for the heroes.
• In the novel Warday by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, published in 1984 and depicting a future which seemed plausible at the time, the United States and Soviet Union destroy each other in a nuclear war. Britain, which emerged unscathed, proceeds to re-establish itself as a major world power and in effect re-create The British Empire. Five years afterwards, a Captain of the British Royal Navy, patrolling the Pacific, tells the protagonists: "There are still submarines at sea, carrying nuclear missiles and loyal to non-existent governments. They are extremely dangerous and if they don't surrender we have to destroy them."
• Warrior Cats: After their defeat, the remainder of BloodClan is one of these for a while, going through a succession of wannabe-tyrants, but none of them can really replace Scourge, and the group eventually scatters.
• In The Years of Rice and Salt, although Western civilization is all but destroyed, a few fragments remain such as Georgia and New Norway.
• Young Sherlock Holmes: In Red Leech, Duke Balthasar is the self-appointed head of the 'Government in Exile of the Confederacy', and plans to rise an army to conquer Canada and transform it into a new Confederated States of America.