A sky churns with turbulent clouds, their underbellies tinged green… or red, or black. The air is thin, nearly unbreathable, and swirls of ash… or sand or dust… spiral in helixes over broken roads. On the horizon looms the skeletal black towers of a ruined city… or a spinning fleet of fluorescent blue UFOs, or an army of undead, or mountains of pestilent bodies, or the blazing fire bloom of a mushroom cloud. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that the end has come. Civilization is in ruins. The world is destroyed, be it by food shortage, or flood, or asteroid, or climate change, or zombie horde, or alien invasion, or pandemic, or nuclear war, or good-old-fashioned Wrath of God.
Apocalyptic fiction (also referred to as post-apocalyptic or dystopian fiction) paints these bleak pictures on the page, conjuring a narrative about destruction and survival that readers scarf down like so much soylent green. Biologist Peter Kareiva calls it “apocaholism”, this obsession human beings have with end-of-the-world scenarios, a fascination that stems from pessimism and schadenfreude (Butler).
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a pivotal work of many genres. It’s science fiction. It’s literary. It’s horror. Most importantly, it’s apocalyptic—and not just once, but twice. Few novels have so successfully told stories of two apocalypses. The characters in Bradbury’s novel-in-stories live through the near-total extinction of the Martian race and the planetary destruction of Earth.
Contents
As put by Ursula Heise in her article “What’s the Matter with Dystopia?” the haunting, horrific visions in apocalyptic narratives “aspire to unsettle the status quo.” Be it a critique of commercialization, environmental neglect, unchecked technological advancement, or an unjust society, apocalyptic fiction has “a sincere intention to scare readers” into changing their ways and reneging their sins (Hicks, 6). The Martian Chronicles joins a long line of apocalyptic narratives that capture the essence of the time in which they were written, serving as cautionary tales against the corruptions of the present and the future horrors that might come.
The Maccabees and Mary Shelley: Humankind’s Long Literary Obsession with the End of the World
“The apocalypse is a big story—maybe one of our oldest as a species.”
—Edan Lepucki, author of California (Anders)
The genre’s beginnings (between 200-165 BCE) are Judeo-Christian, rooted in fervently apocalyptic religious texts that sought to come to grips with terrible events in the devotees’ present: Jewish suffering during the Hellenistic domination of Palestine and revolt of the Maccabees, or Christian persecution by the Roman Empire (Lerner). This resulted in critiques of the existing social order in the Book of Revelations and Revelation of John, and prophesized events like the Second Coming and Last Judgment.
Religious texts established a three-part plotline, a millenarianism best illustrated by the Medieval triptych paintings of Hieronymus Bosch: 1. description of an approaching, imminent, cataclysmic event; 2. a transitional, chaotic time of judgment; and 3. a resulting world, either utopia or dystopia, paradise or purgatory, heaven or hell. This Judeo-Christian three-act structure—pre-apocalypse, apocalypse, and post-apocalypse—would thread through even the secular fictions written in the generations to come, including the two events described in Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.
In 1826, Mary Shelley published The Last Man, in which she describes the urban decay of human civilization, overtaken by nature in man’s absence. “Rome, the capital of the world, the crown of man’s achievements. Among its storied streets, hallowed ruins … by his habitation abandoned to mildew and weeds, that his power is lost, his race annihilated for ever.” While The Last Man is considered one of the first modern apocalyptic novels, a smattering of other such books were published before the mid-20th Century: H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) (Heise).
However, it wasn’t until the overwhelming horrors of World War II that modern apocalyptic fiction entered its first major period of mass popularity. Much like its Judeo-Christian beginnings, the mid-century apocalyptic novel was a response to events in the authors’ present: a second world war in a single generation, mass crimes against humanity, two simultaneous Holocausts (one perpetrated by the Germans in Europe, the other by Japan in Asia), the US dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the long Cold War with Russia and atomic hysteria to follow.
“Flourishing in the post-World War II period works like Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955), John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) sought to represent the aftermath of some cataclysmic event that wipes out a majority of the human population, renders advanced technology useless, and leaves civilization in (literal and figurative) ruins” (Hoborek). There was also a slew of films: Honda Ishirō’s Godzilla (1954), Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Shigeaki Hidaka’s The Last War (1960), among many others.
The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury’s collection of literary pulps written well before its eventual publication in 1950, predates all of these novels and films, yet joins a long history of cautionary apocalyptic tales. In The Post Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century, Heather Hicks writes, “Influential writers from across the globe have all taken up the same genre conventions in order to explore a range of urgent cultural, political, environmental, and economic questions” (6). These conventions have been true since the 1940s and ’50s, when the end of the world seemed plausible. This is the generation to which The Martian Chronicles belongs, this planet on a precipice that—due to unchecked international warfare, a surge of new, deadly weapons and technologies, and a push into space—might result in the destruction of society or extinction of the human race.
The First Apocalypse: The Martian Chickenpox Pandemic
“Chicken pox. It did things to the Martians it never did to Earth Men. Their metabolism reacted differently, I suppose. Burnt them black and dried them out to brittle flakes” (Bradbury, 66).
Pre-apocalypse
The Martian Chronicles presents the Martian race as technologically, spiritually, cognitively, and evolutionarily superior to Earth Men. They construct beautiful cities that have survived hundreds of thousands of years. They have evolved into a race of spiritual empaths who can shape-shift and telepathically commune with one another. In “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” the character John Spender, an astronaut of the 4th Expedition, says, “The Martians discovered the secret of life… Once the civilization calmed, quieted, and wars ceased… life was now good and needed no arguments” (88). He describes the now-ruined Martian civilization as an idealized utopia.
Is pre-apocalyptic Mars really a utopia? Aren’t all such “perfect” places actually dystopias wearing utopian masks? Bradbury provides glimpses of pre-apocalyptic Martian civilization in “Ylla”m “The Summer Night”, “The Earth Men”, and “The Third Expedition”. All portray a less-than-perfect society. The Martian woman Ylla describes her civilization as “dead, ancient bone-chess cities” and “old canals filled with emptiness” (8). In “The Earth Men”, the Second Expedition astronauts are committed to an insane asylum; why would a utopia need an insane asylum? The Martians mistakenly diagnose the men with a “constantly recurring psychotic condition” commonplace among Martians due to their telepathy (33). Clearly, Martian civilization is not without its dystopic shades.
Spender’s idolized picture of a perfect Martian society is tempting. It would be easy to ascribe to his utopian vision because it places the onerous and guilt of the Martian pandemic on the Earth Men’s unintentional yet inherent destructiveness. However, there are no utopias. No place can claim perfection. Martian civilization is ambiguous: Spender’s idealized portrait in “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright” conflicts with the flawed society hinted at in Bradbury’s other stories. This means that The Martian Chronicles expertly sidesteps a common problem in apocalyptic fiction, a tendency to “drown in its own pieties” (Heise).
Spender’s eloquent soliloquies expound upon the Martian ability to “never let science crush the aesthetic and the beautiful” (Bradbury, 88). Yet, perhaps a little less beauty and a little more science—an understanding of the “unexplainable miracle” behind infectious disease—would’ve come in handy when the chicken pox arrived.
Apocalypse
Apocalyptic fiction utilizes “visions of the future [that] serve mostly to reconfirm well-established views of the present” (Heise). Bradbury does this: he connects Martian chickenpox to humanity’s long history of disease infiltrating previously sheltered societies. Twenty-five million died during the Middle Ages’ Black Plague due to bubonic-infected rats brought from Asia on European merchant ships; a cluster of plagues, including smallpox, devastated 90% of indigenous populations when European explorers colonized the Americas; and the Spanish Flu, which from 1918-1920 (the year Bradbury was born—one must assume his family had been affected by it) infected 500 million people around the world, 1/5th of whom died (Jarus). In The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury reconfirms a well-established criticism, drawing upon epidemic events from westward expansion to showcase the real-world consequences of colonization.
In “Ylla”, “The Earth Men”, and “The Third Expedition”, Earth’s astronauts have no idea they’ve brought in themselves and their spaceships a pathogen that can kill off an entire race in mere weeks. Throughout the novel, it’s a thread Bradbury stitches this critique of the human race: the stupidity and inherent destructiveness of Earth Men who bring death with them and destroy a planet without even trying to do so. They destroy simply by existing. As Spender gazes upon the skeletal Martian ruins, he decries, “Isn’t it enough that [Earth Men] have ruined one planet, without ruining another?” (85).
The Martians do what they can and fight to prevent the annihilation of their race: the first three expeditions are killed off, their rockets are destroyed. One must assume the Martians—telepathic and prescient—knew these extraterrestrial strangers somehow brought devastation with them. In “A Summer Night”, “A coldness had come, like white snow falling on the air… ‘something terrible will happen’” (19-20). The Martians gaze at the sky, at whatever falls from the air like snow—invisible bacteria, deadly and inescapable—and predict their own demise.
The Martians (unlike the Earth Men in the second apocalypse) are not directly at fault for their annihilation. The chickenpox is brought upon them by outsiders, an unavoidable galactic disaster. The pandemic hits them like an asteroid because, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, Earth Men hurtle down from the black reaches of space and smash into Mars with extraterrestrial biological corruption. The pandemic is human-made. It’s preventable but not purposeful; destructive, but not deliberate. The destruction of the Martian race is, for all intents and purposes, an accident.
Post-apocalypse
The term post-apocalypse “captures the elements of loss and transformation” (Hicks, 8). From the Martian perspective, the rest of The Martian Chronicles is a transformed post-apocalyptic world. After a devastating plague, their planet is overrun by Earth Men, hostile extraterrestrial invaders who permanently alter their environment (“The Green Morning”), covet and kill their last survivors (“The Martian”), and desecrate their land (“The Locusts”). Like the unnamed father and son in Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road (2006) or Jaguar Paw and his family in the Mel Gibson film Apocalypto (2006), the surviving Martians have fled into what’s left of their wilderness to scavenge on the edges of their own planet. Their numbers are so few they’re spoken of as folklore. In “The Martian,” set a short four years after the chickenpox pandemic, an Earth Man, Mr. LaFarge, has “heard tales of the Martians; nothing definite. Stories about how rare Martians are and when they come among us they come as Earth Men” (162).
The post-apocalyptic fictional canon poses “questions about the sort of world that should emerge from the wreckage. There is an internal dimension to the confrontation with modernity; an essential process for the protagonists in each of these narratives is recognizing what they can or should become, what forms of subjectivity might be salvaged, jerry-rigged, or grown in the new conditions in which they find themselves” (Hicks, 3).
The “new conditions” of the Martian post-apocalypse is a new planet shaped by the mores of colonizers, the Earth Men. Therefore, the Martian’s post-apocalypse is the Earth Men’s pre-apocalypse. Days of reckoning become cyclical. Civilizations rise and fall, only to rise again. Bradbury drives this significant theme home in the pivotal story, “Night Meeting”. In the wilderness on a lonely, dark night, an Earth Man, Tomás Gomez, encounters a Martian, Muhe Ca. Tomás and Muhe have happened upon an astrophysical folding, a tesseract that allows the two to converse despite living thousands of years apart. Staring out at the landscape beyond an overlook, Muhe sees a vibrant Martian city where Tomás sees a ruin; Muhe sees an ocean where Tomás sees an Earth colony.
Who belongs to the past, and who belongs to the future? Tomás is convinced Muhe is a ghost, an ancient relic; Muhe is convinced Tomás is the same. “‘You are a figment of the past!’ [said the Martian]. ‘No, you are from the Past,’ said the Earth Man” (112). They find themselves in an existential paradox.
Muhe solves this paradox by saying, “What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken?” (113). Is it past or present? Foreshadowing the Earth Men’s collapse? The hope of rebuilding a Martian future?
In “Night Meeting”, Bradbury expertly crafts the ambiguity of hope in a post-apocalyptic world. An optimist might believe Muhe is right, that he is not of the past, that thousands of years in the future the Martians have rebuilt and risen again. After all, the surviving Martians still exist when the second apocalypse, Earth’s nuclear holocaust, strikes in three years. However, the nihilist would believe Muhe is a relic, and the Martian civilization is gone for good. In typical Bradbury fashion, “Night Meeting” provides no certainty, and the survival of the Martian race after the pandemic is left ambiguous. It’s up to the reader to interpret whether or not there is hope and salvation to be found in the Martian post-apocalypse.
The Second Apocalypse: Earth’s Nuclear Holocaust
“Earth changed in the black sky. It caught fire. Part of it seemed to come apart in a million pieces, as if a gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an unholy dripping glare…” (Bradbury, 190).
Pre-Apocalypse
Unlike the Martians, who don’t produce the plague that decimates their race, the Earth Men know full well and are responsible for what is happening on Earth. For years, they discuss atomic war and an impending nuclear holocaust. Theirs is an intentional apocalypse, one that is human-made, foretold, easily avoidable… yet unavoided.
Everyone on Earth, including the reader, knows what awaits the planet should humankind continue on its current path. As Andrew Hoborek puts it in his article “The Post-Apocalyptic Present”, apocalypse fiction predicts the future through “social commentary and… despair about contemporary reality.” In the story “The Taxpayer”, four years before the apocalypse, a desperate citizen on Earth pleads to join the Third Expedition. “Don’t leave me here on this terrible world. I’ve got to get away; there’s going to be an atom war! Don’t leave me on Earth!” (Bradbury, 41). As the rocket blasts off without him, descriptive details of its launch foreshadow the dropping of an atom bomb: red fire, big sounds, and a huge tremor.
The Earth Men’s pre-apocalypse takes place between 1999 and 2005, but it might as well have been set in the mid-20th century. Again, Bradbury is commenting on real-world fears at the time of writing, his post-war present. The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950, “shortly after the Soviet Union had completed its first successful nuclear test on August 29, 1949… Many people who grew up during the Cold War era had nuclear apocalypse on their minds” (Belli).
In addition to Cold War hallmarks like the atomic panic, life on Earth in The Martian Chronicles mimics the belief systems from mid-century US society, the effects of which still plague the present day. For example, “In The Middle of the Air” serves as a parable in which the Black American population leaves Earth for Mars to escape the racism of the Jim Crow-era South. Bradbury crafts an Earth world that is beset by the sins of the United States, a “bourgeois drive for comfort and convenience that has created three centuries of racism, sexism, bloody colonial history, and environmental destruction” (Hicks, 10). Or, as defined in Apocalypse Now and Then by Catherine Keller, “an emphasis on progress, its avid colonial drive, and its newly striving scientific inquiry” (10), all of which are heavy themes throughout The Martian Chronicles. Modern society’s commitment to these belief systems inevitably lead to the apocalypse to come, brought on by the very society that will be destroyed by it.
Apocalypse
Unlike the Martians, who do what they can to prevent the doom of their planet, Earth’s deterrent to nuclear war turns out to be… none. The Earth Men are too concerned with commercial exploits, distracted in their pursuit of comfort, or caught up in the snare of their warfare. Inept and selfish, they fail to stave off the apocalypse.
“The Off Season”—one of only two stories in The Martian Chronicles set during an actual apocalypse—follows Sam Parkhill, a character from the Fourth Expedition. He’s introduced in “—and the Moon be Still as Bright” as Spender’s uncouth, selfish, belligerent crewmate. For Parkhill, Mars is a planet to be exploited; the Martians are to be feared and therefore shot and pointlessly killed. His purpose on the planet is commercial. Parkhill wants to be rich and will do so by setting up that most Americana of mid-century icons: a hot-dog stand.
Spender, Parkhill’s foil and one of the most significant characters in the book, acts as an Oracle of Delphi. He predicts the Earth Men’s destructive effect on not only the planet they colonize, but the beautiful blue marble that is Earth: “We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple in Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose” (71). His mention of hot-dog stands circles back, like a prescient bookend at the beginning and end of the Earth Men’s time on Mars. Spender foreshadows his crewmate’s hot-dog stand. Parkhill’s futile money-making project is cut short when, as he sets up the stand, he witnesses Earth’s fiery, cataclysmic nuclear holocaust in the night sky.
One might expect the colonization of Mars to be a solution to Earth’s impending nuclear holocaust. It could’ve been the United States’ attempt to preserve the human race on another planet. But that point becomes moot in “The Watchers”, when the colonizers see the burning of Earth from 70 million miles away. They think of the loved ones they left behind and read the Morse code flashes, “COME HOME. COME HOME. COME HOME” (193). Immediately, in mass, the colonizers pack their luggage, race to their rockets, and—like passengers throwing away their life rafts to board a sinking ship—blast back home to a nuclear Earth. They leave behind an abandoned red planet, one that might’ve otherwise been their salvation. This is a common trope in apocalyptic fiction: “For all of these novels, abandonment provides a keynote” (Hoborek).
As demonstrated by the Earth Men’s abandonment of Mars, their colonization efforts were never about saving humanity. With the mass exodus, Mars is revealed to be nothing more than a vanity project, a recreational distraction, a cash grab, and consequently, an exercise in futility.
Post-Apocalypse
“The Silent Towns” and “The Long Years”, two post-apocalyptic Earth Men stories set on the abandoned Mars, feel very familiar. These are stories about last survivors, akin to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and those who navigate a desolated wasteland like Shelley’s The Last Man. The setting and circumstances are well-known, mimicked in so many 21st century apocalyptic fictions: McCarthy’s The Road, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). Also, countless films: Danny Boyle‘s 28 Days Later (2002), Patricia Rozema’s Into the Forest (2015, see also PopMatters’ interview with Rozema), Sang-ho Yeon’s Train to Busan (2016), Engler and Etter’s Cargo (2017), John Krasinksi’s A Quiet Place (2018), and George Miller’s Mad Max trilogy, to name just a few. The survivors wander an empty world, scrabble for resources, contend with isolation, and face the existential crisis that comes with living in scraps.
However, it is the post-apocalyptic nightmare on Earth—not Mars—that evokes the strongest, most haunting imagery in The Martian Chronicles. The harrowing “There Will Come Soft Rains” is set on the planet Earth following the nuclear holocaust. Save one pet dog that returns home only to die of starvation (symbolically representing the colonizers who return to Earth), the story has no living characters. Instead, the main character is a house “alive” with a radioactive glow.
Decked out in technological and mechanical wonders, Bradbury crafts a house akin to an advanced Alexa Voice Assistant that not only gives you the weather report but can also make you perfect toast and eggs sunny-side up. The house’s automated systems continue to operate long after the family that once lived there has died in the blast. The story “details the great benefits that technology has to offer mankind (automated robots, quality of life), as well as its dangers (nuclear warfare)” (Belli).
Like the Earth Men’s technological achievements, the house was invented for comfort but did nothing to deter the apocalypse. Eventually, a fire (a stand-in for atomic war) starts in the house that—no matter what the automated mechanisms do—can not be contained, and the house burns to the ground. The house becomes a symbol, its story an allegory writ on a small scale of the planet Earth’s apocalypse.
Like the possible existence of a distant, 10,000-year Martian future in “Night Meeting”, Bradbury also ends the Earth Men’s apocalypse with ambiguous hope. In the novel’s final story, “The Million-Year Picnic”, a boy named Timothy and his family have fled the nuclear holocaust under the guise of a “fishing trip” to Mars. It’s strongly implied that they are one of only two possible families to escape Earth before the cataclysm and extinction of all life on the planet. The father reveals that they never had any plans to return from the fishing trip—that he will destroy their spaceship and they will find a city on Mars where they will make a permanent home.
Like another famous apocalyptic story, the myth of Noah and the flood in the Book of Genesis, the family’s three brothers—Timothy, Michael, and Robert—are stand-ins for three other brothers—Japheth, Shem, and Ham. Like their Tanakh counterparts, Timothy and his brothers are symbols of genesis, of the beginning, of life risen from worldwide devastation. The existence of the human race rests on them and—pending the expected but uncertain arrival of a second family with daughters—their progeny.
This theme of family and ensuring a future for generations to come is common in all apocalyptic fiction. When analyzing McCarthy’s themes in “Is The Road Still the Most Depressing Story Ever Told?” Ryan Hollinger says, “The father knows what the world was before the collapse, whereas the son has no impression of the former world. His only knowledge is what the world is now and what it might turn out to be.” This same theme could be applied to “The Million-Year Picnic”, the myth of Noah, and so many other parables about saving humanity through children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to come.
Earth is gone, burnt and blasted into an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland. The surviving family in “The Million-Year Picnic” has no Earth to return to. Even if the second family’s daughters show up and they succeed in continuing their race, Earth Men are nevertheless extinct. When Michael asks to see a Martian, his father tells him and Timothy to stare into the water of the canal. “The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water…” (241).
Unlike the Martian apocalypse, the Earth Men’s apocalypse is complete and total, because the survivors can no longer call themselves “Earth Men”. There is no planet Earth anymore. Only Mars. They can only be Martians.
Xylophone Bones and Human Shadows
The Martian Chronicles’ two apocalypses are best captured in a pair of harrowing, horrifically beautiful images. The first: the Earth children in the short story “The Musicians” who play amongst ruined cities and make musical instruments of Martian corpses. “The first boy there would be the Musician, playing the white xylophone bones beneath the outer covering of black flakes. A great skull would roll to view like a snowball; they shouted! Ribs, like spider legs…” (117-118).
The second image: the human imprints in the story “There Will Come Soft Rains” left like pale shadows on a wall after the nuclear blast, much like the phenomenon photographed in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down (222).
Despite the tragedy these images invoke, Bradbury paints these pictures with eloquent words and beautiful imagery. Hoborek says the most successful apocalyptic narratives do this, juxtaposing dark fantasies and science fictions about the-end-of-the-world with artful imagery, as well as “quotidian description and grand narrative, social commentary and readerly pleasure, despair about contemporary reality and the hopefulness of art. As dark as they can be, all of these books turn to art to imagine some realm of human potential.” Or, as the astronaut and oracle Spender puts it, apocalyptic fiction, like the Martian civilization, “blend religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle” (Bradbury, 88).
Works Cited
Anders, Charlie Jane. “Why Are Many of Today’s Hottest Authors Writing Post Apocalyptic Books?” io9. 21 October 2014. Accessed 18 February 2021.
Belli, Jill. “Ray Bradbury’s warning of nuclear warfare”. English 2001: Intro. To Literature 1: Fiction Fall 2017. Open Lab at City Tech. 2017. Accessed 18 February 2021.
Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. 1999.
Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. Simon & Schuster: New York. 1950.
Butler, Sue. “Apocaholism”. Lexicographer at Large. 28 September 2020. Accessed 18 February 2021.
Heffernan, Teresa. Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century. University of Toronto Press: Toronto. 2008.
Heise, Ursula. “What’s the Matter with Dystopia?” Public Books. 1 February 2015. Accessed 18 February 2021.
Hicks, Heather J. “Introduction: Modernity beyond Salvage”. The Post Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage. Palgrave Macmillan: London. 2016.
Hoberek, Andrew. “The Post-Apocalyptic Present”. Public Books. 15 June 2015. Accessed 18 February 2021.
Hollinger, Ryan. “Is The Road Still the Most Depressing Story Ever Told?” YouTube. 29 September 2019. Accessed 18 February 2021.
Jarus, Owen. “20 of the worst epidemics and pandemics in history.” Live Science. 20 March 2020. Accessed 20 February 2021.
Keller, Catherine. Apocalypse Now and Then. Augsburg Fortress Publishers, Minneapolis. 2004.
Lerner, Robert E., Aakanksha Gaur, Emily Rodriguez. “Apocalyptic literature: literary genre”. Britannica. 28 May 2008. Accessed 18 February 2021.
Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Project Gutenburg, Salt Lake City. 1826. Accessed 20 February 2021.