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You think The Road was bleak? You found Zone One kind of dark and relentless? Bah. The latest literary apocalypse, Ben Marcus' The Flame Alphabet, is weirder, more disturbing and harder to deal with than any of your other literary calamities. More »
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We're all bracing for a robot uprising. Any moment now, a computer could become self-aware and decide to wipe us out. Like Skynet. But really, you should be more scared of posthumans — like mutants or cyborgs. People whose direct ancestors are humans, but they've developed into... something else. More »
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Don't watch this video if you don't want the ending of Brother John spoiled. This 1970 movie features Sidney Poitier as a mystery man who comes to a small town full of xenophobic, vicious racist dickwads, all of whom believe that Poitier is something to do with local labor unrest or whatever. More »
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You may have read Arthur C. Clarke's 1993 space-disaster novel Hammer of God — but have you read the original 1992 short story it was based on? Originally published in Time Magazine, that story is now available for free over at Lightspeed Magazine, and it's a potent dose of cosmic wonder. More »
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Some economists are referring to our current economic malaise as the "Lesser Depression" — but it could be getting worse soon. Europe is unraveling, China's October output fell off a cliff and the U.S. Supercommittee is about to push a round of austerity. More »
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After the apocalypse, the scariest thing could be one gay teenager. At least, that's what one prominent agent who represents successful young-adult novelists seems to believe. This unnamed agent asked authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith to remove a gay character from their post-apocalyptic YA novel — or just make him straight. More »
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Roland Emmerich may be spending his time making a wussy "who wrote Shakespeare's plays" movie, but he's still in the apocalyptic-movie business. Check out the English-subtitled trailer for the German post-apocalyptic thriller he produced, Hell. In which the sun gets so bright, you need to wear protective goggles. And it's dazzlingly bright, even at night! More »
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Hayden Christensen huddles in a shrinking pool of light while a mysterious darkness swallows up the entire human race. Vanishing on 7th. Street, in select theaters today, starts out spooky, but fails to make you care about its characters. More »
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A generation ago, most farms were still relatively small and independent, but the past 20-30 years have seen factory farms become a quasi-monopoly. What will farms look like a generation from now? More »
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Basil Wolverton is best known for his grotesquely comic illustrations in Mad Magazine, Timely and Marvel Comics. But he also produced some disturbing images of the apocalypse for evangelical preacher Herbert W. Armstrong. Are you read for the Mad apocalypse? More »
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Fans of classic British comedy, like Monty Python, should check out the 1969 Richard Lester film, The Bed-Sitting Room. Technically, it's a post-apocalyptic film, set after a nuclear war, but mostly it's just very daft. Like this "Aquatic Bishop" scene. More »
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Fans of the greatest post-apocalyptic movies of them all, the Mad Max trilogy, met in the desert for three days to reenact life in a radioactive oil-thirsty post-apocalyptic wasteland. And we've got the bloody, sexy photos to prove it. More »
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Paul Bettany will convert you to the worship of smouldering crucifix-faced angst, vampire-hunting explosions and six-pack abs, judging from the latest trailer for next summer's Priest. If you played a spot-the-cliche drinking game on this trailer, you'd pass out. Spoilers! More »
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In the 1980s, the Soviet Union built nuclear-powered ice-breakers, hoping to open a shipping route through the Arctic. They needn't have bothered — there's no ice left now in the summer, opening the fabled Northeast Passage to shipping. More »
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Gary Shteyngart, author of the hit novel Super Sad True Love Story, tells the L.A. Times he wanted to set his novel after the collapse of the United States. But the disaster scenarios he came up with kept coming true. More »
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Ready to be plunged into a post-apocalyptic war between super-clergy and wild vampires? Check out the first trailer for Priest! [via HeyUGuys] More »
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One man takes on the ruler of post-apocalyptic New York City, in a quest for vengeance that may turn into a hope for salvation. Check out this new concept art for the post-apocalyptic pot-boiler The Last City. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5582534&view=rss&microfeed=true How will the world end? Cory Doctorow, Ben Greenman and other authors debate! More »
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For possibly the first time ever, North Korean art is being displayed in Europe, and the utopian optimism is heart-breaking. Yes, monster movies may not be the scariest culture North Korea ever produced. More »
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An Edgar Award-nominated mystery author has just sold her first zombie novel — and it's being published by Harlequin's speculative fiction imprint Luna. Could Sophie Crane's Aftertime be proof that genre-mashups are the new genres? More »
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The Survivors aren't. The BBC has canceled its remake of Terry Nation's 1970s classic, in which a plague devastates most of the population, due to low ratings. Good news is, it's coming to U.S. DVD along with the original series. More »
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The nuclear cannon dubbed "Atomic Annie" fires a 280 millimeter nuclear artillery shell packing 15 kilotons of explosive force, in this breathtaking image from 1953's Operation Upshot-Knothole in Nevada. Check out more images from our only nuclear artillery test. More »
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Did you know the Wachowskis were filming a new "futuristic" movie? Neither did we, until Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington tweeted a series of pictures from the set of the mystery film, which is about Iraq 90 years from now. More »
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Looking for an alternative to the horrific scenarios of 2012 and The Road? Try the "cosy catastrophe" genre, the Guardian suggests: Stories like Day Of The Triffids and The World In Winter feature a less violent version of the end. More »
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There's nothing scarier than deja vu: that feeling that everything we've seen before will keep coming back over and over again, until your head dissolves. Which overused trope are you most sick of: zombies, vampires, alt-universes, post-apocalyptic worlds or steampunk? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5392997&view=rss&microfeed=true Mad Max's vision of a shattered world where social order has broken down, and everyone fights over the last drops of oil, could be reality soon. Oil prices are starting to tick upwards again after coming down from summer 2008's heights. Imagine what would happen if oil reached double the price levels it hit a year or so ago, says the Guardian: More »
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Three great moments from 1985's post-apocalyptic Def-Con 4: Three astronauts watch a nuclear holocaust claim the entire world. A post-apocalyptic survivalist demands to know, in great detail, about the female astronauts nipples. And a teenager whips slaves dragging a space-capsule. More »
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Eat your blistery hearts out, Zombieland and The Road. They don't make post-apocalyptic epics like 1985's Wheels Of Fire anymore. Witness skin-peeling punks, a speechifying harem-gathering warlord, and the would-be rapist who gets knifed in the crotch. Plus machine-gun kick-boxing! More »
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The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins was one of our favorite books last year, and the sequel, Catching Fire, looks even more insane. A new book trailer promises ramped up political intrigue, and an audio excerpt provides a major downpayment. More »
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Tired of the creaky entertainment machine churning out copy-cat stories of zombies, superheroes, apocalypses and cyborgs? Then you need to conjure new dreads and fantasies in the real world, since that's where all our science fiction cliches come from. More »
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The United States is always collapsing in science fiction. The U.S. implodes, explodes, or just declines. But a team of professional futurists sees only four scenarios that could end the U.S.A. — and they've got a chart to prove it. More »
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As the world ends, who'll provide the soundtrack for the final moments? In all likelihood, apocalyptic British folk band We'll Write, whose music video includes a giant robot taking over the world. More »
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Suffering from Terminator withdrawal, now that the TV show's on break and the movie's weeks away? Skynet has published a novel and some comics that lead up to Terminator Salvation. We've reviewed them for you. More »
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The movie version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road still doesn't have a release date, months after it was supposed to come out. But at least concept artist Hugh Marchant's brilliant art has appeared online. More »
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In these troubled times, whether you're looking for some simple escapism or a vision of how things could be even worse, science fiction has the answer. And book sales are starting to reflect that. More »
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The last survivors of humanity shelter on a train going in circles through an icy landscape, in Transperceneige, the French comic which Bong Joon-Ho (The Host) is adapting into a film. More »
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Click to viewSome of the most gorgeous, evocative, and strange science fiction art you've ever seen comes from the covers of novels written between 1904-33, in SF's "pre-Golden Age." More »
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With Wall-E director Andrew Stanton working on a film based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1917 novel A Princess of Mars, you need a crash course in books from this seminal era in science fiction. More »
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Yet another bizarre webseries has hit the net, but this one has a big budget and a real actor. MSN UK has debuted a miniseries called Kirill, about a heroic blogger 50 years in the future who tries to save us all from a horrendous disaster. The blogger's played by David Schofield (Gladiator, Pirates Of The Caribbean), and a staff of 50 people worked on Kirill for six months. But is it any good? See for yourself — the first episode is below. More »
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Roland Becerra's terrifyingly lovely animated short, Dear Beautiful, is being turned into a full-length movie. The jarringly realistic animation follows Paul, a married man whose marriage is in trouble. Paul's wife sniffs a deadly new flower that is popping up all over their home state of Connecticut. The contaminated flower (tarnished by a nearby make-up laboratory) slowly turns Paul's beloved into a crazed zombie. Unable to accept her transformation, Paul goes about living his life with his zombie wife, much to the horror of his friends and family. Click through to check out the trailer. More »
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