<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Disasters occupy a special place in science fiction. Although mainstream writers have frequently chosen to use a natural disaster as the background for a novel, the SF community seems to take an almost perverse delight in destroying the world, or at least modern civilization. The most common cause is without doubt a nuclear war, and literally hundreds of stories and novels have been set either during, immediately after, or in the years following a devastating conflict. Alien invasion and, in recent years, new plagues or a breakdown of Earth's ecological system are also common catastrophes, although tales of the former usually concentrate on adventure, while tales of the latter are often stretched over a long period, a slow-motion disaster.

Most true disaster novels develop more rapidly. Dramatic shifts in weather patterns result in deadly, destructive storms in The Wind from Nowhere by J. G. Ballard and Mother of Storms by John Barnes. The world succumbs to a new global flood in Ballard's The Drowned World or S. Fowler Wright's Deluge, a theme so popular that even Leonardo Da Vinci wrote a fictional account of a similar disaster. Conversely, the oceans dry up in The Tide Went Out by Charles Eric Maine and The Burning World, again by Ballard. Similar to these are stories of worldwide famine, as in John Christopher's No Blade of Grass (aka The Death of Grass) or Famine by Graham Masterton. Earthquakes on an unprecedented scale destroy much of the world in John Christopher's The Ragged Edge, or just North America as in The Rift by Walter Jon Williams. Christopher, who destroyed civilization several times in his career, described a new ice age in The Long Winter, as did Robert Silverberg in At Winter's End. In David Brin's Earth, an unsuspected black hole is absorbing the Earth from the inside out.

Often the cause of the disaster originates outside the atmosphere. In Aftermath, Charles A. Sheffield described what might follow a massive solar flare. Meteors, rogue planets, and wandering asteroids have struck the world in numerous novels, including The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke, When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber, and Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Alien life forms threaten to alter the very nature of life on earth in The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard and Evolution's Shore by Ian McDonald. John Wyndham combined both terrestrial and extraterrestrial causes in The Day of the Triffids, universal blindness induced by a phenomenon in the sky matched with the presence of mobile, carnivorous plants presumed to be the product of genetic engineering.

Over the years, SF writers have managed to find many inventive ways to destroy the world, but Poul Anderson has written what is probably the ultimate disaster novel, because in Tau Zero, he describes the destruction of the entire universe.

Film

Also see: Disaster film

Literary concepts and themes regularly make their way into film and disaster movies are no exception. Disaster films have become a subgenre of their own. Though many are not scifi in nature some do incorporate fictional technology as both a solution and the source of the problem.

Popular disaster films outside the genre include The Perfect Storm, Titanic and The Poseidon Adventure all of which deal with disaster at sea. Dante's Peak, Volcano, and the TV Movie Volcano: Fire on the Mountain deal with volcanic eruptions.

Popular genre films include the hit 1996 film Twister which starred Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as members of a team of tornado chasers trying to get their experimental technology into the center of a twister. The controversial film The Day After Tomorrow dealt with instantaneous climate change due to man-made global warming. In Deep Core Earth's core stops spinning causing a slew of disasters. A team is sent deep inside the Earth to fix the problem.

Scifi disaster films often take on the negative effects of man's scientific experimentations quite often for the purpose of creating weapons. In 28 Days Later a disease from a lab is released that turns most of the population into zombies, a similar man-made disease is also the cause of an epidemic in Resident Evil and its sequels turning humans into the walking dead.