You know, after forty years of watching real spacecraft leave Earth and reading about fictional ones fleeing dying worlds, I’ve come to realize something odd about us humans – we’re absolutely fascinated by our own extinction. Not in a morbid way, exactly. More like… well, it’s complicated.
I was maybe twelve when I first read *On the Beach* by Nevil Shute, right around the time I was glued to NASA mission reports. Here I was, completely obsessed with humanity reaching for the stars, and I couldn’t put down this book about everyone on Earth slowly dying from radiation poisoning. My mother found me reading it at 2 AM with a flashlight under the covers and asked what was so interesting about “such a depressing story.” I couldn’t explain it then, but I think I get it now.
There’s something about apocalyptic science fiction that scratches an itch we didn’t even know we had. Maybe it’s because these stories let us peek at our worst fears from a safe distance – like watching a hurricane from inside a bunker. Or maybe it’s because they strip away all the noise of modern life and show us what really matters when everything else is gone.
*Children of Men* hit me harder than most, and I saw it pretty late in life – I think I was already in my sixties, recently retired, suddenly aware of my own mortality in ways I’d been too busy to think about during my working years. P.D. James crafted this world where humanity just… stops reproducing. No more children. No more future. The movie adaptation was brilliant – those long, uncut shots of violence and despair that made you feel trapped right alongside the characters.
But here’s the thing that got me about *Children of Men* – it wasn’t really about the end of the world. It was about hope persisting in impossible circumstances. When that baby cries in the refugee camp and the fighting just… stops… even hardened soldiers remember what they’re supposed to be protecting. I’m not ashamed to admit I teared up. My wife came into the room during that scene and asked why I was watching “such sad movies” in retirement, and I tried to explain that it wasn’t sad, not really. It was about finding light in darkness.
The technical aspects fascinated me too. James didn’t give us some ridiculous scientific explanation for the infertility – no alien virus or genetic weapon. Just… biology failing for reasons we can’t fully understand. As an engineer, I appreciated that restraint. Too much sci-fi feels the need to explain everything with technobabble. Sometimes the most powerful approach is admitting we don’t know why things go wrong.
*The Road* was different. Cormac McCarthy doesn’t do hope the same way. I read that book in three sittings – couldn’t stop, even though every page was like swallowing broken glass. A father and son walking through ash-covered America, pushing a shopping cart full of scavenged supplies, trying to stay ahead of cannibals and starvation. No explanation for what caused the catastrophe. No grand plan for rebuilding civilization. Just… putting one foot in front of the other because the alternative is giving up.
What killed me about that book was how real it felt. I mean, I’ve done radiation exposure calculations for spacecraft, I know what a nuclear exchange would actually look like, and McCarthy got the physical details right without beating you over the head with them. The ash covering everything. The dying trees. The cold. But more than that, he got the human part right – how love persists even when everything else has been stripped away.
The father in that story keeps going because of the boy. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. And reading it as someone who’d raised kids myself, who’d worried about the world we were leaving them… Christ. There were nights I had to put the book down and go check that the thermostat was working, that we had food in the refrigerator. McCarthy made you grateful for ordinary things.
Now *The Expanse* – that’s a different beast entirely. This isn’t post-apocalyptic, it’s pre-apocalyptic. Humanity has spread through the solar system but we’re still the same territorial, short-sighted species we’ve always been. The Belters mining asteroids, Mars terraforming, Earth choking on its own pollution – and everyone ready to go to war over resources and ideology.
What I love about *The Expanse* is how it handles the engineering realistically. These aren’t Star Trek ships with magical artificial gravity. People get crushed by acceleration. Space is huge and hostile and expensive to traverse. The authors – and yeah, I know one of them was George R.R. Martin’s assistant, but they both clearly did their homework – they understand orbital mechanics and fusion drives and why nobody’s invented antigrav yet.
But the real genius is how it shows our current problems scaled up. Climate change, resource wars, class conflict – except now it’s across planets and asteroid belts. The Belters aren’t just an alien species, they’re what happens when people adapt to low gravity and get treated like a permanent underclass. Their physiology changes. Their culture changes. It’s evolution and politics and physics all tangled together.
I binge-watched the TV series twice and read all the books, and what struck me was how it managed to be both pessimistic and optimistic. Pessimistic because humans keep making the same mistakes on bigger and bigger scales. Optimistic because some of them keep trying to do better, keep reaching for cooperation even when everything’s falling apart.
The protomolecule storyline gets a bit hand-wavy for my taste – alien technology that breaks known physics always makes me twitch – but I forgave it because the human drama was so well done. Holden trying to do the right thing and usually making things worse. Avasarala cursing her way through political crises. Bobby Draper punching through problems with Martian marine efficiency. These felt like real people, not sci-fi archetypes.
Here’s what I think apocalyptic fiction really does – it’s a pressure test for human nature. Strip away civilization, comfort, certainty, and what’s left? What would you do if the power grid failed permanently? If crops stopped growing? If you had to choose between your family’s survival and helping strangers?
These stories let us rehearse for disasters we hope will never come. Not the specific scenarios – I mean, global infertility is pretty unlikely, and nuclear winter hopefully stays fictional. But the underlying challenges: maintaining humanity when resources are scarce, preserving hope when everything looks hopeless, deciding what’s worth sacrificing for.
During my aerospace career, I worked on contingency planning for spacecraft failures. You can’t predict every possible malfunction, but you can design systems that fail gracefully, that give crews options when things go wrong. Apocalyptic fiction does something similar for society. It’s not predicting specific futures, it’s stress-testing human resilience.
I think that’s why these stories have such staying power. We’re living through what feels like slow-motion apocalypse – climate change, political polarization, technological disruption happening faster than we can adapt. Reading about fictional survivors helps us process real anxieties about whether we’re adaptable enough, whether our institutions are robust enough, whether there’s enough basic human decency to see us through whatever’s coming.
My engineering background makes me naturally pessimistic about complex systems – I’ve seen too many ways things can fail catastrophically. But these stories, the good ones anyway, remind me that humans are remarkably good at improvising solutions, at finding reasons to keep going even when logic suggests giving up.
Maybe that’s why I keep reading about the end of the world at an age when I should be reading, I don’t know, gardening magazines. Because these stories aren’t really about endings. They’re about what comes after the ending, about the stubborn human refusal to accept that anything is truly final.
Even *The Road*, bleak as it is, ends with the possibility of renewal. *Children of Men* ends with a boat disappearing into fog, carrying hope toward an uncertain future. *The Expanse* keeps finding ways for enemies to become allies when faced with bigger threats.
The apocalypse in science fiction isn’t a conclusion – it’s a reset button. A chance to imagine what we might build from the rubble of what we’ve got now. And honestly? Sometimes starting over sounds pretty appealing.
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