Catastrophes

Lots of dystopias seem to come about through some kind of war or another form of catastrophe, such as an environmental one. In addition they are often set in places that are uninhabitable, they could have already been destroyed or could be preparing for destruction. This genre would usually leave the character to fend for themselves, or on the other extreme, be controlled by a totalitarian government - revealing the struggles of making it in this distrorted future to the readers.

Many dystopias deal with this sub-genre:

Read below for a summary of a few examples

War of the worlds

The War of the Worlds chronicles the events of a Martian invasion as experienced by an unidentified male narrator and his brother. The story begins a few years before the invasion. The catastrophe here is the invasion and the characters are left to fend for themselves in a cruel and drastically changed environment.

The Road

The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilization and almost all life.

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

In this novel a Bounty hunter wakes up to a world devastated by nuclear war, - which is the catastophere that occurs - where humans care for animals to prevent the mass extinction of several species and where androids are colonial slaves who kill their masters and flee to hide on Earth. Here the popular theme of nuclear destruction is presented, revealing that this weighed heavily on people's mind at the time.

Maze runner

In "The Maze Runner" Massive solar flares ravaged the planet and turned the area between the two Tropics, Cancer and Capricorn, into the wastelands known as the Scorch. The cataclysmic event devastated Human civilization and brought irrevocable changes to both Earth's climate and environment for centuries to come.

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