Post-Apocalyptic books and films are getting quite lot of attention in recent years; Movies like i'm Legend and Cormack McCarthy's book The Road for instance have had huge success and important acclaim. This features a lot of individuals wondering why there has been such a explosion in fiction of this genre.
Looking back in recent history you'll easily identify the increase in apocalyptic fiction against the political era. for instance the first 60s with the Cuban missile crisis, saw a rise in peoples appetite for nuclear war themed movies. But it wasn't just the fear of nuclear annihilation that fanned the flames of Hollywood's burning obsession with Armageddon. The publics knowledge that both the American and Russian military were conducting secret experiments in biological weaponry, was also added fuel to the hearth . then we now had a plethora of Armageddon flavours to settle on from; anything from flesh eating zombies and plagues to rogue meteors, also because the good quaint nuclear holocaust.
So why the explosion within the "end of the world" movies? Are we still getting 9/11 out of our system, or is that this something else? Maybe the straightforward truth is that we've always been in an era of fear. When Oppenheimer detonated the primary nuclear bomb the dynamic of the human experience was changed forever. It's now painfully apparent that whether intentionally or folly, the most important threat to human existence is man himself. in any case our future may only be as secure as an air lock in a military laboratory somewhere. the reality is that the likelihood of human induced Armageddon, is now forever etched into the human psyche and that is reason enough for our obsession with apocalyptic fiction