The U.S. might, I suppose, be pre-apocalyptic now, but I don’t think it has the “aiming for utopia and missing” quality that I think defines a dystopia. Do you?

For her senior thesis, she looking at the changing causes of apocalypses in book over the past 100 years.

That’s interesting about non-fiction: can these terms apply outside of the science fiction genre? Something like Richard Lewis’s The Killing Sea, about the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004… is that post-apoc? I’d been thinking of these as science fiction only, but maybe there are some things in common about modern-day apocalypses or dystopias that make it useful to include them, too.

But yes, I totally agree about the shift in type of apocalypse. They do tend to be biological or ecological these days. Biological gets you a nice quick apocalypse for the characters to react to, whereas ecological (when written in a way that’s remotely believable, anyway) is a slower slide, so the book is usually set much later.

(I wrote about this more a couple of years ago .)

I really have to wonder at the idea that we didn’t have much dystopic/post-apocalyptic fiction in our day, and especially because “the government was in control.” I remember reading a *lot* of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction as a kid, and some of the most common dystopias were about the extent government control (with the Soviet bogeyman lurking in the subtext). The most common source for the apocalypse, of course, was nuclear war. It just seems like the details have changed, where the dystopia is the collapse of government (though even in the 80s we had the not-for-kids-but-we-watched-’em-anyway Mad Max, Escape From New York, RoboCop, etc.) and the apocalypse is biological or ecological.

“Doom books” it is, for the combo term. Thanks, Mim!

I guess that might explain why so many people still get sniffy about science fiction (Margaret Atwood, I’m looking at you) while loving, say, Never Let Me Go.