Optimistic Post-Apocalyptic stories

[DrCorby]

Alas Babylon is very optimistic. It actually predicts both survivors and

Spoiler: ending spoiler

a winner to the war

which seem somewhat far-fetched, IMO.

Just finished the book last night. I agree that it was optimistic, perhaps naively so. I kept comparing it in my mind with One Second After, which was pretty terrifying, and not very optimistic at all.

Lucifer's Hammer was just dark, IMO.

Footfall was more optimistic.

Enjoyed them both. It has been a while since I read Lucifer's Hammer. I agree there were very dark parts, but I still thought it left the survivors in a fairly optimistic place, with

Spoiler: ending spoiler

elctricity generated by a nuclear plant and military jets flying overhead.

YMMV

The Postman certainly qualifies.

Loved the book. The movie, not so much.

 

[Gepard]

That's kind of what got me thinking about this. After I left "Battle Los Angeles" last night I was thinking, "What if there was a movie about the months following the attack?"

But a story that begins with the end of a more plausible invasion and explores how the survivors put the world back together? Now, that's an interesting idea. Would work better as a novel or TV series than a movie, though.

That's essentially what we're getting in Spielberg's Fallen Skies. Though since the alien invaders in that show have occupied Earth instead of being defeated, maybe that's not quite what you mean.

 

[Base_Delta_Zero]

Most major cities in the world were not destroyed in Battle: LA. It looked like NYC, London and Tokyo were under assault still. They had lost contact with San Fran and San Diego for sure. The movie covered around 24 hours into the invasion, after which the US was able to go onto the offensive on the West Coast and presumably elsewhere once the drone control hub weakness was relayed.

World War, sure - but not exactly an apocalypse. Now, if the aliens decide they're tired of playing fair and start dropping rocks on us from orbit ... we'd be in the shit.

 

[sojourner]

^Wow, spoiler much?

 

[Christopher]

But a story that begins with the end of a more plausible invasion and explores how the survivors put the world back together? Now, that's an interesting idea. Would work better as a novel or TV series than a movie, though.

That's essentially what we're getting in Spielberg's Fallen Skies. Though since the alien invaders in that show have occupied Earth instead of being defeated, maybe that's not quite what you mean.

From what I've seen of that, I'd hardly call it a plausible alien invasion -- just a repetition of the usual lazy alien-invasion cliches that make them little more dangerous than human foes so that the heroes have a chance in hell of surviving against them.

 

[Gepard]

Okay, well scratch "plausible." It's still a post-alien invasion TV series about the survivors. Three out of four ain't bad.

 

[Pingfah]

Damnation Alley (the movie) ends on a sickeningly sweet finale.
The book-not so much.

Hard to believe that Fox thought that would be their big summer blockbuster, and had higher hopes for it than Star Wars.

Awful film.

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

I just noticed that nobody has mentioned Jeremiah so far (the TV show, don't know the comic myself).

And it seems that most "optimistic" post-apocalyptic scenarios deal with rebuilding civilization in some way, huh? As long as it goes uphill again and not downhill...

Speaking of which, you could also argue that Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is optimistic, at least compared to the downward trend of civilization in the previous two films.

 

[Kaijima]

One of the more optimistic post apocalypse sci-fi stories I've read are the obscure novels Dragons Can Only Rust and The Dragon Reforged - each really one half of a big novel that the publisher was afraid to print as whole, in case it was a flop.

They're not fantasy as the setting first insinuates, but a post apocalyptic Earth very far in the future.

Spoiler: Click Me

Human society has suffered on in a grim mockery of the heights of former civilization, clinging to old forms of technology and luxury in a few closed cities. People are generally incurious and afraid of the reclaimed wild Earth, their civilization supported by orbital manufacturies that are slowly wearing out. The story creates what is at first a real sense of sorrow at the passing of civilization, then nihilism at the prospect of a crude, backwards existence replacing it. This is all turned around in the end however, when it becomes clear that the surviving human descendants have blinded themselves to a post-human revitalization of the species. One of their own creations achieves sentience and begins to demonstrate a richly possible future rather than clinging to past memetics and mythology on which human values were predicated. It has a sad but hopeful ending, as humans begin to leave their cities and open themselves up to being transformed by the new forms of life and consciousness that have been evolving in the wilds of the regenerating Earth.