Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Fantasy and the Post-apocalypse

How common are post-apocalyptic themes in high-fantasy? Post-apocalyptic literature is something I think of as more science fiction than fantasy but there’s an overlap between both genres that is substantial. The common fake-medieval or dark age settings of fantasy draw on Western European tropes that include the Atlantis myth, the fall of Rome, and the mythic golden age of Greek mythology.

A fallen, lost civilisation provides a backstory from which lost/forgotten artefacts, lore and hidden threats can arise. It provides a backdrop for ruins, legendary kings and the existence of treasures. As magic can be the equivalent of lost technology (or actually be lost technology) it provides a reason why magic in the setting is unreliable and inconsistent. An apocalyptic myth provides a backstory for the movement of peoples within the geography of the setting and the foundation of dynasties.

Some examples:

  • The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s posthumous book of Middle-earth myths, The Silmarillion, provides two substantial ones. The War of Wrath concludes the core story of the Silmarillion with a continent smashing conflict the reshapes Middle-Earth and removes Elven hegemony. The Fall of Numenor provides the second apocalypse that more closely parallels the fall of Atlantis.
  • Stephen Donaldson’s first Thomas Covenant trilogy has the Ritual of Desecration by Kevin Landwaster – a desperate move by the most powerful wielder of magic in the land to destroy its existential enemy. The story setting is placed several generations after this event and not all the lore once known has been recovered.
  • Robin Hobb’s Farseer/Liveship novels use a common thread of the disappearance of dragons and the race of Elderings in some poorly understood disaster (the nature of which is gradually revealed as an element across all the books). Elderling magic and artefacts appear as poorly understood magical items throughout.
  • George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones has a world placed between a climatic/seasonal apocalypse of a poorly understood winter. In addition, the multiple lands of the setting are joined by a common history with a long destroyed Valyrian Empire – once ruled by a visual distinct race of people who commanded dragons but which was destroyed (Atlantis style) by a mysterious event known as the Doom of Valyria.

I’ve been trying to think of big fantasy epics that don’t use this trope. Earthsea? Any others? Suggestions are welcome!

camestrosfelapton

82 responses to “Fantasy and the Post-apocalypse”

  1. I can’t actually think of any. First pass at a theory:

    High Fantasy requires some sort of world-threatening Bad Thing to be present.

    For anyone to know about it and so set off on an epic quest the Bad Thing has to have acted in the past.

    Therefore high fantasy is always post- some sort of apocalypse.

    (Idle thought, feel free to pull apart!)

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      • The Earthmasters practically wiped themselves out in a war, which ought to count. The destruction of the Wizards’ school would be too small scale, even if it was a small city.

        The “vanished elder race” trope often has some sort of apocalypse as an explanation, I think

        I don’t think that Moorcock’s Elric series has a past apocalypse (although one might have been added at some point, I suppose). The Bright Empire mainly fell because the Melniboneans just got bored with everything and gradually retreated from the world.

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        • Is “golden age that faded due to decadence” a specialized version of an apocalypse? Both leave you with the remnants of a fallen civilisation as a salutary lesson that the present world is foolishly ignoring.

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  2. Robin Hobb’s work also carries the name “The Realm of the Elderlings”.

    And this is hard. Discworld maybe, insofar that it has History (like Roundworld) but no real big apocalypse (or apocralypse).

    But someone who brought this trope to an extreme is R. Scott Bakker, where the World was rescued mid-apocalypse and is still far from recovered and there’s a second apocalypse.

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  3. I don`t recall anything particularly apocalyptic in the past of David Eddings`s Belgariad, or in the Malazan Book of the Fallen (although pretty much any day in that one counts as apocalyptic by most people`s standards.)

    I can think of specifically post-apocalyptic settings like Saberhagen`s Empire of the East… I think the future Europe of Michael Moorcock`s Dorian Hawkmoon stories might have a disaster or two in its past, too.

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    • In the Belgariad, hadn’t Evil God done something bad and been stopped, and now might do it again? Sort of apocalypse-interuptus.

      IIRC, the protagonists were basically being bossed around by a sentient Prophecy, which I guess is what breaks my theory above – the apocalypse doesn’t need to have happened before because a prophecy lets the characters see it coming!

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      • The world was physically ripped apart, such that the continents were reshaped, and at least half the population was killed. So I think that can be regarded as pretty apocalyptic.

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  4. Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy might be interesting in this context. I can certainly place the novel within the tradition you discuss above. The novel produces a rich history of the rise and fall of empires, patterns of migration, conquest and colonization, etc., but that transformation is a lot more uniformitarian rather than catastrophist to borrow terms from geology. They are defined by social and historical forces, even the moments that magic intervene, rather than being defined by a cosmic battle of good and evil, but we certainly get ruins and the intrusion of the past into the present. It just feels different.

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    • I thought of this one but it has been awhile and wasn’t sure. Also the basic settings look initially so textbook that I assumed there was an apocalypse I’d forgotten

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      • I think Williams is an interesting revisionist. It’s such a gentle and loving revision that its easy to overlook how he’s changing the conventions. The novel is certainly marked by potential cataclysms, both within the present of the narrative and its history, both cases in the form of the Storm King, but they’re a product of historical struggles, rather than the theological struggles that you find in the work of Tolkien, for instance.

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        • I was initially disappointed by it because I came to it late, having read Otherland first and expecting something less conventional…but as you say it is a subtle change of conventions and there is a lot more craft there than is immediately obvious.

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      • I read it before Otherland, which I should probably revisit. It’s also a book that gained a lot from rereading. There’s a lot of material that I picked up the second time around that I missed the first time.

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  5. I cant remember anything like this in the riftwar cycle by Feist. But then again, its a long time since Ive read those and things got complicated in the later series.

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    • Feist’s books are sort of after the fall: Before the coming of gods, there was a race of amoral super-elves (elves were their lowly slaves) who raided and pillaged the whole galaxy, and waged war against the gods when they arrived. Among other things, this war caused the human diaspora after their planet was destroyed, and they took refugee in a number of worlds.
      One of the super-elves sort of infuses one of the protagonists of the first book in the series, so we get this ancient history in occasional flashbacks.

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  6. I thought Kingkiller Chronicles since the potential end of the world threat is still kind of a vague thing but there’s a history of the world being split in the past.

    Temeraire? There’s a world war but it’s not an apocalyptic one and nothing predates it as such (though since it’s based on our world the meteor level extinction event might count) and if anything the series goes beyond that war to show how that fight isn’t really a problem to others parts of the world.

    Gentleman Bastards?

    The Dragon Prince trilogy wasn’t very apocalyptic that I can remember from either the perspective of a past one or potential future one, though there’s a plague in the Dragon Star series that immediately follows.

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      • Gentleman Bastards has an unknown apocalypse far in the past which has left unfathomable structures by an ancient civilization standing and the destruction of an empire through the Bondsmagi of Karthain. The names escape me in the moment and I don’t have the books with me.

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      • Huh crap. I think that most Epic Fantasy have events that threaten the world and probably use a previous destruction as a way of showing the audience that the threat is real because see, it happened before, so it could happen again. Never really thought of it before but once I started thinking about it, yeah it’s all over the place.

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  7. The Shannara series strongly suggests there was some cataclysmic event in the past of that world, possibly a nuclear holocaust (although maybe my brain wouldn’t have made that connection if it wasn’t the eighties when I read them).
    (long time lurker, first time poster)

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    • Welcome to the jungle, angharad!

      Mostly the regulars don’t bite, and if you slip Timothy some squirrel jerky now and then, he won’t claw up your leg. 😀

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    • I only read the first one, and I had no idea it was supposed to be post-apoc Earth. I thought it was firmly secondary world high fantasy (and that the Tolkien estate should have sued). When I saw an ad for the TV show with the Space Needle, I was completely WTF. I had a bad cold at the time so I maybe wasn’t reading too closely.

      Also, hello!

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  8. I’d argue that Walter J. Williams’ Metropolitan series isn’t post-apocalyptic. He’s always claimed that he intended it as fantasy and that folks just misunderstood what he was doing when they called it SF. Or if it’s post-apoc, then it’s WAY post-apoc, since its setting is a world which is one big city divided into different countries, which at some point three thousand years ago was cut off from the rest of the universe. But it’s kept growing and changing, so that doesn’t, to my mind, count as an apocalypse.

    And Martha Well’s two fantasy series (Ile Rien and Raksura) neither seem to be post-apoc. The first is actually rather pre and then ongoing apocalytic, and the other is just set in a weird world far away.

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  9. Or are neither of these worthy of consideration because they aren’t High enough? To the bongs, Batman!

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  11. Shannara is absolutely post-apocalyptic- it’s our world, in the future. Landover, maybe. The Fionavar Tapestry is perhaps the closest I can think of.

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  13. Sofia Samatar’s Olondria novels (A Stranger in Olondria, The Winged Histories) don’t really use this trope; there are civilizations that have risen and fallen, but it’s more “the world was ever thus” than an apocalyptic past. They’re not exactly epic fantasy, but everyone should read them because they are wonderful books.

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  14. I don’t recall an apocalypse or cataclysm of some sort in Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty. Was there one in Joe Abercrombie’s First Law world? I’m pretty sure that (massive spoiler) the mage whose name I can’t remember was on the brink of causing a cataclysm at the end of the original trilogy but can’t remember if there was a prior apocalypse.

    I think in general a lot of high fantasy has a habit of falling into the story cycle mode, so there’s always a cataclysm in the past that a hero stopped or tried to stop, and a cataclysm looming in the future in which the hero rises or is reborn in order to stop. (Most obvious in The Wheel of Time which is extremely explicit about the cyclical structure of the story it’s telling).

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  15. Wheel of Time certainly uses it to a very big extent. Michael J. Sullivans books do too… Mistborn certainly does with the whole Lord Ruler having taken over so many generations ago and so much lost. Shannara does. Now it’s making me want to write one that doesn’t but the last thing I need is another series heh.

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  16. The Drenai novels have the rise and fall of empires, but I don’t think that there’s anything that rises to the level of an apocalypse.

    Conan (and Thongor) are pre-apocalyptic – the world has been reshaped since their day

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    • There are several hints that the Drenai world is a post-apocalyptic setting. The ancient machines used to create the Joinings in King Beyond the Gate for example. Also the twisted fortress at the end of Waylander II has lighting as described sounds similar to modern fluorescents.

      Gemmell was quite keen on this trope too, the Sipstrassi series was explicitly pre and post-apocalypse.

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  17. I would argue that an apocalypse or fallen world of which there remains no trace or memory (except maybe among the Secret Lorekeepers of On the Whole Irrelevant but Cool Exposition) is not, in effect, post-apocalyptic. You as the reader, and people in general, must know something grand has been lost to lament the loss. The whole point of it is that people in the world must be able to make a comparison to the pre-apocalyptic world. Otherwise, it’s just, well, the world.

    The fallen empire and lost golden age is a trope harking back to at least early medieval times in the European/Western tradition, both academic and literary. (The unquestioned wisdom of ancient sages like Aristotle (who claimed flies have four legs, so that must be true even though you can count them), the virtuous conqueror emperors Alexander and Caesar, the architectural wonders, etc.) It’s also the foundation (hah!) of a lot of SF, like Star Wars’ old republic for instance.

    Mysterious inexplicable remains (e.g. in the Gentleman Bastards world) is a different trope, I think.

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    • “Mysterious inexplicable remains… is a different trope, I think.” One utilized so frequently by Andre Norton (who may or may not have invented it, but she certainly put it to excellent use) that it would be fair to call it ‘Nortonesque’.

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    • I completely agree — if the story is told closer to the ‘end’ of previous ‘culture’ in a way that suggests a MAJOR regression from the previous society, that would be post-apocalyptic. Otherwise, if years later a stable new society has developed, the ‘mysterious inexplicable remains’ are just a hint of prior event that may or may have not been an apocalypse.

      For example, people in middle ages thought Roman ruins and forgot Saxon building were ancient magical places — or at least places of lore. These were not ruined due to an apocalyptic event, but rather cultural/social changes brought about by shifting dominant powers.

      I think for a story to be post-apocalyptic, the narrative must be places somewhere where culture/tech/etc has regressed and the people are aware of that — or at least the narrator is aware of that in such a way that the apocalypse *is* a character in the narrative.

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  18. Eh, Earthsea is distinctly post-apocalyptic; the Dry Lands, which Ged and Arren cross in The Farthest Shore are later revealed to be the result of a man-made disaster, created when early the Mages stole part of the West to ensure their immortality. Not only is the land rendered sterile but ALL humans – past, present and future – are condemned to an eternal zombie existence there.
    Everyone knows of the Dry Lands, but only the Dragons remember how they were created.

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  19. I guess the answer hinges on the definition of “Big fantasy epic,” but the subgenre of European-history-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off is often not post-apocalyptic, though it may have the ruins of a Roman Empire analog providing local color. e.g, Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels often involve localized war and conquest, but there isn’t necessarily a past apocalypse. Bujold’s Five Gods novels and novellas, taken as a whole, might be big and sprawling enough to qualify (though Wide GreenWorld is definitely post-apocalyptic).

    (Like Angharad, longtime lurker. Can’t recall if this is very first comment)

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  20. Do worlds locked in a cycle of cataclysms and rebuilding count? Like, say, The Stormlight Achive.

    But on the other hand those kind of stories usually depict civilization at latter stages of rebuilding right before the next cataclysm hits so here we have the question “When does post-apocalypse end and pre-apocalypse begin in this kind of setting?”

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    • I guess I’m interested in whenever there is an element of loss in the contemporary culture from a previous one. As in referencing either Atlantis myth or fall of Rome elements (specifically that British Dark Age trope of the legions having gone).

      Not fantasy obviously, but Foundation Trilogy plays on the Dark Age Britain trope. So ‘post-apocalyptic’ isn’t quite the right term maybe

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  21. Bujold’s “Sharing Knife” series is post-apocalyptic. The Lakewalkers are the heirs to the civilization that apparently accidentally created the malices and destroyed much of the world.

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  22. Both Robert Jackson’s Divine Cities books and Max Gladstone’s Craft series take place after magical wars that killed or defeated the settings’ gods and caused ripples of destruction that are still being patched over years later when the books are set.

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    • Oh, yes – it is a good example because it is also a subversion of the trope. The contemporary society we meet is one that is essentially modernist in outlook and dismissive of the past rather than occupying it.

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      • Plus “Craft Sequence” apocalypse isn’t the dim past — it’s within living memory of some of the characters, who were actually involved in doing it. Definitely subversion.

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  23. Much of the stuff of Guy Gavriel Kay isn’t post apocalyptic. What about Peter Beagle’s oeuvre?

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  24. “The Crimson Empire” series by Alex Marshall (VERY underrated — I nominated the trilogy for Best Series), had the usual mighty sorcerers’ war that left a haunted desert land, and weird-ass scary black pits/gates which, spoilers, plus the fabled Sunken Kingdom burbling out at sea. It’s 500 years in the past, but it definitely set up the world as it is, both political and religious. Everyone knows about it in some detail, and about what was lost.

    Everyone in our world ought to read it. It’s epic in a good way, *very* multi-cultural and LGBT friendly. Also surprisingly funny even mid-grimdark.

    And there are big mysterious whatsits galore that drive the plot in Oor Wombat’s “Clocktaur War” duology. Which I’m sure you all have read, correct? Wonderful as always, with beautiful characterization. A gnole recommends them heartily.

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    • Lurkertype: Everyone in our world ought to read [“The Crimson Empire” series by Alex Marshall]. It’s epic in a good way, *very* multi-cultural and LGBT friendly. Also surprisingly funny even mid-grimdark.

      I totally bounced off A Crown of Cold Silver. What I said at the time: I thought it, like The Dark Between the Stars and to a lesser extent The Builders, suffered from what I call “GRRM Syndrome”: eight hundred characters, four thousand chapters of 6 pages each, and – 50 pages in – me still not giving a damn about any of them.

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      • Once you get into it, it’s worth it. I bounced off GoT several times, but Crimson Empire got me.

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  25. What about E. R. Eddison – The Worm Ouroboros & the Zimiamvian trilogy?
    Another one that comes to mind (although it’s a very long time since I last read it) is William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (and quite possibly other Morris novels, though I haven’t read any of the others. (Yet, he added optmistically))

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  26. In general: a world doesn’t become post apocalypse because there is a fallen civilization in its history. Western Europe of today isn’t post apocalypse, but still has the fall of the Roman Empire in its history.

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    • And the post apocalyptic feeling of lothr probably have more to do with the various catastrophes (plague,civil war, invasions and migrations from the east) for the two Dunedain kingdoms in the middle of the third age.

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