apocalypses

“The Girl Who Was On Fire” Inspires An Inferno, In Hunger Games Sequel

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins was one of our favorite books last year, and the sequel, Catching Fire, looks even more insane. A new book trailer promises ramped up political intrigue, and an audio excerpt provides a major downpayment. Here’s the new “book trailer” for Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games, in…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

How Do We Get New Science Fiction Stories? Have New Nightmares

Tired of the creaky entertainment machine churning out copy-cat stories of zombies, superheroes, apocalypses and cyborgs? Then you need to conjure new dreads and fantasies in the real world, since that’s where all our science fiction cliches come from. We look at science fiction from the Cold War era with a certain bemusement, with all…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

4 Ways The United States Could End In The Next 100 Years

The United States is always collapsing in science fiction. The U.S. implodes, explodes, or just declines. But a team of professional futurists sees only four scenarios that could end the U.S.A. — and they’ve got a chart to prove it. Slate talks to GBN, a corporate futurist organization, and despite being professional doomsayers, the GBN…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

Sing Along As The World Ends, With Folkalypse Band We’ll Write

As the world ends, who’ll provide the soundtrack for the final moments? In all likelihood, apocalyptic British folk band We’ll Write, whose music video includes a giant robot taking over the world. We’ll Write hails from London, and they start off their biography by noting that oil is vanishing, bees are disappearing, and robots will…

io9 AndrewLiptak

Get Indoctrinated Into Terminator Salvation’s Resistance

Suffering from Terminator withdrawal, now that the TV show’s on break and the movie’s weeks away? Skynet has published a novel and some comics that lead up to Terminator Salvation. We’ve reviewed them for you. The novel is Terminator: From The Ashes, by Star Wars veteran Timothy Zahn, published by Titan Books. And the comics…

Movies Charlie Jane Anders

Moody Concept Design For “The Road” Is Artwork In Its Own Right

The movie version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road still doesn’t have a release date, months after it was supposed to come out. But at least concept artist Hugh Marchant’s brilliant art has appeared online. The artworks include early watercolors of key scenes from the film, and then photomontages using actual location photos. Some of the…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

As Our World Crumbles, Readers Clamor For Science Fiction

In these troubled times, whether you’re looking for some simple escapism or a vision of how things could be even worse, science fiction has the answer. And book sales are starting to reflect that. An article in today’s Publisher’s Weekly traces how the economic crisis and all the resulting social instability have led to two…

Books & Comics Alasdair Wilkins

Let The Host’s Director Show You How To Rule In Hell

The last survivors of humanity shelter on a train going in circles through an icy landscape, in Transperceneige, the French comic which Bong Joon-Ho (The Host) is adapting into a film. Bong contributed one of three segments, along with Michel Gondry and Leos Carax, to an anthology film called Tokyo!, opening in limited release this…

Movies Charlie Jane Anders

The Most Amazing Book Covers from Pre-Golden Age SF

Click to viewSome of the most gorgeous, evocative, and strange science fiction art you’ve ever seen comes from the covers of novels written between 1904-33, in SF’s “pre-Golden Age.” Readers, here is the long-awaited second installment in my Pre-Golden Age SF series. I can’t afford first editions of PGA SF novels, but I’ve managed to…

Books & Comics Joshua Glenn

The 10 Best Apocalypse Novels of Pre-Golden Age SF (1904-33)

With Wall-E director Andrew Stanton working on a film based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1917 novel A Princess of Mars, you need a crash course in books from this seminal era in science fiction. Hollywood adaptations of Brave New World and When Worlds Collide, based on books released at roughly the same time as Princess…

Books & Comics Joshua Glenn

Bloggers Are The Heroes Of The Future. No, Really.

Yet another bizarre webseries has hit the net, but this one has a big budget and a real actor. MSN UK has debuted a miniseries called Kirill, about a heroic blogger 50 years in the future who tries to save us all from a horrendous disaster. The blogger’s played by David Schofield (Gladiator, Pirates Of…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

The World’s Most Beautiful Zombies

Roland Becerra’s terrifyingly lovely animated short, Dear Beautiful, is being turned into a full-length movie. The jarringly realistic animation follows Paul, a married man whose marriage is in trouble. Paul’s wife sniffs a deadly new flower that is popping up all over their home state of Connecticut. The contaminated flower (tarnished by a nearby make-up…

io9 Meredith Woerner

What’s The Greatest Post-Apocalyptic Movie For Kids?

Will City Of Ember be the first post-apocalyptic movie aimed at kids? Based on Jeanne DuPrau’s young adult novel, Ember features two kids discovering there’s a world outside the dying underground city that they’ve lived in for the past 250 years. And director Gil Kenan (Monster House) sees it as a visual, epic teen adventure…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

Norway Builds Giant Shelter For The End Of The World

Norway’s “Doomsday Vault” will open tomorrow, just in time to safeguard our biodiversity against the apocalypse. Carved into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, about 620 miles from the North Pole, the vault has been built to withstand nuclear missiles or a plane crash on top of it, but it’s also far enough above…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

Jericho Predicted The Blackwater Scandals

This week’s episode of post-apocalyptic drama Jericho pits our hero Jake Green against Ravenwood, the government security contractor he used to work for. When the producers were originally coming up with ideas for a TV show about the collapse of governing institutions after nuclear attacks, they did a lot of research into contractors like Halliburton…

io9 Charlie Jane Anders

“The Girl Who Was On Fire” Inspires An Inferno, In Hunger Games Sequel

How Do We Get New Science Fiction Stories? Have New Nightmares

4 Ways The United States Could End In The Next 100 Years

Sing Along As The World Ends, With Folkalypse Band We’ll Write

Get Indoctrinated Into Terminator Salvation’s Resistance

Moody Concept Design For “The Road” Is Artwork In Its Own Right

As Our World Crumbles, Readers Clamor For Science Fiction

Let The Host’s Director Show You How To Rule In Hell

The Most Amazing Book Covers from Pre-Golden Age SF

The 10 Best Apocalypse Novels of Pre-Golden Age SF (1904-33)

Bloggers Are The Heroes Of The Future. No, Really.

The World’s Most Beautiful Zombies

What’s The Greatest Post-Apocalyptic Movie For Kids?

Norway Builds Giant Shelter For The End Of The World

Jericho Predicted The Blackwater Scandals

Study Challenges Popular Theory on Why Primordial Bugs Were So Darn Huge

Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway’s Mystery’s Sci-Fi Film Has Its First Trailer

Scientists Just Found the Salt Limit That Pushes Your Heart to the Breaking Point

White House Social Media Just Had Its Covfefe Moment

Roborock F25 Ultra Steam Wet Dry Vacuum Is Now at Its Lowest Price, but Only During the Spring Sale Window

This $450 Semi-Dumb Phone Is Barely Even a Phone

Startup Successfully Ignites World’s First Fusion Rocket

Shokz OpenDots One Earbuds Hit Their Lowest Price Yet Across All Color Options, Including the New Ones

Sonos Play Review: Call It a Comeback

Sonos Era 100 SL Review: The Cheapest Way Into Wired Sonos Sound

Asus ROG’s Massive Swift OLED Gaming Monitor Epitomizes Excess in the Best Way

The Ikea Varmblixt Smart Lamp Fills a Donut Hole in My Life

Nothing Headphone A vs. Headphone 1: Which Pair of ANC Wireless Headphones Wins?

Asus ROG’s Cetra Open Wireless Gaming Earbuds Might Be Better Than Wearing a Headset

Nintendo’s Talking Flower Is Annoying as Hell. I Love It

Level Lock Pro Review: As Good as a Secret Smart Lock Gets

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