America's post-apocalyptic maps reveal eerily familiar fault lines

"The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That's the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it "America after the Fall." It's a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America's long, hard look in the mirror."

"The unease about the precariousness of that project is heightened by another American specialty: the tension between secular progress and religious millenarianism, the latter being the ardent hope that a divinely ordained cataclysm will wash away the pride, greed, and debauchery resulting from all that so-called progress."

"One of the earliest literary examples of the genre is The Scarlet Plague (1912) by Jack London. Set in 2073, the novel looks back at an epidemic that wiped out most of humanity 60 years earlier. Survivors in the San Francisco Bay area are devolving from civilization back to primitivism. The old civilization recedes, and a new one emerges."

Post-apocalyptic fiction centered on the United States imagines how America endures after catastrophic collapse. The genre projects present anxieties onto future disasters such as nuclear war, alien invasion, deadly pandemics, technological breakdowns, climate collapse, and civil war. Moral turpitude frequently accompanies these imagined catastrophes. The uniquely American dimension arises from the national self-conception as an ongoing democratic experiment perceived as vulnerable to terminal failure. Tension between secular progress and religious millenarianism intensifies apprehension, with some embracing divinely ordained cataclysms to purge societal vice. Classic early examples include Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912) and George R. Stewart's Earth Abides (1949).

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