One of the oldest traditions in human culture is imagining the death and destruction of everyone around us. The Bible offers multiple cataclysms, from Noah’s flood to Sodom and Gomorrah. During the 19th century, fiction writers like Lord Byron, Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells started to wonder about what life would be like after the end of the world. But with the exception of Wells, these ideas made their way into smaller works. The end of the world wasn’t the biggest concern. All that changed after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
