Have you ever seen Pulse? It’s not a great movie, but I like the fact that its dystopian vision is about ghosts. I’d like to read a few books about ghost dystopias but I’m not sure they exist.
So let’s talk more broadly about dystopias that don’t involve a zombie plague (there are literally 1000 of these stories on Kindle right now), a disease like The Stand or war like Swan Song and On The Beach. Hmm, maybe we should disallow weather/climate change too given there are a fair few stories like that too…
So what other ways have the world ended in stories?
I’m mostly interested in books but you can recommend TV shows, movies and comics if they’re really appealing to you.
Cat’s Cradle ends with the world frozen into a form of ice that’s stable at room temperature. It’s not weather because Ice-Nine was invented by a scientist.
The Matrix movies destroyed the world by ending the simulation.
Larry Niven dropped a black hole into Mars in “The Hole Man.” (Could have been earth!)
(Personal brag: I wrote a fantasy story where the “magical paint” that makes up all that we see gets wiped away with magical turpentine. Reality itself blurs like dissolving paint. Unpleasant…)
[side note] David Brin accidentally dropped a very small black hole into the Earth. It didn’t destroy the planet, it just bounced around down there so much that it created neuron-like pathways, so that the Earth became sentient (and sapient). I kid you not. [/side note]
A video game entry offers: temporal compression. The big bad of Final Fantasy VIII was a trans-temporal sorceress whose endgame was to collapse past, present, and future into a sort of kaleidoscopic instant of frozen time, in which only she could act freely. In order to reach her and take her out, the heroes had to let her do it, and hope that killing her would break the spell.
The star Betelgeuse is about six hundred light years away - practically a next door neighbor in galactic terms. And it’s heading towards turning into a supernova. This will be, by far, the closest Earth has ever been to a supernova.
The scientific consensus is that this isn’t a problem. Even though supernovas put out a lot of radiation, six hundred light years is far enough away for us to be safe. All we’ll get here on Earth will be a really cool light show. But the figures are fuzzy enough that we’re in a gray zone.
For a literary recommendation, I’d suggest The Harvest by Robert Charles Wilson. It’s an unusual novel in that the end of the world is presented as a generally positive event.
Would “Children of Men” count? The world doesn’t end but is certainly headed in that direction after women are no longer able to have babies. I don’t believe it falls under the “disease” disqualifier since I don’t think they ever stated or knew the cause.
I heard about a story that was about a disease that killed all the grass in the world. Keep in mind that wheat, rice, corn, and many other grains are forms of grass.
Peter Hamilton’s pretty good (other than the ending, which I found a big disappointment) Neutronium Alchemist sf series is about a galaxy-threatening plague of ghosts, in a way.