# This is the way the world ends (but not with zombies, disease, war, or weather) **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 11, 2016, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079 "2016-06-11T02:41:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/1 "2016-06-11T02:41:22Z")
Have you ever seen **[Pulse](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454919/combined)**? 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. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/2 "2016-06-11T02:53:23Z")
_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. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/3 "2016-06-11T02:56:39Z")
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…) ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/4 "2016-06-11T03:58:31Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Larry Niven dropped a black hole into Mars in “The Hole Man.” (Could have been earth!) [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] ---
**Author:** ![Balance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ccd318/32.png) [@Balance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balance)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/5 "2016-06-11T04:32:21Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/6 "2016-06-11T04:33:25Z")
Grey goo. Nano bots that turn the world into, well themselves. Sorry can’t remember the name of the book. Solar flares and the sun going out is another option. Runaway volcanism (not the Spock kind but the earth kind). Meteors are very popular too. There are a bunch of those books. Lucifer’s Hammer comes to mind. OH! And there was a good one about a tiny black hole that orbited through the earth and slowly ate it up. Eh… can’t remember the name. Aliens are popular too. Ghosts? That’s kinda interesting. I like things that are a bit closer to (however improbable) science though. -edit, the black hole book I mentioned is not what Roderick above was talking about ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 4:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/7 "2016-06-11T04:52:15Z")
Betelgeuse. Not the ghost. The other one. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/8 "2016-06-11T04:54:01Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Shoeless](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/shoeless/32/7099_2.png) [@Shoeless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shoeless)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/9 "2016-06-11T13:18:58Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Goofus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/7feea3/32.png) [@Goofus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Goofus)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/10 "2016-06-11T13:45:42Z")
Left Behind: divine intervention ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/11 "2016-06-11T14:12:38Z")
The most accurate answer is found in James Morrow’s [This is the Way the World Ends](https://www.amazon.com/This-World-Ends-James-Morrow/dp/0156002086?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0). ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/12 "2016-06-11T14:21:09Z")
Not with a bang, but a whimper. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 5:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/13 "2016-06-11T17:13:26Z")
> [@enipla](#): > > Meteors are very popular too. There are a bunch of those books. Lucifer’s Hammer comes to mind. > > OH! And there was a good one about a tiny black hole that orbited through the earth and slowly ate it up. Eh… can’t remember the name. > > Aliens are popular too. Right, but we’re looking for _un_common ways the world ends. That’s why zombies, disease, war and climate change aren’t allowed: too common. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/14 "2016-06-11T17:39:10Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/15 "2016-06-11T17:57:03Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > The most accurate answer is found in James Morrow’s [This is the Way the World Ends](https://www.amazon.com/This-World-Ends-James-Morrow/dp/0156002086?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0). That’s a nuclear war story, though, yeah? ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/16 "2016-06-11T18:04:10Z")
In Fritz Lieber’s _A Pail of Air_ the Earth is torn away from the sun and the survivors have find a way to live when even the atmosphere has frozen. The Earth similarly goes off its orbit in the Twilight Zone episode _The Midnight Sun_, but there’s a twist ending. I don’t think these qualify as just “climate change.” ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/17 "2016-06-11T18:13:04Z")
Frank Herbert’s White Plague was an interesting take on a major world change, tho not outright apocalypse. ---
**Author:** ![AncientHumanoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ancienthumanoid/32/278_2.png) [@AncientHumanoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AncientHumanoid)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/18 "2016-06-11T18:14:18Z")
A planet where Apes evolved from Men?! ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/19 "2016-06-11T18:23:04Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Trafalgar\_Laura](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/trafalgar_laura/32/2907_2.png) [@Trafalgar\_Laura](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trafalgar_Laura)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2016, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079/20 "2016-06-11T20:23:49Z")
Although there are aliens somewhat involved, _Childhood’s End_ ends the world with the human race evolving into a higher form and flying off into space. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-but-not-with-zombies-disease-war-or-weather/757079.md?page=2)