# What's your favorite science fiction storyline?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favorite-science-fiction-storyline/48856>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [January 7, 2001, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favorite-science-fiction-storyline/48856 "2001-01-07T11:53:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 8

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Fenris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fenris/32/498_2.png) [@Fenris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fenris)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2001, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favorite-science-fiction-storyline/48856/8 "2001-01-07T19:21:12Z")

</div>

> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by featherlou \*  
> \*\*(Fenris - as a fan of really bad puns, I loved “The…Toxic Spell Dump” - many, many giggles in there).  
> One of my favourite sci-fi storylines is what I call Apocalyptic Fiction in which mankind is virtually wiped out on Earth for whatever reason. The storyline usually focuses on how people deal with this huge catastrophe, and also on how life on Earth would be for the survivors, where they go from there, how they re-build, fight the evil that caused it, etc. One of my favourite novels with this theme is Stephen King’s “The Stand”. L.Ron Hubbard’s “Battlefield Earth” (the book, not the very inadequate movie) is another fairly good example (I’ve read much better, but I can’t think of them at the moment). \*\*

I went through a period where I read every Apocalyptic book I could get my hands on, and kind of burned out. An oddball one is “Of Men and Monsters” by William Tenn (aka world-class skeptic Phillip Klass). Aliens invade and wipe most of us out. The ending is really, _really_ creepy.

Have you tried any of the British-style “cozy catastrope” novels from the '50s and '60s? From Wyndham’s “Day of the Triffids” to John Christopher’s “No Blade of Grass” to Ward Moore’s “Greener than you Think”, to Jones’s “Denver is Missing” they all feature novel ways of wiping out the earth (Everyone is blinded in Triffids, grain won’t grow in Christopher’s, everything with chloriphyll grows too well and takes over in Moore’s and the atmosphere is poisoned from a mile above sea-level up in Jones’s book), they all feature small groups trying to survive. I think you’d enjoy them.

BTW: Spider Robinson, in “Telempath” has the most inventive way of destroying civilization I’ve ever read: Someone lets loose a virus that gives all humans the ability to dectect smells better than a bloodhound. And no ability to filter it or turn it off. Cities are destroyed in a matter of hours as people rush to get free of the scent.

Fenris

---

_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favorite-science-fiction-storyline/48856)._