Published in 2010, The Passage is the first book of a planned trilogy by Justin Cronin. The novel spent nearly two months on the New York Times bestseller list, and more importantly my wife really liked it and suggested that I should read it. In broad strokes the story is about a secret government experiment that is attempting to create super-soldiers but instead unleashes a virus that ultimately destroys civilization (at least in North America, we are never given any glimpse of the wider world so it is unknown whether or not the infection was contained). The twelve initial test subjects, all death row inmates who were offered the removal of their death sentence in exchange for participating in the experiment, become in effect vampires. One tenth of their victims also become lesser vampires, powerful enough to hunt mankind nearly to extinction and yet under the thrall of whichever of The Twelve is the original...

After four consecutive weeks of writing about movies, I thought it was time to get back to some white-knuckle post-apocalyptic literature. Published in 2007, Plague Year by Jeff Carlson is the first book in a trilogy about a nanotech machine plague that nearly wipes out humanity and forces the few remaining survivors up onto the mountain tops in order to stay above the invisible sea of death. As one group of survivors struggles to stay alive in the High Sierras in California, a team of researches on the International Space Station races to find some kind of cure or vaccine. Meanwhile a civil war is brewing within the US government, now relocated to Leadville, Colorado in the heights of the Rocky Mountains.

As post-apocalyptic thrillers go, this book is a little more outside my normal comfort zone. It is very much a techno-thriller, with much detail given to the mechanics of the Machine Plague. The nano-virus...

Back in 2007, before he was cast in the lead for the Star Trek reboot, Chris Pine was in a little independent post-apocalyptic virus film called Carriers. It sat in a can for two years until one presumes the distributers of the movie realized that they could maybe make a little extra cash off of Captain Kirk and got Carriers into a limited theatrical release. I stumbled across it on Netflix a while back, and although I entered into it with low expectations I was actually pretty impressed.

The story follows four young adults in the aftermath of a global pandemic.  Brian (Chris Pine), his girlfriend Bobby, his brother Danny, and his brother’s friend Kate are trying to reach Turtle Beach where they think they can wait in safety for the virus to die out. They have survived so far primarily because Brian has a very rigid set of rules they must follow in order to stay uninfected. These aren’t lighthearted Zombieland-type rules, but rather very strict and...

So, I had originally intended to write a Deathlands retrospective this week. I still plan on doing that next week. But I just got home from seeing Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and suddenly that became my topic of the week. I went to the movie expecting a fun Planet of the Apes movie, and instead what I got was a genuinely smart, well-written and well-acted science fiction film. Yes, there were plenty of nods to the original movie, but it really stands completely on its own. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go. You won’t regret it.

The premise of the film is that Will Rodman (played by James Franco) is a research scientist trying to create a cure for Alzheimer's. Not coincidentally, his own father (played perfectly by John Lithgow) suffers from the disease, and is the primary motivator for the research. Through an unfortunate chain of events, Rodman winds up taking home an infant chimpanzee who has genetically inherited the traits from the treatment he was testing. Caesar is raised...

Writer Terry Nation is probably best know as the creator of the Daleks, the most popular recurring monsters on the television show Doctor Who. First appearing in the second ever storyline in the series, the Daleks (and by extension, Terry Nation) were responsible for a huge ratings success on the BBC and spawned a national craze in the United Kingdom. A decade later Terry Nation created a new series for the BBC called “Survivors” which ran for three seasons from 1975 – 1978. The storyline followed a small group of people who survive a plague that kills most of the Earth’s population.



The Logo for the original series

In the original series (which unfortunately I have never seen, but would be keen to watch), the story begins with the mysterious pandemic and then gradually builds a cast of characters who eventually group together to try to build a new...