Fiction set after civilization has collapsed, exploring how humans survive, rebuild, or adapt in the aftermath.
Post-apocalyptic fiction picks up after the end: nuclear war, pandemic, climate collapse, cosmic event, or something weirder. The focus is on survival, community formation, and what remains of humanity when the systems we depend on are gone. It strips life down to essentials and asks what people are made of when everything else is taken away.
Post-apocalyptic fiction forces you to think about what matters when everything else is removed. It's a stress test for characters: who are they without the structures of society? It also teaches you to build worlds through absence, showing what's gone rather than what's there, which is a powerful worldbuilding technique.
Father and son crossing a dead landscape, with prose as stripped-down as the world it describes.
A pandemic apocalypse focused not on survival mechanics but on what art and culture mean in a broken world.
Set so far after civilizational collapse that the ruins feel alien, blurring the line between science fiction and fantasy.
Food, shelter, and violence get repetitive fast. The best post-apocalyptic fiction is about what people choose to value when survival is no longer automatic.
Post-apocalyptic is about collapse; dystopia is about control. A tyrannical post-collapse government blends both, but they're different starting points.
Write a scene set three years after an unspecified collapse. A character finds an object from the old world (a vending machine, a traffic light, a children's toy). Through their reaction to this object, reveal both what they've lost and who they've become. Don't explain the apocalypse.