Nicolas Moulin, Blindness and deserted streets

Via BLDGBLOG, I’ve just discovered Nicolas Moulin’s computer-altered images of Paris, with streets emptied of all life and the ground floors of each building sealed with concrete. You can see more of Moulin’s stunning work here. One commenter on the BLDGBLOG post referenced the opening scenes of Danny Boyle’s ‘28 Days Later’ – but these [...]

John Hillcoat on societal collapse

John Hillcoat, director of the wonderful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, commenting on the swift degradation of society after a catastrophe: To New Orleans, where we have picked up some local crew who are survivors of Katrina, which gives everything an added poignancy. We heard incredible stories: after the hurricane, the first gang that [...]

The Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham, 1951)

The Day of the Triffids is often cited as the first and archetypal ‘cosy catastrophe’ novel. The hero, Bill Masen, is one of the few not to be blinded by the sights of a green comet storm as his eyes have been bandaged in hospital – in the first and most memorable scene he experiences [...]

The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona, 1964)

What’s striking about The Last Man on Earth is the sheer tedium of Robert Morgan’s day-to-day existence in the years following the vampire virus outbreak.

Cosy catastrophes

The term ‘cosy catastrophe’ was coined by Brian Aldiss in his science fiction history Billion Year Spree. Cosy catastrophes are stories involving a sudden non-violent event wiping out most of civilization; the cosiness refers to the conceit of a band of survivors left to rebuild society in relative comfort. Aldiss originally used the phrase to [...]