"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones"

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.     

                          -There Will Come Soft Rains, poem by Sara Teasdale (1920)

I've been interested in dystopic and post-apocalyptic media for some time now. Fortunately for me, there's actually a lot of it out there--more than I would have thought before I went looking for it. I know there are a lot of other people who have similar interests (yes, the zombie craze has many crossover points with post-apocalyptic media generally), so I wanted to start a segment on some of my favorites.

Concept art from Fallout 3, drawn by Adam Adamowicz of Bethesda Softworks.

Realize, first, that dystopia and post-apocalyptia share some traits but fundamentally cover two separate things. While dystopic settings describe a society (that still exists!) in a repressive, police-state situation, post-apocalyptic settings occur when society has broken down due to some tremendous catastrophe. In short, dystopia covers a society that is still structured, but exists in an anti-utopia (hence the name), while post-apocalyptia entails a society that has completely broken down into the state of nature. Post-apocalyptic stories usually involve extensive lawlessness and fights for even the most basic of needs. Sometimes there are pockets of people who have begun to rebuild and have created some semblance of order once more. Another key aspect of post-apocalyptic situations is the apocalypse itself. This could be anything from a natural disaster to an entirely humanity-created catastrophe (as we will see, humanity has a tendency to bring about its own demise in post-apocalyptic literature).

In essence, while the two categories have some similarities (namely, the undesirable nature of living in such a setting), they are fundamentally different. While dystopic societies may be extremely repressive, there is at least some structure to them. In fact, often it is the extent of the structure that causes such a society to be come dystopic in the first place. In this way, they are in stark contrast with the complete "wild west" attitude of post-apocalyptic society.

I plan to hash out each situation further in later posts, while highlighting my favorite examples of each. For now, though, I just wanted to provide a brief overview of each.