If the History Channel is to be believed, humanity is subject to two certainties. One: The human race’s turbulent past is composed pretty much as follows: 84% violence/war; 15% political/social/philosophical/architectural development; 1% pirates. And, two: Mankind’s fate is to suffer a violent extinction, an uncomfortable, blazing conclusion that will appropriately mirror the species’ violent existence. Citing sources like Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar, the bastion of televised erudition routinely reports on the apocalypse as if it were a given.

The first episode of the History’s much hyped series, "The Universe," was about the sun, which, we were warned, regularly burps a storm of lethal protons from solar flares. And it seems that a proton cloud might have fatal consequences for Earthlings. Of course, it also might not. However, even if we’re safe, a proton cloud could knock out power lines across the planet. Whereupon, according to the documentary, mankind can expect mass hysteria, violent riots, and, you know, the apocalypse, probably.

For every apocalypse, though, a post apocalypse awaits around the corner. As determined as various spiritual teachings are to ensure mankind’s demise, we humans share a belief that at least a handful of us will survive any catastrophe. Trends show that if you want to scare people into abstinence from sex and liquor and other fun stuff, you tell them the world’s about to end. On the other hand, if you want to entertain them, the world’s end is just the beginning of the story.

In literature, the post-apocalyptic world primarily serves one of two functions. The end of the world is a device used to paint a dismal background on which the foreground drama plays out, or the end times are used to merely tell a morbid story of the apocalyptic process: this is the end of the world, and here is how we go.

The alarmingly successful "Left Behind" series plunges hastily and irresponsibly into the latter category. The result is what happens when interpreters of religious text exchange moral instruction for the wealth and influence that go with entertainment. Unfortunately for the authors’ savings accounts, even Hollywood’s lower-than-low-brow producers can’t inflate characters like Rayford Steele and Buck Williams, who are so flat they’re rendered invisible. But, as the History Channel’s repetitive reporting on the state of potential catastrophes proves, fascination with the apocalypse isn’t limited to Christian zealots. In fact, the allure of post-apocalyptic inevitability has been recently underscored on film (Children of Men), in video games ("Gears of War"), and frequently in fiction meant to appeal to a wide audience.

An imaginative approach to the end of days is Max Brooks’ recent World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. The story is as direct as its title implies. There are zombies. They will eat you. Brooks instantly endows his characters with substance by employing a popular narrative trick. As the title suggests, these oral recollections are told from the many varied perspectives of survivors of the Zombie War. Whether the narrator is a teenaged Japanese Internet addict or a celebrity bodyguard in Manhattan, each tale exhales an unexpected freshness that drives the plot. The plot, however, may be the story’s weakness, since it fails to develop into much more than an escapist fable, a cautionary tale that details how the world will end if we don’t try to snuff out bird flu before it gets us. Regardless, "World War Z" is gristly, macabre fun and would be on the big screen in no time if it weren’t for that other zombie flick.

As real as the zombie threat may seem to some of us, the standard mode of near extinction in post-apocalyptic literature is still The Bomb. As a thorough and indiscriminate destroyer, it has no manmade equal. Plus, it obliterates with such dreadful irony that whatever plot follows is effortlessly consumed. In fact, nuclear annihilation is such a forgone conclusion that, in The Road, Cormac McCarthy doesn’t even bother spelling it out as the source of the empty, singed wasteland across which a father and son lumber towards salvation (or something like it). The journey the two suffer takes place in the near future and is tragically plausible, were the world to come to that. McCarthy’s gaunt prose propels their gruesome expedition, and the effect leaves an irrefutable display of man’s overwhelming and pathetic fragility. Fortunately, McCarthy pulls a punch at the end, which permits his readers to sleep at night.

The same annihilation that McCarthy’s characters struggle to survive could very well be the cause of the post-apocalyptic world faced by the characters in Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx. Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy’s great-grandniece, borrows the charred scenery to draw this postmodern twist on the Russian literary tradition. The partial dystopia in which her characters more or less contentedly toil – they eat mice; they bear “Consequences” caused by radiation – is governed by a unbending ruler who controls everything, from the October holiday, which takes place in November, to reading material. Yes, books, it seems are still around, but only those written (or, more properly, plagiarized) by their benevolent leader are allowed. Everyone knows that pre-apocalyptic printed material causes a terrible death – a lie that the protagonist discovers and ignores. As it turns out, post-apocalyptic Moscow is a tightly governed and censored kleptocracy where state enforcement regularly punishes recalcitrant comrades who rise from the masses drunk on kvas and their prideful, sour melancholy. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

Will Self’s The Book of Dave takes place even further into the future after the blast. So far, in fact, that the inhabitants of Ham, an island off mainland New London, have bred beasts, called motos, that talk and baby-sit the community’s children. The compelling crux of the novel is the Book of Dave itself, an angry treatise written in the 1990s by a London cabbie named Dave, whose ex-wife refuses to let him see his son. Dave buries the rant in his ex-wife’s backyard so his son will eventually find it. Instead, the text is uncovered millennia later by New Londoners, who take it as holy scripture, which understandably leads to some alien social norms – especially regarding male-female relations. Overall, Self’s latest is a good story, if it is a bit unwieldy, a blemish amplified by sections written in Arpee, the Hamsters’ dialect. And, yes, people of Ham are called Hamsters, one of the lighthearted quirks Self employs that makes The Book of Dave a pleasure to read. 

Historically, the warning of a coming apocalypse formed the basis of nascent religions, usually composed of small, persecuted groups. An apocalyptic story, called an eschatology, often tells of a sect’s salvation through faith or ritual, as well as their wicked rulers’ demise. Today, these groups are called cults, though plenty have matured enough in membership and familiarity to be called denominations, even if they can’t quite earn the title of a sanctioned religion. Stories of the end of the world are strikingly similar across cultures and centuries, and they indicate some fixture of the human condition, which lies at the heart of another recently translated Russian novel, ICE, by Vladimir Sorokin.

ICE and The Road are the most devastating and thrilling novels I’ve read in a while. But where The Road ties finally into a precious, if soot-stained, little bow, ICE implodes. The tale describes an influential Aryan cult that recruits from Moscow’s seedy underground by kidnapping malcontents and forcing them to endure a cruel ritual. Just as the threads of the story begin to make sense, Sorokin introduces a new narrator, along with a new setting, tone, and characters. The story is asymmetrical and is routinely pitiless to its characters, but one of the most enchanting narrators in several years soothes the pain. ICE is a postmodern tale, but it’s the kind of dark masterpiece that somehow comes to outshine anything comparable. (By the way, ICE and The Slynx are published by New York Review Books, which is devoted to out-of-print and translated masterpieces – I’ve yet to find a flop in the NYRB catalog.)

Accuracy is always demanded when questions are raised about Jesus’ life and death, as James Cameron recently found when he suffered Biblical scholars’ derision over his documentary about the discovery of Jesus’ tomb. They charged that it ignored academic standards of responsibility by taking several creatively unfaithful leaps of logic, along with a few minor offenses of periphrasis and visual dissembling.

The same standards should also be upheld when we worry over the seeming inevitability of human extinction. As a nightmare backdrop for entertainment or literature, any adaptation of these events is acceptable. But when the notion of apocalyptic destruction is allowed to transform from a fantasy of the persecuted into an implicit, sensationalized and imminent event, people begin to make goofy decisions about their lives.

Unfortunately, in the end, the History Channel is right. If we don’t get off this rock, the sun will eventually kill us. But we’ve got about five billion years to think about it.