Post-Apocalyptic and Dystopian Fiction

Subgenres of speculative fiction set after or anticipating the collapse of civilization, or its replacement by an imagined worse society, used to comment on the real one. Includes post-apocalyptic fiction and its zombie-apocalypse variant, utopian and dystopian fiction, the founding genre that imagines a society radically better or worse than the author's own to argue about the real one, and paranoid fiction's exploration of a reality manipulated by an external totalitarian government or an internal force, a theme this subgenre shares directly with the dystopian tradition. Excludes general science-fiction subgenres whose premise is a scientific or technological change without a societal-collapse or totalitarian-control premise, grouped instead under Science Fiction Subgenres.