I came across this brief post as I was scrolling through Tumblr entitled “I still wonder what happened to the rest of the world in The Hunger Games”:

Do they still have meetings and stuff?
France: Anyone heard from America lately?
Mexico: Same old, same old. They’re still sending out children to fight to the death in a reality show.
UK: Shouldn’t we do something about that?
China: Just leave them, at least they’re not annoying us.

We have a rather extensive set of post-apocalyptic or dystopian speculative fiction set within the boundaries of the United States or North America, but not much looking at such an America from the outside. Speculative fiction, by offering a view of a possible future, is often the best vehicle for commenting on or criticizing today’s political, economic, or social realities. Think of how much social commentary the original Star Trek was able to accomplish by setting its stories in a quasi-utopian future humanity. I too wonder what a post-disaster U.S. would look like from a non-U.S. perspective, particularly one from the “developing world.”

In terms of post-apocalyptic or dystopian future Americas, aside from The Hunger Games, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road comes to mind, along with alternate history works like Harry Turtledove’s “Timeline-191” series and about half the episodes of the TV show Sliders. Then there are TV shows like Jericho, which portrayed a modern-day nuclear attack, and Terra Nova, which was set 85 million years ago but centered around a dangerously polluted 22nd-century America. The new ABC show Last Resort, about which I will probably write more later, depicts a potentially dystopian contemporary or near-future United States. These all focus on America itself, though.

Robert Silverberg’s Time of the Great Freeze takes place during a future Ice Age, where ice sheets have covered much of North America. The protagonists leave their underground city in North America after picking up a radio signal from the London area, intending to cross the ice sheet over the Atlantic. The book mentions that, with much of Europe, North America, and East Asia covered in ice, the equatorial nations of South America, Africa, and Asia have become dominant world powers. It still doesn’t tell us anything about life in those places.

The Brits Seem to Have No Problem Blowing Us Up in Fiction

The best examples I can think of, that deal with the rest of the world, should the United States go all post-apocalyptic or dystopian, come from Great Britain or other English-speaking countries. The films V for Vendetta and Children of Men both came out around the same time in 2005 or 2006. Both are set in the relatively-near future: V for Vendatta mentions the year 2015 as the not-too-distant past, and Clive Owen’s character in Children of Men wears an extremely ratty London 2012 Olympics sweatshirt for much of the film. Both films reference events in “the former United States,” and both depict a UK turned to dictatorship in one form or another. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, set in Australia, shows a U.S. devastated by nuclear war. Continue reading →