It goes without saying that when the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this month, it had a profound impact on how we imagined the world around us. At the sci-fi blog io9, Chanda Phelan shows that the event also changed the imaginings of apocalyptic fiction:
I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time. … As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that’s to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war’s popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991? That surprised me.
Read more (and see the accompanying chart) at io9.
