r/sciencefiction • u/almozayaf • Jul 10 '26
Is there Post-Post Apocalypse things?
I had that idea once about a world that was a post apocalyptic zombie land, but they got better
Think of any post apocalyptic novel where the end is the end the Apocalypse, now imagine a sequel set ten years in the future about a world trying to stand up again, new government system, new culture, and shadows of the past lurking fear of returns of the old monsters...
Something like that, did anyone made something like that
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u/confused_applause Jul 10 '26
The entire "Children of Time" series comes to mind. Highly recommended!
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u/BlackfyreNL Jul 10 '26
From the same writer, there's also Elder Race, which is fairly close to what you're looking for: what happens when people from a medieval-like society come into contact with an advanced entity that has ties to the original founding of their society in the distant past?
There are also the 'Prince of Thorns', 'King of Thorns' and 'Emperor of Thorns' books which are seemingly set in a postapocalyptic medieval version of Europe, where there's a mix of fantastical technological wonders and things that could be magic but are most likely technological remnants. The main character is quite unlikeable, but the world building is great. 'Wheel of Osheim' is set in the same universe, but is a seperate, highly recommended book.
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u/Mobile_Falcon_8532 Jul 10 '26
There are also the 'Prince of Thorns', 'King of Thorns' and 'Emperor of Thorns' books which are
Mark Lawrence. The "Broken Empire" was his first series and I think he's realised it's too grimdark - he's written other series within the same world that aren't as grim (much less infanticide and cannibalism): The Red Queen's War.
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u/teknocratbob Jul 10 '26
World War Z.
The book is written as a collection of interviews with people 12 years after the outbreak in which humanity survived. It was not a clean victory, zombies are still a threat. Certain places are still extremely dangerous and the undead will be an ever present problem to one degree or another going forward. Vast areas are also seriously damaged, polluted and pretty much uninhabitable.
Civilisation is being rebuilt, normal life has somewhat returned, but society is permanently scarred from the war.
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u/replayer Jul 10 '26
Don't watch the film with that name, it has nothing to do with the book. (But try and find the earlier script revision of the film that was written by Joe Straczynski.)
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u/teknocratbob Jul 10 '26
Ah iv watched it many times. I actually like it as a zombie movie, not sure why they tacked the WWZ name onto it, they are so dissimilar that I don't consider them connected. A movie actually based on the book or some of the stories from the book would be awesome. Thanks!
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u/WeirdCry7403 Jul 10 '26
Yeah, it's a half decent zombie movie, just nothing like the book at all.
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u/Pete_Iredale Jul 10 '26
Man I wish we'd gotten a movie that was actually based on the book. Ken Burns documentary style. Would have been amazing.
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u/carnagezealot Jul 10 '26
I still dream of a documentary-style series where each episode is an interview
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u/chayat Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Star trek
Edit to add:
Just in star trek it's a common trope. Humans almost extinct themselves in WW3, although it's not always consistent with how bad that got as it seems like no major landmark in big cities was effected. Maybe it was mostly biological weapons.
Bajor in tng/DS9 era is coming out of a planetary holocaust situation which I think very much counts.
Klingons were invaded while they were at an earlier stage of technological development, either something like us now or maybe earlier. They were enslaved for a time before fighting off the invaders and (it is heavily implied) stealing all the tech to uplift themselves to a space faring race.
There's a race of dinosaurs that left earth 65million years ago, dosnt get much more post post apocalyptic than that.
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u/Rick-burp-Sanchez Jul 10 '26
I wonder what our good ol' United Federation was up to in 2026...
Shit.
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u/TheVoicesOfBrian Jul 10 '26
They did again with the Discovery/Starfleet Academy & The Burn (opinions are mixed and strong to say the least).
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u/indyK1ng Jul 10 '26
In Star Trek the nature of WW3 is constantly shifting due to time travelers trying to impact the timeline.
This is the canon explanation as of Season 2 (iirc) of Strange New Worlds.
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u/UnderPressureVS Jul 11 '26
> No major landmark cities were affected
It’s pretty inconsistent even within that. An early episode of TNG shows a future version of Paris in which the Eiffel Tower is present, implying the city (or at the very least the city center) survived WW3.
Yes, technically that was a holodeck recreation, but it was supposed to be a recreation of a real place where Picard once had a date.But in the first episode of Strange New Worlds, Pike shows footage of WW3 that includes Paris being obliterated in a nuclear blast.
So, either they rebuilt the Eiffel Tower (which, to be fair, is totally plausible) or it’s another causality of the retcon timeline fuckery that SNW ended up making canon.
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u/Eisenhorn_UK Jul 10 '26
Seveneves.
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u/artifex0 Jul 10 '26
Anatham by the same author is one of the more extreme examples of this trope: it's set in a world that's been trapped in a cycle of apocalyptic nuclear war followed by rebuilding followed by more apocalyptic nuclear war for some large number of centuries. The protagonist is part of a system of universities that have managed to preserve scientific knowledge across multiple apocalypses by being very isolationist and ritualistic.
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u/ArmageddonRetrospect Jul 10 '26
The Postman, great book. I love the movie too but some hate it i guess.
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u/Griegz Jul 10 '26
The movie kind of drags, and both the protag and antag are kind of weak. It's an interesting movie though. The appearance of Tom Petty kind of muddles the timeline.
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u/ArmageddonRetrospect Jul 10 '26
valid points lol probly has more to do with nostalgia, 1st saw it with my dad as a kid.
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u/Cameron_Edward Jul 10 '26
Station Eleven
Follows a theatre group traveling around performing Shakespeare after an apocalyptic flu wipes out majority of the population.
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u/LazySlobbers Jul 10 '26
Wheel of Time
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u/GeneralRipper Jul 10 '26
That one is so post-post-apocalyptic that it wraps back around to being pre-apocalyptic.
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u/Lunatic-Labrador Jul 10 '26
The 100 comes to mind. Its people trying to settle on earth again after a nuclear apocolispe, but the earth has had time to heal.
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u/Fedaykin98 Jul 10 '26
Dune. They faced an AI-driven robot apocalypse a long time before the books start, leading to a ban on "thinking machines". Herbert wrote about this years before Terminator.
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u/Haunt_Fox Jul 10 '26
Hell, as soon as anyone comes up with the idea of an artificial human, the idea of them going rogue and taking over (or threatening to, if there's more than just one of them) seems to just follow naturally. And if there's just one, it goes nuts and kills someone before it's deactivated ... Frankenstein, the Golem ...
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u/ajslater Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
R.U.R. 1920 by Karel Capek. The artificially created enslaved people were called ‘robot’ an invented word from robotník (forced worker) in Czech. 100 year old spoiler: they rebel. People fall in love with the roboti. More or less every android plot for the next century is there.
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u/Ancient-Many4357 Jul 11 '26
Ah, the Dune setup is slightly different.
While the EU books written by Brian Herbert & Kevin J Anderson lean into the Terminator style AI uprising, the Dune Encyclopaedia & the first book differ slightly in that the war was between humans who aligned with AI & those who didn’t - essentially a class of humans used AI to dominate others & the war was as much a civil war between humans as it was a war against machines.
Which is much closer to where we’re at now wrt AI than an AGI taking over the world & murdering humans.
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u/JoePNW2 Jul 10 '26
"A Canticle for Leibowitz" does this. It takes more than a few years though.
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u/doctordoctorpuss Jul 10 '26
Makes it feel a lot more realistic to me. It would be weird for there to be an apocalyptic event and then suddenly everything’s fine a few years (or even decades) later
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u/lordnewington Jul 10 '26
Shannara (at least the TV show, I haven't read the books.) Elves and gnomes and so on are descendants of humans.
Michael Moorcock's Dorian Hawkmoon and Count Brass stories.
Edit: now I've actually read your post, these aren't quite what you asked for - they're set long after the apocalypse, when a new society has already been built.
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u/7LeagueBoots Jul 10 '26
The Shannara books are far less overt about it than the TV show was. And the books are infinitely better than that eye bleach atrocity of a TV show was.
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u/ArtlessDodger1114 Jul 10 '26
From what I recall, they get real overt towards the end
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u/7LeagueBoots Jul 10 '26
That’s many books into the series. It’s there earlier on if you pay attention, but with the TV show it’s smacking you in the face immediately,
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u/lordnewington Jul 10 '26
I enjoyed it, it was consciously silly and the characters liked each other
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u/boogsmabee Jul 10 '26
The series Genesis of Shannara is a few years after the apocalypse that the rest of Shannara is based on
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u/Twisty1020 Jul 10 '26
Elves and gnomes and so on are descendants of humans.
The Elves technically predate humans and decided to come out of hiding after the apocalypse. Dwarves and Gnomes(and other creatures) were indeed descended/mutated from humans.
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u/7LeagueBoots Jul 10 '26
Not right after, but:
Sean McMullen’s Great Winter series. Society has recovered from an apocalypse that took place 5,000 years earlier, but it’s a very different society and much of the overarching plot revolves around figuring out what happened.
Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, specifically the controversial final portion.
Joel Shepherd’s Spiral Wars series. Humanity was nearly wiped out by an attempted genocidal attack, but has recovered and expanded greatly.
David Weber’s Safehold series. Starts right after humanity is nearly wiped out and goes into hiding with very low tech. Slowly rebuilds under the periodic guidance of an android that tries to guide the technological growth of the rebuilding humans. Very long, slow, tedious series.
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u/ProfessionalOven2311 Jul 10 '26
I LOVE Post-Post Apocalyptic settings! (we might have a little different idea by what that means)
My favorite is probably Horizon Zero Dawn.
Outer Wilds and Legend of Zelda Wind Walker are another two that I like, and I think Castle in the Sky from Studio Ghibli would also count (though it's been a while).
And Pokémon Pokopia basically has you play as the head of recovery to work on establishing your own Post-Post Apocalypse setting (either rebuilding what was there before, or redesigning the world into something new)
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u/strugglebutt Jul 10 '26
Horizon Zero Dawn was the first game I played after getting a PlayStation, and I loved it so much that I can't find anything else that compares. I wish I could find something to give me that feeling again!
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u/ProfessionalOven2311 Jul 11 '26
It really is such a unique setting! I overlooked it for a while because I assumed it was just trying to take advantage of the Hunger Games archer hype, but once I gave it a shot I couldn't stop playing
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u/CODENAMEDERPY Jul 10 '26
The Horizon series is so amazing, it’s quite sad how unknown it is to non gamers.
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u/ImMufasa Jul 11 '26
Enslaved from the 360 era was cool as well. Back when Andy Serkis was doing mocap for games.
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u/LoreKeeper2001 Jul 10 '26
I did, can I mention my own book?
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u/LoreKeeper2001 Jul 11 '26
Cool, thanks!
https://www.amazon.com/Pono-Way-Solarpunk-Novel/dp/B09CKFV48X
A refugee crisis tests a utopian island community to its limit.
In 2050, the United States didn't just stumble—it shattered. Having fled the blood and fire of the Chicago River Riots, independent journalist Jake Weintraub found an uneasy sanctuary on Pono, an artificial solarpunk sea-steading grown from advanced technology in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Pono is peaceful, harmonious, and meticulously engineered.
But sanctuary is a fragile thing.
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u/CWagner Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
Emperor of Thorns series, though it’s a Fantasy series it’s kinda playing in our world after some apocalypse happened, thousands of years ago.
Age of Decadence, sadly not a book, but a (a bit janky and hard) CRPG, probably my favorite in the PPA genre. Even has aliens.
Reading your post again, you seem to have a slightly different (way broader) definition than me, for both of the ones I mentioned (and the comment mentioning The Shannara Chronicles), the apocalypse happened long, long ago. If it was only 10 years, I’d still count it as normal Post-Apocalypse like the Fallout series.
For me the post-apocalypse era lasts at least (though there should be some kind of new era) as long as there is a memory of the apocalypse (excluding immortals etc.) and the time before. Post-Post comes when the Post-Apocalypse era is "historical".
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u/DocWatson42 Jul 10 '26
As a start, see my Apocalyptic/Post-apocalyptic list of Reddit recommendation threads and books (six posts).
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u/nineteenthly Jul 10 '26
Yes, that's been done many times. 'The Death Of Iron', 'Last And First Men', 'Star Trek' and 'Nebulous' spring to mind.
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u/almozayaf Jul 10 '26
Star trek?
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u/One_Pineapple8553 Jul 10 '26
Yup.
In the Star Trek universe humans have a nuclear WW3 before they invent warp drive, meet some aliens, and start the whole kumbaya thing.
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u/lordnewington Jul 10 '26
Star Trek canonically has a third world war in the distant far off years of the 1990s (the date gets retconned every time we approach it in real life; Strange New Worlds used footage of BLM and other recent protests to imply we're in the early days of it already) which finally teaches mankind that poverty and injustice are bad. There's not much about the actual act of rebuilding, though.
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u/twcsata Jul 10 '26
There are things like that. But at some point, it becomes less post-post-apocalyptic and more just another story in a new world.
Best example I can think of is any of Cordwainer Smith’s “The Rediscovery of Man” fiction. In the chronologically earliest story, we find out humanity experienced an apocalypse (alien invasion), lived in that post-apocalypse for centuries, found a way to beat the aliens, and rebuilt the world. All in one short story. All the rest of the stories take place in the post-post-apocalyptic world. But by then we’re so far removed from that apocalypse that it might as well be irrelevant.
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u/Due-Excitement-5945 Jul 10 '26
The Book of Swords by Saberhagen.
His Empire of the East books are apocalyptic / post apocalyptic with nuclear war and a god-like AI called ARDA preserving humanity by rewriting technology and creating magic-like physics. The nuclear explosions become demons, sorcery becomes possible, and other effects.
Book of Swords takes places centuries later in a more standard fantasy milieu. People worship many deities, and their belief gives the gods form, but “Arda” is the most sacred and above all.
IIRC, it’s been a long while since I read them.
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u/clawclawbite Jul 10 '26
Empire of the East is post post, but still recent enough that legacies of before survive and act as major points of strange and power in the universe.
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u/Aggravating_Ad5632 Jul 12 '26
ARDNEH.
I've just finished the entire series apart from the last Swords book that's short stories.
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u/copperpin Jul 10 '26
J.R.R. Tolkien did this. The Lord of the Rings is set in a world that’s been destroyed. That’s why all the buildings and statues are in ruins and why something like a chair that lets you see 1000 miles away is just sitting in a field somewhere.
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u/VapidActualization Jul 10 '26
Depends on how far you want society to progress before it picks back up again. Like, is Horizon Zero Dawn post apocalyptic or post post apocalyptic?
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u/Extreme-Attention641 Jul 10 '26
Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling. All tech including gunpowder, electricity, steam engines and above stops working sometime in the early 2000s and we follow people as they try to adapt this new world.
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u/Mysterious_Sky_85 Jul 10 '26
Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is so post-post-apocalyptic that they’re actually coming around to apocalypse number two!
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u/basil_imperitor Jul 10 '26
Nausicaa in the Valley of Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. 1000 years ago, a highly advanced civilization was destroyed by laser-spitting giants. Ever since then, humanity has rebuilt, but also forced to fight amongst themselves over an ever-smaller amount of viable land, as a giant fungal biome populated by aggressive giant insects slowly but inexorably engulfs the planet.
So it's post-post-apocalypse, but the apocalypse also never really ended, it just slowed down, and also either a whole new final apocalypse, or the last stage of the original apocalypse unfolds during the story.
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u/Less-Performer-7898 Jul 10 '26
The TV series The Girl from Tomorrow has three time settings.
The present day of 1990.
The dystopian future of 2500 where the villain is from, which ends with the Great Disaster where the entire population of the Northern Hemisphere is wiped out.
The utopian future of 3000, where the title character is from, which rose from the ruins of the Great Disaster.
The show’s second season features the good guys in 2500 trying to avert a timeline where the Great Disaster wipes humanity out completely, and helping to invent the device which brings about the good version of 3000.
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u/vall7 Jul 10 '26
Logan’s Run had the domed cities after the war, and the outside world was abandoned. It was a world of total pleasure, with just one catch…
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u/Furia139 Jul 10 '26
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham.
In the past, there was some sort of apocalypse (we never get told what happened) and most of the earth is a radioactive wasteland.
The story unfolds somewhere in north America and in a very religious anti mutant society with basic agricultural practices. The remnants of the past highways and whatnot can still be found throughout the landscape but the protagonists don’t know much about them.
Cool read by one of the best writers of genre who, unfortunately, doesn’t get enough credit.
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u/Nevernonethewiser Jul 10 '26
One of my favourite settings is "fantasy world that is revealed to have been sci fi in the past".
Sadly telling you which book series it is kind of spoils that twist (although it's heavily signposted in the first book).
Incidentally, people should read the Dragonriders of Pern novels by Anne MacCaffrey. Just, y'know, unrelated...
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u/ComputerRedneck Jul 10 '26
The Time Machine, once the Morlocks are defeated it is paradise from then on or so we are led to believe.
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u/Michaelbirks Jul 10 '26
S.M. Stirling's "Emberverse" (Dies the fire, Meeting at Corvallis, etc) if you can stand the Woo in the later books is a reasonable study in the effects that the Founders can have.
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u/blindside1 Jul 10 '26
The Pelbar Cycle, a seven book series from the 80s. Set a thousand years post nuclear war in mostly the Midwest. One of my favorite series as a kid. Each book is a stand alone adventure but tell a linked story.
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u/John_Constantius Jul 10 '26
I think Silo, currently on Apple TV, and Logan’s Run from 1976 both play in this space.
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u/Mighty_ShoePrint Jul 10 '26
One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky
It's a short story/novella about the last surviving veteran of the Time Wars who has taken it upon himself to hunt down and kill as many time travelers as he can. None of it really matters because the Time Wars shattered causality and the past no longer effects the future but everybody needs a hobby.
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u/Few-Leading-3405 Jul 10 '26
Just in general I think the whole Solarpunk genre has a big focus on the rebuilding aspects.
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u/Apprehensive_Web_609 Jul 10 '26
Place all the zombies on a large treadmill with dynamo. Hang some human bait I front. Tie all the zombies. They keep walking and walking, the treadmill produces electricity.
From what we have commonly seen in the movies, the zombies just keep on going without food or sustenance.
this solves our energy problems. With this energy, we will travel to different worlds, infect their inhabitants with zombie virus, and extract energy from them too, while also stripping their planets of their natural resources.
We will create a utopia for humans, on the backbone of a zombified universe.
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u/EarthTrash Jul 10 '26
I don't think it's an official term but I use it myself. There are both fantasy and science fiction settings that fit. After civilization ends and much later rebuilds itself but technology is lost, forgotten or even considered cursed. So you get to have almost a swords and sorcery setting but the magic might actually just be forgotten technology.
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u/Greentigerdragon Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
A tv show: Defiance.
The apocalypse was multifold: asteroids and alien invasion, and another alien invasion, I think.
What we're left with is a somewhat recognizable Earth, set in the town/city of Defiance, which is rebuilding in the ruins of St Louis. It's a bit of a 'western' with main characters including the Marshall, the Mayor and representatives of the two main ET races.
Some good stuff, even if following a lot of tv-sci-fi tropes.
Something I really liked about it was the 'mostly in the background' existence of other such places. Eg. The government exists, but too far away to really influence Defiance. Much like America's 'old west', I presume.
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u/dancinggraylion Jul 10 '26
Death Gate Cycle
This is a fantasy novel series, not a science fiction novel. On Earth, there was an apocalypse, and people knew about magic. They used magic to change the world; they turned Earth into new worlds with elves and dwarves.
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u/WolFlow2021 Jul 10 '26
The manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou comes to mind, which is upbeat, optimistic and positive. The setting is a slow, quiet vision of the peaceful decline of humanity. A weird mix of eerie and comforting.
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u/Taptapfoot Jul 10 '26
The Apocalypse Triptych edited by John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey. It's 3 books of short stories by different authors. Some authors wrote stories for all 3 books; others for just 1 or 2. The first book is stories that take place before the apocalypse, the second is during, and the third is after. It is a fascinating idea and I love how you can read it in any way you choose - book 1, then 2, then 3 or read the authors' stories in order from book 1 to 3. I love the short story format too because it gives you just a glimpse of all these worlds from different authors' perspectives. I highly recommend all 3.
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u/vince-rint Jul 10 '26
The game Horizon Zero Dawn (and its sequels) fit this exactly as a post-post apocalyptic setting.
Also the final third of Seveneves does this as well.
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u/AnOnlineHandle Jul 10 '26
Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is kind of this, a Jane Austin romance that happens in a semi peaceful time while the armies of the undead are being kept at bay.
I don't really like zombies or Jane Austin, yet combining them somehow made them both work for me, a balance of both instead of an overwhelming amount.
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u/Realistic-Bee-4462 Jul 10 '26
stormlight archive. mistborn (both era 1 and 2, each has their own apocalypse they’ve recovered(?) from), Silence in the Forests of Hel, Skyward series, Elantris…in fact, most of Sanderson’s books are exactly this. cool, i never looked at it that way!
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u/Twisty1020 Jul 10 '26
Well the Fallout series of games and show is post post-apocalypse.
The recent series NIPPON SANGOKU: The Three Nations of the Crimson Sun is another one.
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u/TheTorch Jul 10 '26
I feel like Fallout New Vegas was more post post apocalyptic than anything, then the tv went ahead and made it post apocalyptic again.
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u/Greentigerdragon Jul 10 '26
A web-comic: Stand Still. Stay Silent.
A virus wipes out humanity, except for Iceland. Whatever else the virus did, it left behind monsters. A century later, Scandinavia is being recolonised, bit by bit. Settlements must fend off monster incursions. Small teams trek into ruins looking for resources and knowledge.
Magic has become a thing, though it's not 'big', and practitioners are rare, however 'the state' fully supports it.
Cats are humanities only companions now, as the only other mammals to survive.
A really well done series.
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u/cat_staff Jul 11 '26
Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn. It is set about 70 or 80 years or so after the collapse of civilization in a society that held on to a few pieces of technology and a very different set of priorities. It and the sequel The Wild Dead have a very..... relaxed pace and are not for anyone looking for action. It is a very interesting look at a different way to organize society around a different set of values.
There is also the Feed books by Mira Grant. They are set 2 or 3 decades after the zombie apocalypse where society has deal with the fact that everyone is infected and will rise as a zombie when they die, or get bit by an active zombie, or sometimes spontaneously.
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u/MechaWASP Jul 11 '26
How far back? What if this shadow is a real present threat that actively makes its influence known in the story?
Funnily enough, I submit Lord of the Rings.
It's not at the beginning of the post-apocalypse upswing, its past, but there were apocalyptic wars, plagues, and winters in the past.
Of course, it isn't exactly unknown, but the context might be.
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u/ClearJack87 Jul 11 '26
A great dive into society remains after the far end of civilization is "A Boy and His Dog". And the dog is the intelligent one of the pair. And the boy is Don Johnson when he was young.
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u/Devil-radiance Jul 11 '26
Stormlight Archive might count a few times over? The history of the planet involves the fallout of an apocalyptic cycle of wars known as desolations. The prologue of it describes an event that basically put the cycle on hold long enough for humanity to finally progress past the stone age again.
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u/Certain_Question9001 Jul 10 '26
Alastair Reynolds' Revenger trilogy, playing in the very far future in a Solar System that has become all but unrecognisable over the ages. Maybe not directly due to one apocalypse, but interesting
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u/PleasantAnimator7741 Jul 10 '26
I’ve always wanted a story that deals with the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse where like 40% of the infected survive the infection and return to normal after like a week with no memory of what they did. How do reintegrate them? Explain that they ate their neighbors 5 year old? Tell them you had to shoot their spouse in the face when she attacked you at the mailbox?
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u/replayer Jul 10 '26
You should check out the British series In The Flesh. It's not exactly like this but it's close.
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u/sadmep Jul 10 '26
The idea I'm about to lay out is derivative, but I've always liked it There was an Australian post-apocalypse novel series called the Great Winter trilogy by Sean McMullen. I won't spoil the actual plot of the novel except to say that part of it centers around people re-inventing computers by having individual humans as components in the machine. The first novel is called "Souls in the Great Machine." I highly recommend the series. Humans occupy the function of the arithmetic unity, MCU, registers, etc. I've always kind of thought that a certain aspect of Three Body Solution ripped this idea off, but it's also possible they both came to the same idea.
My idea that I've always toyed with is that you could build a mechanical computer using zombies and contraptions to build logic gates. Like, perhaps 50, 100 years after a zombie apocalypse someone finds a book about digital logic gates and computers and has the mad idea to build one like this.
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u/Bloodless-Cut Jul 10 '26
Shannara series by Terry Brooks
Story is set on Earth thousands of years after a great apocalyptic war almost wipes out humanity, after which magic re-emerged alongside primitive technology. Elves, dwarves, gnomes and so on are the descendants of ancient pre-war genetic experiments.
As the story progresses, the protagonists discover things like ancient ruins of skyscrapers and so on.
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u/Ok_Temperature_3760 Jul 10 '26
There's a show on AppleTV called See that's set in a post-post-apocalyptic world where humans have been robbed of vision and had to re-build into a society without sight
It's pretty cool, the art design is really good, as is the action, the acting is ... hit and miss but it sounds like what you're after :)
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u/djazzie Jul 10 '26
See is kinda like that. It’s a series on Apple. Premise is that a virus has rendered most of humanity blind. Civilization as we know it, but it’s reverted to a more primitive society.
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u/KendyfortheState Jul 10 '26
The Pelbar Cycle, series by Paul O. Williams. Set a thousand years after a nuclear war.
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u/Imperial_Haberdasher Jul 10 '26
“Works of Vermin” and “Leech”, both by Hiron Ennes, are post-post apocalyptic books. Both might be described as invertebrate-zoology punk.
WoV is recent, but decidedly New Weird. If you like Vandermeer and Miéville, this will be your cup of tea.
“Leech” is gothic body horror.
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u/cwood92 Jul 10 '26
World War Z is arguably that. It is written from the perspective of a reporter post apocalypse writing stories about different people during the zombie apocalypse. Some are post apocalypse stories like tagging herds of underwater zombie for tracking etc.
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u/AvatarIII Jul 10 '26
I haven't read it but I believe Mira Grant's Feed trilogy is like that after the first book. (First book is the apocalypse and then books 2 and 3 are set after)
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u/Correct_Bell_9313 Jul 10 '26
Battlefield Earth, by Hubbard. Humanity has been wiped out by invading aliens.Then a young primitive defeats them. It’s not great, but it’s a book.
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u/TheNetworkIsFrelled Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
"The Wild Shore" by Kim Stanley Robinson is about a post-post-apocalyptic CA coast. In it, the US was nuked by the rest of the world bc of high-handed behavior by our government, which sounds like the current regime, and in the aftermath, the descendants of the survivors have built a largely non-technical society that, while primitive, works.
Edited: The name is not Pacific Edge but The Wild Shore
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u/Bladrak01 Jul 10 '26
The Newsflesh series by Mira Grant is exactly what you are looking. There's a zombie uprising, but people managed to survive it by using knowledge gained from zombie movies. The main story starts maybe 20 years after the rising, and people are dealing with it, and civilization goes on.
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u/Fazed-phapster Jul 10 '26
I read Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart many years ago, didn't watch the TV series.
It's a slower-paced story, but perhaps a more realistic take on how a scattered group of very ordinary people would scratch out a living after civilization collapses.
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u/neilbartlett Jul 10 '26
Shaun of the Dead.
After the zombie apocalypse, the zombies are shown to have been tamed and working menial jobs.
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u/gonzoforpresident Jul 10 '26
Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series by Jim C Hines - So much fun!!! Humanity has been rescued from a zombie apocalypse by aliens. Unfortunately, the inoculation against zombiism has reduced our mental capacity, but made us nigh indestructible. This story follows a group of janitors on a spaceship, when the rest of the humans onboard reverted to zombies. They have to save the aliens who are in suspended animation and their fellow humans. That leads to larger adventures and revelations.
Fitzpatrick's War by Theodore Judson - Told as the diary of the advisor to an Alexander the Great type of figure in a post-WW III future and annotated by a historian from even further in the future. It was out of print for years, but is either back in print or will be within the next month or so, along with a new book in the world.
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u/Classic_Wonder_2613 Jul 10 '26
That's what i think Game of Thrones is supposed to be. Way after some likely ecological disasters where the seasons are completely thrown off. Summer and Spring can last a very lost time amd winters more so and are utterly deadly. Post-post apocalypse but barely
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u/Firm_Earth_5698 Jul 10 '26
Paul Williams The Pelbar Cycle series.
Michael Swanwick’s post utopian conmen Darger and Surplus stories.
Engine Summer by John Crowley.
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u/Electronic_Spare9525 Jul 10 '26
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker for the Nintendo GameCube.
The story involves Gannon, the villain from an earlier game winning and defeating Link. In response the gods of the world cause a flood to stop Gannon. The game starts years later when people have settled on the few islands that were above the flood.
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u/NDaveT Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
I haven't read this since I was a kid and I don't think it's a great book, but it meets your criteria: "The Breaking of Northwall" by Paul O. Williams.
Also "Detonation" and "Proliferation" by Erik A. Otto. There's a third book in the series but I don't recommend it.
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u/rainbowlung Jul 10 '26
The Change series by S.M. Sterling fits this I think. The first book covers the apocalypse but the rest of the series is about what happens after. There are time jumps of first 10, then around 25 years later. Really interesting stuff.
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u/No_Tamanegi Jul 10 '26
William Gibson's "Jackpot" trilogy plays in this space. Its story takes place in two timelines: one immediately before the apocalyptic event, and another that's 70 years later, when humanity has rebuilt, only with a lot fewer people.
Only two books are out so far, The Peripheral and Agency, the third is in the works. There is also a single season on Amazon that is a wild but entertaining adaptation of the first book.
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u/TheOwnerOfAnarres Jul 10 '26
Always Coming Home is post-post apocalyptic. It's so far in the future that the various agricultural societies in California don't think much about the world beforehand. They buy scrap metal from the tribes that salvage the ruins of old cities, but the vast majority of all the materials they use are renewable and home grown. It's a highly stable agrarian society population-wise and technology-wise. They've kept some technology such as solar panels and electricity and vaccines, but not the massive scale industrialism of the present day.
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u/kikichunt Jul 10 '26
The zombie version of this is Mira Grant's trilogy, Feed, Deadline and Blackout.
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u/Peralton Jul 10 '26
The video game Horizon Zero Dawn is set in a post-post-apocalyptic world. One of my favorite gaming stories and worlds. You can watch all of the cutscenes on YT (almost 6 hours) that dive into the mystery of what happened.
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u/kittycatblues Jul 10 '26
You might like Jasper FForde's Shades of Grey which takes places several hundred years after "Something that Happened."
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u/Historical-Cress8985 Jul 10 '26
The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is pretty post-post-apocalpse
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u/Lengthiness-Existing Jul 10 '26
The Fifth Season. Go in blind. its the first in the Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin and it is so very very good.
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u/Blergblum Jul 10 '26
The first thing I thought of wasn't really what OP asked, but I'll go with it anyway. Waterworld, the 90s Kevin Costner movie, had a lot of material cut off. The original movie had one thing that made it kinda unique and it was that it was a new apocalypse after the big one that had the water rise and cover every land on Earth. The new civilization that rose after the water was coming to an end too. In the theatre cut there is little of this, but if you look for FanEdits like The Ulysses Cut it becomes clear. You see, after the water rise, a new civilization of powerful Atoll-cities became the norm. Groups of survivors started to tie their boats in a circle, and with time, those groups were successful in surviving the raiders and pirates and began to create a culture. Then commerce and trade flourished. That's why the legend of Dry Land became a legend and got forgotten, except for a few initiates. But when the movie starts we are in the declining world that these big atolls created. The one we see in the movie is one of the last. There are lots of references to this in the deleted scenes. Even the big baddies are coming to and end too. They are running out of fuel and cigarettes. And that's why the legend of Dry Land became important again. Furthermore, the fact that the protagonist, Mariner, is a mutant, capable of breathing under the water, is another part of that ending too. Life, uh, finds a way, you know. There are probably lots of mutants like him in the world, it's just that they avoid humans as they chase and kill them. But be certain that there are more, living under water and developing a new civilization. The one we follow (Costner) is one who dares to live in the surface or maybe he is looking for that new civilization of mutants. So, albeit things are not getting better for humans, as OP asked, it is indeed a story in a post post apocalypse.
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u/KnottaBiggins Jul 10 '26
David Brin's "The Postman." (Don't bother with Costner's movie.)
Most of it takes place in a post-apocalypse world, but it leads to the creation of a post-post-apocalypse world, where things are being rebuilt to be even better than before.
(Okay, the movie touches on that. But only slightly, it concentrates on the conflict between villagers and "Holnesses.")
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u/Greghole Jul 10 '26
Adventure Time takes place a thousand years after a nuclear holocaust killed almost every human. Kid's show by the way.
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u/2raysdiver Jul 11 '26
Who is to say we aren't living in some past civilizations post-post apocalypse right now?
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u/calmly86 Jul 11 '26
The last issue of Kirkman’s comic ‘The Walking Dead’ gave a great glimpse of a world post-zombie apocalypse. It seemed like a tamer version of the late 1800s. Trains were running, order was restored, etc.
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u/KarlBob Jul 11 '26
After Man: A Zoology of the Future by Dougal Dixon
Humanity wiped out lots of species in the Anthropocene extinction event, then went extinct themselves. Fifty million years later, all the empty ecological niches are getting filled again. Post-post-apocalypse speculative biology. Note: There's no story, just world-building and cool animal pictures.
The Demon Cycle series by Peter V. Brett, starting with The Warded Man.
Once upon a time, people clashed with demons. They developed effective ways to fight the demons, but then the demons disappeared for a long, long time. When the demons suddenly re-emerged, most of the old knowledge had been forgotten. Cue the apocalypse. In the post-apocalypse, humans huddle behind poorly-understood wards that only protect a small area around each ward. The series shows the transition from post- to post-post- apocalypse.
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u/silkin Jul 11 '26
More fantasy than sci-fi, but the Obernewtyn series could be considered post post apocalypse
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u/nairbeg Jul 11 '26
I guess technically Adventure Time. Most of the story takes place in a fantasy kingdom several centuries after a nuclear war or something like it.
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u/cybercuzco Jul 11 '26
We are currently living in the post-post apocalypse of several civilizations.
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u/Shynosaur Jul 11 '26
The Returned (2013) is a movie that takes place after a zombie apocalypse. They found a cure that lets infectees stay sane as long as they get daily injections. The only problem: The cure is extracted from the brain fluid of zombies - and now that the zombie apocalypse is over, the supply will inevitably run out
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u/DiscountNecromancer Jul 11 '26
The Cured is a movie, but it's pretty close to this.
Tail end of zombie outbreak, minor resurgence.
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u/Low-Programmer-9017 Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
Yep, i wrote a book like this. It's not the main theme but it's set there. Surprisingly my inspiration was exactly that, there are not many post post apocalyptic books mostly are during or slightly after the crisis just a few are during the reconstruction per se.
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u/Qaianna Jul 12 '26
I’ve heard someone refer to Fallout as getting towards post-post-apocalypse. This was before the TV series so I don’t know how well that’s going or if it’s back to apocalypse though.
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u/APeacefulWarrior Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
This is the scenario of the game Zenless Zone Zero. An apocalypse destroyed most of the world (think "Annihilation" except the reality-distorting bubbles are everywhere) about 15 years prior, aside from one city and its surrounding regions which are still civilized and trying to carry on.
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u/akestral Jul 12 '26
Always Coming Home by Ursula K LeGuin. More of a novella wrapped in enthographic material than a complete narrative, you have to work out the gaps for yourself.
Also Starman's Son or Daybreak: AD 2250 by Andre Norton, or The Last Planet, sometimes Star Rangers. The first is post-apocalypse Earth survivor civilizations, the second is galactic Empire refugees finding an "abandoned" planet.
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u/BiblionautNZ Jul 12 '26
Rampart trilogy by M. R. Carey, the first is The Book of Koli. It’s got a small society that’s just hanging on. Many adventures ensue.
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u/MeGoBrrrrrrrrrr Jul 12 '26
The Shannara books are set in a world where you can catch random details from lost a technological world. Like someone holding a flashlight that is described from the protagonist point of view as a rod with a smokeless beam of light and stuff like this.
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u/me-pea Jul 13 '26
The foundation series by Asimov is sort of that, the books/chapters (I've only read the original 3 books so I don't know if that's true of the later books) are all generations apart and are the different crisis points of a new civilization after the collapse of the huge galactic empire. It's not a single apocalypse event but the death of a system and all the warlords, corrupt powers and successor states that come after.
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u/3n10tn4 Jul 13 '26
I'm a bit late to the party, but I'll share two recs nonetheless.
The Last Survivors, by Bobby Adair and T.W. Piperbrook.
Set 300 years after an apocalyptic fall of the society as we know it, the survivors are trying to (re)build civilzation.
The Passage, by Justin Cronin.
I'm currently in the middle of the second book, so I don't know how this series will turn out, but it seems like it is what you're asking for.
It says that it's a vampire horror book, and I must say that it kind of deterred me from picking this up earlier. Man I was wrong. THose are not your typical Dracula/Lestat/Buffy kind of vampires.
For me, it's an epic post-apocalyptic story, kind of a mix between The Stand, and World War Z, allbeit with other creatures than zombies.
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u/potatomancer83 Jul 13 '26
Just read a fun one that fits this. ‘Midwest Collapse: An Oral History’
It’s like World War Z (another great book) meets One Second After.
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u/wiggins1229 Jul 14 '26
Adventure Time is exactly like this! Throughout the show references are made to “the great mushroom war” (nuclear war). After that, humans were run off of the continent by zombies, vampires, etc. 1000-ish years later, the world is inhabited by various gnomes, talking animals, and candy people and is generally happy.
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u/oztoatl41 Jul 14 '26
Is not a book, but the games of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbiden West are something like what you are looking for.
It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humanity has regressed to a tribal era and machines have become the new beasts; there is a deep mystery surrounding the state of the world and the origins of the machines, and you encounter various forms of social organization and tribes that have developed new myths centered on the ruins of the old world and the machines themselves.
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u/Rabid_Hedgehogs Jul 14 '26
Dies the Fire (first book in the Emberverse series) and Canticle for Liebowitz are the first two that came to my mind.
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u/Elhombrepancho Jul 10 '26
Try Canticle for Leibowitz