Empty World

As a sub-genre of science fiction, end of the world-style themes have always had a powerful - pileup at the side of the motorway - pull on our imaginations.

However horrible it gets you can't look away.

From the bleak cannibalism of Solyent Green, to the monochrome scramble for the last lifeboat off Earth in When Worlds Collide, through to the petrol-hungry white line nightmare of the Mad Max movies.

Obviously I'm not the only one who feels a certain fondness for this genre, as Bryan Anderson has created Empty World, a site which encompasses the end of the world and post-holocaust movies; a sly tribute to the novel the Empty World by John Christopher.

Lay in a year's food supply and a couple of AK47s - the end of the world is nigh.

While the site might be subtitled 'The Apocalyptic Fiction Site', it also nicely covers the genre in movies, television and book-form.

Books get pride of place in the site's pantheon, though. Perhaps fittingly, as in the plague-emptied world of the future it is books that will outlast the decaying tapes of video, and pages which can be turned without an AC-DC power supply.

If you want an insight into the Drowned World of JD Ballard, or the destroyed world of Twelve Monkeys, Empty World should be the first stop on your cyberspace tour for the next human dark age.

Stephen Hunt

Visit them at www.emptyworld.info