Survivalism in fiction

Games and other formats

• Fallen Earth is an MMORPG/Shooter set in a post-war, western-like Arizona. "The Suvivalists" appear here as a hostile non-playable faction.
• The Fallout series is a series of games set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic world. The gameplay is centered around the character's own survival instinct and skills, and communities of survivalists. This is taken further with Hardcore mode in Fallout: New Vegas, which introduces the need for the player character to eat, drink, and sleep in regular intervals, suffering increasingly severe stat penalties and eventually death if their needs are not met.
• In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a mission involves stealing a harvester from a survivalist farm. Being reduced to being unable to bring in their crop easily, and risk starvation; the survivalists are portrayed as extremely violent and aggressive individuals.
• In the 2011 video game Homefront, a mission involves stealing a helicopter from a survivalist farm. These survivalists are also very aggressive and violent.
• The video games
  series of novels and stories
  ) take place in post-apocalyptic Moscow, Russia, where people live in the metro subway tunnels after a nuclear attack.
• In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri the Spartan Federation faction is run by a survivalist.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a series of games set in the apocalyptic wasteland of the "Exclusion Zone" surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The gameplay focuses heavily on survival and relations with factions of survivalists.
• The Wasteland video game was released in 1988, and was one of the first video games set in a post-apocalyptic world. The developers and designers of Wasteland went on to produce Fallout 1 & 2 and with the recent success of a Kickstarter campaign a sequel Wasteland 2 is being produced by a team including many of the original creators of Wasteland.
• post-apocalyptic U.S. The player uses firearms, improvised weapons, and stealth to defend against hostile humans and zombie-like creatures (humans infected by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus). Its sequel, The Last of Us Part II
  , was released in 2020.
• The Long Dark is an open world outdoor survival game launched through early access in 2014. The game takes place in the Canadian wilderness and the player controls a Bush Pilot who crashed during a "Geomagnetic disaster" - the plot device behind the lack of power. The player is required to loot food, clothing, medicines, tools and weapons to survive, and can use found items to craft clothes and weapons. In addition, Prepper Cache spawn in random locations that provide large amounts of survival gear. Threats include the weather and wolves whose aggression has been increased as a result of the plot device.
• Far Cry 5, the fifth main title of the Far Cry series released in 2018, takes place within the fictional Hope County, Montana where a militant doomsday cult called Project at Eden's Gate has seized autocratic control of the area and is actively preparing for the collapse of civilization. Some of the supporting characters who aid the player in their struggle against the cult are also preppers and many survivalist stashes can be found throughout the game where various rewards can be obtained.
• Days Gone is a survival horror game released in 2019. Set in post-apocalyptic Oregon, the protagonist, Deacon St. John, is a former member of an outlaw motorcycle club who is searching for his missing wife. The majority of humanity has been infected by a virus that turned them into a zombie-like race called "Freakers", while the rest of humanity has assembled into opposing camps or has (willingly or unwillingly) joined a doomsday cult that worships the Freakers. Deacon uses survival skills on his journey, such as foraging, hunting, assembling/repairing weapons and/or his motorcycle using scrap lying around, and finding fuel to keep his motorcycle functioning.
• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open source roguelike game focusing on realism and survival in post-apocalyptic New England.

• Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (1719) is about a man shipwrecked on a remote tropical island and forced to survive. It spawned an entire genre of fiction called Robinsonade, famously including Johann David Wyss's novel The Swiss Family Robinson (1812).
• R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858) is the tale of three boys, survivors of a shipwreck, who are marooned on a South Pacific island.
• William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies (1954) is a response to Ballantyne's The Coral Island. In this case a larger group of boys being evacuated from England during a war survive the crash of their airplane on an isolated tropical island.
• Good News
  (1980) is about small bands of people in the Phoenix, Arizona area trying to fend off the rise of a military dictatorship after the collapse of the economy and government.
• Jerry Ahern's series of 29 novels, titled The Survivalist, was first published between 1981 and 1993.
• In Steve Boyett's novel Ariel (1983), all advanced technology ceases to function, while magic becomes real. The protagonist struggles to travel across a world filled with cannibals and other dangers.
• David Brin's novel The Postman (1985) is set in a time after a massive plague and political fracture result in a complete collapse of society. It unflatteringly portrays survivalists as one of the causes of the collapse, and so the quasi-survivalist "Holnist" characters are despised by the remaining population. The Holnists follow a totalitarian social theory idolizing the powerful who enforce their perceived right to oppress the weak. However, Brin later stated that when he was writing the book, survivalist was the best term to describe the militia movement.
• new country based on environmentalism
  , named the political party governing the new country the Survivalist Party. However, in his sequel, Ecotopia Emerging (1981), he qualified that choice of name by having the party leader state that the term "Survivalist" referred to the survival of the planet's ecosystems, rather than to people who prepare for an economic or political collapse.
• Gordon R. Dickson's novel Wolf and Iron (1993) details the journey of a single man attempting to cross 2000 miles of hostile territory. He faces roving gangs and fortified towns after a worldwide financial collapse. This book is extremely detailed in its discussion of certain techniques and preparations needed in a post-apocalyptic world.
• Pat Frank's novel Alas, Babylon (1959) is a story dealing with life in Florida after a nuclear war with the USSR.
  • Pat Frank also authored the non-fiction book How To Survive the H Bomb And Why (1962)^[3]
• stories, books, and video games
  that take place in the same setting and fictional universe.
• I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream features a self-aware supercomputer who annihilates all of humanity but for 5 surviving people who the AI proceeds to torture. The novel won a Hugo Award in
  1968.
• Robert A. Heinlein uses survivalism as a theme in much of his science fiction. For example, Tunnel in the Sky (1955) explores issues of survivalism and social interactions in an unfamiliar environment, and Farnham's Freehold (1964) begins as a story of survivalism in a nuclear war. Heinlein also wrote essays such as How to be a Survivor, which provide advice on preparing for and surviving a nuclear war.
• biological weapon
  pandemic. The surviving few slowly gather together only to realise that they are not alone.
• industrial revolution lifestyle in an agrarian
  village. In part, the novel explores the question of what happens when modern technology, based on electricity, is no longer available.
• IMDb
  .
• Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven's novel Lucifer's Hammer (1977) is about a cataclysmic comet hitting the Earth, and various groups of people struggling to survive the aftermath in southern California. Lucifer’s Hammer has contributed significantly to the survivalist movement, as we understand it today. One reviewer noted: "A comet’s impact with the Earth creates an extremely bad, worst-case “fast crash” scenario. ...In this novel, people begin feeding on one another, literally, within a month of the event.""^[4]
• Pournelle and Niven's similarly themed "Footfall" (1985) is about aliens bombarding Earth using controlled meteorite strikes to exterminate life.
• Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) describes a group of highly creative people who withdraw from society into a hidden mountain valley while civilization totally collapses, whereupon they emerge to rebuild it. This book differs from others in the genre in that the protagonists' withdrawal directly causes the collapse, since it was they who sustained civilization.
• novel series about a full-scale socio-economic collapse and subsequent invasion of the United States. The book describes in detail how the survivalist main characters establish a self-sufficient survival retreat in north-central Idaho
  . Three of the four original Patriots novel were New York Times bestsellers.
• Olaf Stapledon's monumental cosmic history Last and First Men includes an episode when the whole world is devastated by a nuclear chain reaction, which kills all humanity except for a few hundreds who happened to be near the North Pole. Their descendants eventually repopulate the world and create a new civilization, but this takes hundreds of thousands of years.
• George R. Stewart's novel Earth Abides (1949) deals with one man who finds most of civilization has been destroyed by a plague. Slowly, a small community forms around him as he struggles to start a new civilization, and preserve knowledge and learning.
• S.M. Stirling.'s alternate history, post-apocalyptic book Dies the Fire (2004) is the first in The Emberverse series
  . The story takes shape in a universe where electricity, guns, explosives, internal combustion engines, and steam power no longer work. The sequels flesh out the storyline in a survivalist post-Change world of agriculture, clan-based life, and conflict.
• weapons of mass destruction
  and the systematic destruction of cities, the grim struggle of the isolated few survivors, and the reversion of the world to semi-Medieval conditions - in all this anticipating recurring themes of later works.
• Philip Wylie's novel Tomorrow (1954) is the story of two American cities weathering a nuclear attack. One was prepared with an extensive civil defense plan, while the other was not.
• John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) is the story of the survival of a small group of people in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by carnivorous plants, where most of the population is afflicted by blindness. It was later adapted into a feature film and TV series. It was also the inspiration for Danny Boyle's zombie film 28 Days Later (2002), which shares plot elements and survivalist themes.^[5]
• John Marsden's Tomorrow series of seven novels (published 1993–99) depict a high-intensity invasion and occupation of Australia by a foreign power. A small band of teenagers is waging a guerilla war on the enemy soldiers in the region around their fictional home town of Wirrawee. The name of the series is derived from the title of the first book, Tomorrow, When the War Began, which was adapted as a 2010 movie.
• Max Brooks' New York Times bestseller, The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), is a survival manual dealing with the fictional potentiality of a zombie attack. It contains detailed plans for the average citizen to survive zombie uprisings of varying intensity and reach, and describes "cases" of zombie outbreaks in history, including an interpretation of Roanoke Colony. Survivalism and disaster preparation are also prevalent themes in Brooks' second novel, World War Z (2006). Brooks interest in the subject was sparked circa age 10, when he saw his very first zombie movie, Revenge of the Zombies (1943).
• This Other Eden
  is a satirical environmentalist science fiction book set in the future, when Earth is devastated by systematic pollution and environmental disasters that seem intentional, as news of them is immediately broadcast from faraway sites in the presence of a terrorist pressure group of environmentalists. This is followed by a huge TV advertising campaign for self-contained survival environments manufactured, as the positive main character finds out, by a company controlled by both the egomaniacal TV network owner and the equally hideous sponsor of eco-terrorism, both of whom in the end are punished cruelly for their dastardly deeds. Earth eventually restores itself after its eco-Doomsday.
• Weir's science fiction novel The Martian follows an American astronaut, Mark Watney, as he becomes stranded alone on Mars and must improvise in order to survive. It has been described as Apollo 13 meets Cast Away. Ridley Scott directed an eponymous 2015 film adaptation starring Matt Damon.
• electricity generator, and solar panels. Like most preppers, they also have an offsite 'bug out' where they intend to travel to whilst the social chaos as a consequence of the water shortage, coined the Tap Out. The novel explores the game theory
  problems tackled when Kelton's neighbours who are not survivalists ask for free supplies.

• Gilligan's Island is an American sitcom about a two-man boat crew and their five passengers who get swept away by storm to an uncharted desert island in the Pacific while engaging on a three-hour tour of the Hawaiian islands. The seven castaways, most of whom are strangers to one another, learn to survive in near-primitive conditions until they can get rescued.
• 24 is a TV series about a federal agent named Jack Bauer and his attempts foil terrorist plots in Los Angeles. During Season 2 Jack's daughter, Kim Bauer, is on the run from the law and finds shelter with a survivalist.
• The TNT series Falling Skies tells the story of the aftermath of a global invasion by extraterrestrials . Within a few days the invaders neutralize the world's power grid and technology, destroy the armies of all the world's countries, and apparently kill over 90% of the human population. The aliens' objectives are not explained. The story picks up six months after the invasion and follows a group of survivors who band together to fight back.
• Robert Hawkins uses his prior planning and survival skills in preparation of the attacks. Most of the episodes center around the sudden collapse of American society resulting in a six-way split of the country. The town usually must fight an outside enemy in order to preserve their food and supplies. Jericho, as well as other media fiction (as Oddworld
  ) also focuses on scavenging.
• Lost, a group of crash survivors are stranded on an island with little food and only the remains of the aircraft and baggage to survive with. Over the course of the series, the survivors adapt to life on the jungle isle while some even welcome it. One of the main characters of the series, John Locke, appears to be a survivalist even before the events of the crash, due to carrying knives with him as baggage, possessing hunting and tracking skills, and being part of a pseudo-survivalist commune earlier in life.
• Revolution is an NBC science fiction television series that takes place in a post-apocalyptic future. Fifteen years earlier, an unknown phenomenon disabled all advanced technology on the planet, ranging from computers and electronics to car engines, jet engines, and batteries. People were forced to adapt to a world without technology, and due to the collapse of public order, many areas are ruled by warlords and militias. The series focuses on the Matheson family, who possess an item that is the key to not only finding out what happened fifteen years ago, but also a possible way to reverse its effects. However, they must elude various enemy groups who want to possess that power for themselves.
• In the
  George Sibley
  's delusions manifests itself as a form of survivalism, and he becomes terrified that a number of apocalyptic or damaging events, ranging from nuclear war and the disappearance of water to earthquakes, are imminent and takes precautions against it, much to the horror of his wife - who realizes that it is beyond cautious and is becoming obsessive.
• Survivor (2000–present) is a reality television game show
  which places a group of contestants in remote location and awards a prize to the one which lasts the longest. Generally, the game is structured such that a player's social skills are more important to winning than survival skills.
• The BBC TV series Survivors, which ran from 1975 to 1977, suggested a UK view of survivalism with a small band of survivors emerging from a pandemic that wipes out more than 95% of the population. In 2008 and 2009 the BBC aired a new updated Survivors series, which was more hard-edged than the original, but still showed the protagonist "Abby Grant" and her ad hoc survival group as reluctant to arm themselves, even after being confronted by armed adversaries on numerous occasions. In Episode 6 (which aired on Dec. 29, 2008) Abby's group is forced to abandon their quasi-retreat—a country estate—following a confrontation and kidnapping by a provisional government.
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008) is a science fiction
  show involving time travel with lead characters that take survivalist steps to prepare for, or possibly prevent, a future nuclear war.
• Department of Homeland Security. And Sarah Connor
  ".
• The Colony in which a group of survivors try to survive in a "post apocalyptic world" where a majority of Earth's population is killed by a hypothetical "virus" and attempt to "rebuild".^[6]
• Two made-for-TV movies made during the 1980s,
  Threads
  in the UK, portray a nuclear war and its aftermath of social chaos and economic collapse. Both movies were, at the time, among the most controversial ever made for television.
• The Fire Next Time (1993) a made for television mini-series set in 2017 portrays the world undergoing green house gas-caused global warming caused natural disasters. The story follows the Morgan family, as they try to escape the floods, hurricanes and droughts and find a way to survive together against all odds. The movie starred Craig T. Nelson, Bonnie Bedelia and Justin Whalin.
• The AMC series The Walking Dead (2010–present) features a small group of survivors led by Rick Grimes of a worldwide "zombie apocalypse". The group moves together, scavenging what they can from the remains of society, while fighting off a seemingly endless number of zombies (which they refer to as "walkers"). The group starts off as a camp outside the city of Atlanta, Georgia.
• In
  drop ship on a seemingly pristine planet that they have only seen from space. They attempt to find refuge and supplies at an old military installation, Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains
  .
• Man vs. Wild (2006-2011) Bear Grylls travels around the globe to find the most dangerous tourist locations and environments, in order to show us how to survive in them. With his simple survival techniques and his knowledge of the wildlife, he is able to give handy tips that could effectively save lives. Whether it's traversing across volcanoes or stuck on a desert island, Bear is always one step ahead when it comes to survival of the fittest.