20 Post-Apocalyptic Stories That Aren’t Totally Depressing

The 100 — “We Will Rise” — Image HU406a_0068 — Pictured (L-R): Zachary McGowan as Roan and Eliza Taylor as Clarke — Credit: Cate Cameron/The CW — © 2017 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved

9. The 100

Young adult fiction is practically bursting at the seams with post-apocalyptic stories. There’s just something about the end of the world that seems to resonate with modern teens. Maybe, for a group of young people that are just beginning to navigate their own independence, it can seem easier to simply do away with the existing world. It may be easier, in some cases, to construct both yourself and your society from the ground up.

Now, that’s not entirely the case of The 100, the popular showing currently airing on The CW. In this future, 97 years after a thermonuclear apocalypse, human society still exists. One can’t say it’s thriving, however. The remaining members of our species cram aboard an orbiting space station known as the Ark.

There, they quarrel over resources and enforcing increasingly strict population control measures. In fact, everything is so scarce that even the most innocuous crime is enough to shoot someone out into space.

Still, this doesn’t alleviate the issues aboard the Ark. When someone discovers that the life support systems are failing, 100 juvenile offenders are sent down to Earth. These “expendable” kids soon discover that the planet’s environment has greatly recovered from the nuclear apocalypse. However, they also learn that they’re not alone. Humans who did not make it onto the Ark managed to survive. Their descendants don’t necessarily want to share the planet.

Still, at least the Earth is thriving. Moreover, these kids, though subject to both a dystopian society on the Ark and a more blatantly violent one on Earth, have managed to escape. Down on the planet, they have a chance to survive and even thrive.