John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was an English science fiction writer best known for his works published under the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes. Some of his works were set in post-apocalyptic landscapes. His best known works include The Day of the Triffids (1951), filmed in 1962, and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was filmed in 1960 as Village of the Damned, in 1995 under the same title, and again in 2022 in Sky Max under its original title.
John Wyndham
Wyndham's first published sf story, "Worlds to Barter", was published in the May 1931 issue of Wonder Stories, under his pen name John Beynon Harris.
Wyndham/Harris as pictured in the May 1931 Wonder Stories
Wyndham's second story, "The Lost Machine", was cover-featured on the April 1932 issue of Amazing Stories, also under his Harris pen name
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction is a subgenre of science fiction in which the Earth's civilization is collapsing or has collapsed. The apocalypse event may be climatic, such as runaway climate change; astronomical, such as an impact event; destructive, such as nuclear holocaust or resource depletion; medical, such as a pandemic, whether natural or human-caused; end time, such as the Last Judgment, Second Coming or Ragnarök; or any other scenario in which the outcome is apocalyptic, such as a zombie apocalypse, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics or alien invasion.
The apocalypse is also depicted in visual art, for example in Albert Goodwin's painting Apocalypse (1903).
Joseph Pennell's 1918 prophetic Liberty bond poster calls up the pictorial image of a bombed New York City, totally engulfed in a firestorm. At the time, the armaments available to the world's various air forces were not powerful enough to produce such a result.
Imagination magazine cover, depicting an atomic explosion, dated March 1954
An artist's 1922 depiction of a futuristic war