Apocalyptic fiction: It has gotten more messed up

About twenty years ago we went bananas and stopped being able to blame the apocalypse on robots and/or sin. Because apparently we don't care any more about why the world ends—we just want to see what happens after the cool explosions and burning and what have you.

Perhaps the most important part, though, is this:

I recently finished a thesis project on post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and in my research I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time.

Someone got a degree for reading about how we imagine the world ending. Please. Sign. Me. Up.

There's also a great graph. Clicky clicky.