California

While there aren't necessarily a lot of apocalyptic books to go with the movies and television shows, they are out there. (And yes, The Leftovers was a book before it was on TV.) Still, Edan Lepucki's California seems rather tame. Although since it's being featured in an article about the future of the apocalypse needing to be more imaginative, perhaps it's not a huge surprise.

The description given there sounds only slightly worse than the California of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. There, nation-states franchise out sections of suburbia as places where the American Dream still lives, while occasional raiders from a huge floating agglomeration of humanity in the middle of the Pacific Ocean keep life far too interesting.  California has earthquakes, a few suicide bombers, a trek to the north of the state - not fun, nothing anyone would looking forward to, but not like having to deal with a sociopathic Inuit Aleut who has a nuke wired to his brain in a new twist on Mutual Assured Destruction. And Snow Crash is dystopic more than post-apocalyptic, a scarier world on balance but one where plenty of people appear to lead reasonably happy lives.

Maybe it's true that our end-of-the-world scenarios need some work. Or maybe the end of the world is close enough already that improvements are not necessary.