America’s post-apocalyptic maps reveal eerily familiar fault lines
In post-apocalyptic fiction, imagined futures turn today’s political and cultural tensions into geography.
By Frank Jacobs
The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That’s the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it “America after the Fall.”
It’s a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America’s long, hard look in the mirror.
A generous helping of moral turpitude
Depending on the prevailing panic, the nature of the Fall typically varies between half a dozen usual suspects: nuclear war, alien invasion, a deadly pandemic, technological breakdown, climate collapse, civil war — each often infused with a generous helping of moral turpitude to lubricate the disaster.
This is a very American genre. Other countries may have similar worries about the future, but in the U.S., those are exacerbated by the peculiar nature of the American project — the idea of the country as a bold, unique and ongoing experiment in democratic self-governance, in perpetual danger of terminal failure.
The unease about the precariousness of that project is heightened by another American specialty: the tension between secular progress and religious millenarianism, the latter being the ardent hope that a divinely ordained cataclysm will wash away the pride, greed, and debauchery resulting from all that so-called progress.
That adds up to a lot of U.S.-focused post-apocalyptic thinking, writing, and mapping.
One of the earliest literary examples of the genre is The Scarlet Plague (1912) by Jack London. Set in 2073, the novel looks back at an epidemic that wiped out most of humanity 60 years earlier. Survivors in the San Francisco Bay area are devolving from civilization back to primitivism.
The old civilization recedes, and a new one emerges
London’s book inspired Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart. Itself an influential work, it provides many of the genre’s recurring templates: the protagonist traveling across an emptied-out America, scavenging for food and encountering small groups of survivors. As the comforts and knowledge of the old civilization recede, a new one emerges, cruder and more superstitious perhaps — but also more attuned to nature and survival.
Earth Abides informed several later plague-driven post-apocalyptic narratives, including Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), and arguably also the whole Walking Dead universe, as well as The Last of Us, the video game about a zombie-holocaust-by-fungus that morphed into a 2023 TV series. Stewart’s own novel finally got the TV treatment in 2024.
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Well-known examples of post-apocalypic Americas by causes other than epidemics include The Postman (a 1985 book turned into a movie in 1997), set in an America recovering from a nuclear exchange; Half Life 2 (the 2004 video game), after an alien takeover; One Second After (2009), in which an electro-magnetic pulse fries all electronics; J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), set partly in a half-submerged New York City; and DMZ, a graphic novel series (2005 to 2012) about a second American civil war.
The common thread in post-apocalyptic fiction is balkanization. After the Fall, the States disunite into smaller, mutually hostile geopolitical fragments: confederacies, theocracies, city-states, tribal zones, no-man’s lands. Those fragments may be speculative, but they’re not entirely random. They reflect the anxieties that pulse beneath the surface of contemporary American life.
Translated onto a map, the fragmentation of the U.S. provides a visual shock to the system. The map of the U.S. is one of the world’s most recognizable, most stable cartographic emblems. In its unified form, the map of the nation has the strength of a logo, symbolizing the Union itself.
Perhaps the most violent shock is the physical rather than the merely political destruction of the United States, as on Gordon-Michael Scallion’s Future Map of North America (1996).
A comet that would turn people blue
From 1979 onward, Scallion received “visions” of coming events. Some he got right, notably the 1984 Mexico City earthquake and the 1988 election of George Bush Sr. as president. But most he got wrong, including the arrival of a comet that would turn people blue and give them psychic powers. And seismic shifts in the earth’s polarity and tectonics that would drown much of the world, including large parts of North America.
While Scanlon focuses on the physical breakup of the United States, most other catastro-futurists — and they are legion — leave the coastline alone, and wreak havoc on the body politic instead.
A fairly typical example is this Map of North America, 2150, which grants future independence to some of the most prominent political, ethnic, religious, and regional entities in today’s North America (which in this case generously includes Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean).
Texas and California survive as sovereign republics. California, to indicate its (current) left-leaning politics, is a Democratic Republic, reminiscent of the nomenclature of former Communist countries, and mirrored farther south in the Democratic Republics of Aztlán and Baja California.
Farther north, the Mormons have finally established their Holy Republic of Deseret, the liberals in Seattle and thereabouts are united in the Social Republic of Cascadia, and the Native Americans inland have proclaimed a Republic of Lakhota. Sitting uneasily in between is the Aryan Bastion, unsubtly boasting Hitlerburg and other all-too-Germanic-sounding place names.
The Great Lakes are the natural setting for a Confederation, and New England is now a Commonwealth, stopping short just north of New York City, which is part of the United States of Columbia — perhaps the most direct descendant of the formerly united states.
Further down are the Republic of New Afrika and the Confederate Republics of Dixie; the South never gets to turn the page on the Civil War. The League of the Mississippi is a re-Frenchified, re-enlarged Louisiana, and Libertalia is the Caribbean-oriented southern tip of Florida. In between all that: a vast, blank, and, one assumes, entirely lawless space.
The franchised nation of Monaco
These entities are the stalwart ingredients of many post-apocalyptic maps, operating under the assumption that, once the veil of unity is whisked away, historical and current divisions within the U.S. will assert themselves.
Even the literary imagination of Douglas Coupland couldn’t escape these tropes. On a map of Canada and the United States in 2092, he identifies Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest, the states of Dixie and Texlahoma, and a theocracy in Utah. Some interesting flourishes, though: a Shrine of Tupelo (in memory of Elvis, supposedly); the Disney National Memory Storage Facility (in Orlando); and the franchised nation of Monaco (somewhere in New England).
The Hunger Games provide a more radical departure from the post-apocalyptic tradition. Centuries into the future, a North America diminished by coastal flooding is home to the nation of Panem, which consists of 12 districts loosely centered on a Capitol located in the Rocky Mountains.
As annual atonement for a failed rebellion, in which the 13th district was destroyed, each district must send a boy and a girl to the Capitol for the so-called Hunger Games, a fight to the death with prizes for the last players standing and their district.
The books by Suzanne Collins don’t provide a map, nor are they explicit about the location and boundaries of the districts, so maps — mostly fan-made — vary. All, however, convey the impression of a continent reduced in vitality as well as size.
The favorite risk du jour for institutional implosion of the U.S. is political division. Some have already suggested matching America’s institutions to the widening cultural gap between Red and Blue tribes, and splitting up the country into two nations, one for each tribe.
This suggestion, from 2019, is based loosely on election maps, but also ensures the Red and Blue nations are contiguous, thanks to a network of nodes where it is possible to cross over from one part of each zone into another. Map nerds will recognize this peculiar setup from the original 1947 proposal by the UN to divide the Holy Land between Arabs and Jews. What could go wrong?
Texas and California, lumped together in the Western Forces
Here’s what could go wrong: a second American Civil War is not a clean fight between two sides, but a free-for-all between multiple parties. One example is this map from the movie Civil War (2024), which purposely kept the politics vague in order to focus on the shock of full-scale American-on-American political violence. Because of that vagueness, Texas and California — typically on opposite sides of the political spectrum — were lumped together in the Western Forces. Other warring parties: the Florida Alliance, covering most of the South, a New People’s Army in the north and northwest, and the Loyalist States in between.
In the movie, a weakened central government is ultimately overwhelmed by the vaguely defined insurgent forces. On that basis, you could classify its outlook as “left-coded” — implicitly preferring the merits, however questionable, of unified authority over the havoc wreaked by rebels and secessionists, however well-intentioned.
An analysis of the forces at play in The Last of Us justifies classifying it as a “right-coded” narrative. FEDRA, the rump of the central government surviving in a handful of fortified Quarantine Zones, is an authoritarian military junta, imposing martial law, rationing, and execution of dissidents. The good guys are the Fireflies, a revolutionary militia fighting to restore democracy. Most of America, though, is hostile territory. Even if you avoid the fungal zombies, the slavers and the cannibals, you’re still in danger of encountering sadistic Hunters, semi-fascist “Wolves”, or the religious cult called the Seraphites.
Today is valuable enough to want to preserve
In the post-apocalyptic future, true Americans are few and far between. And — subtext warning — perhaps they always were.
Whatever the political coding, if you look at enough maps of America after the Fall, they will start to look familiar, almost reassuringly so.
Yes, the U.S. is gone, and division, tyranny, and anarchy have taken its place. But each cracked map of the late, great U.S. retains an imprint of the good old days, an untapped reservoir of citizen-to-citizen benevolence, and a flickering spark of societal hope.
This is perhaps the genre’s most pertinent takeaway: America is rehearsing its disaggregation in the safest possible arena — that of science fiction, the comments section of history. In the safety of post-apocalyptic fiction, America is fabricating a future that is nostalgic for the present. The message is that, even with all of its problems and divisions, today is valuable enough to want to preserve. But should the worst happen, then even on the other side of a possible future apocalypse, there is still hope. Why else would anyone make a map of it?
Strange Maps #1282
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
I think you—and anyone writing post-apocalyptic stories—would get a lot out of Colin Woodard's* American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. It's basically the history of how this nation has always been so divided in viewpoint and would serve as the basis of how this nation would likely divide in a post-apocalyptic world. A lot of these maps reflect this well. I highly recommend it.
*Incidentally, Colin Woodard is here on substack, so you can follow him if you like.
It's just fiction brothers and sisters, just fiction. Good fiction too!