Top 10 Worst Mass Exterminations in Science Fiction

Space aliens called the Overlords land on Earth and take over the planet, though for decades they don't show themselves. They create a sort of utopia, which some find a bit dull. These Overlords intervene in human affairs occasionally. For example, they act to protect the white minority in South Africa but only rarely.

So far, so strange, but what happens next is really disturbing. Eventually, hundreds of millions of children are transported away from their families as they lose their individuality and become part of the Overmind. These children, "naked and filthy, with matted hair," seem to spend a lot of their time dancing (their faces "emptier than the faces of the dead") and eliminating plants and animals. In the end, Homo sapiens goes extinct.

Three movies have been based on Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend. Omega Man is the second. In the movie, Charlton Heston is one of the few to survive the biological warfare that breaks out between the Soviet Union and China. Isolated, he barely maintains his sanity as he battles a cult, The Family, which despises all technology.

Mankind often seems to be menaced by evil corporations and governments which accidentally or on purpose unleash biological weapons. The release of biological weapons drives the plot in a number of zombie movies, for example.

Mary Shelley's The Last Man pursues some of the same themes explored in her Frankenstein. Or, The Modern Prometheus. In The Last Man, a plague wipes out the human race. By the end of the novel, in the year 2100, only one man is left alive. Literary scholar Kari Lokke has called the book an attack on "Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective efforts."

The last man is a tragic figure as he wanders: "Neither hope nor joy are my pilots - restless despair and fierce desire of change lead me on." One of Shelley's inspirations was Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's 1805 Le Dernier Homme.

George Orr's dreams are "effective"... they become real. He is managed by the sinister Dr. Haber, who wishes to use George to create a perfect world. Dr. Haber's attempt to engineer a world free of racism, overpopulation, and war leads to truly awful unintended consequences. For instance, Haber's attempt to control the human population leads to "The Crash," a carcinogenic plague that kills off 6 billion people. This drastic population reduction doesn't even solve any of the problems it was meant to cure.

Now robots get a chance to destroy humanity. A computer system, Skynet, gains self-awareness and sets about liquidating its main rival: us. You may think this scenario is far-fetched, but take a look at James Barrat's Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, which argues convincingly that robots will exterminate the human race.

Many works of science fiction take up this theme of robots at war with humans - the Matrix series, for example. I'm sure it's not just me who detects an evil smirking expression on coffee makers, cars, and desk lamps.

Pierre Boulle, who also wrote The Bridge over the River Kwai, gave us an extraordinary parable about alleged superiors oppressing alleged inferiors. Apes are used as slaves by corrupted humans until the apes revolt and kill humans en masse. A remnant of mankind is pushed into the wild, where they devolve into beasts. These bestial humans are in turn brutalized by the apes.

Stapledon follows the course of history millions of years into the future as mankind develops into a bizarre collection of breeds: some dwarfish, some huge, some aquatic, some that can fly, and some with six fingers. Man's future includes acts of genocide, which Stapledon seems okay with. For example, the "Fifth Men" need living space, so they look to Venus. Unfortunately, all kinds of living creatures call Venus home, including an intelligent deep-sea race called the Venerians. The Venerians are not intelligent enough, however, as they are deemed inferior by the Fifth Men. Their destruction is called by Stapledon "terrible, but right."

Akira is a dystopian movie that deals with a world desolated by nuclear war. The film is an example of the cyberpunk style, which combines elements of film noir with science fiction. Featured are street gangs, a secret government lab, psychic powers, and guerilla attacks. So much fiction, both within and outside the science fiction genre, is concerned with World War I and its aftermath. Think of The Road, On the Beach, and A Canticle for Leibowitz.

The man who introduced the word robot, Karel Čapek, had his own apocalyptic vision of mankind's demise. In Čapek's clever satire, the destructive agents are newts. Yes, newts. Giant intelligent talking newts. The novel chronicles the exploitation of the newt population, the formation of a salamander syndicate, the desire of the newts for more territory, war between newts and men, and finally the near-total destruction of the human race.