Just Before the End



""Last one to die -- please turn out the light.""

- Graffiti on poster in Children of Men

It's probably sometime between Next Sunday AD and Twenty Minutes Into the Future, but it could also be another planet in a distant galaxy in an inverted universe. All that really matters is that the world, or civilization anyway, is ending... any day now. The zombie army is making its way across the continent... oh so slowly. The worldwide economic crash is in its 10-year stretch. The global powers are arming for all-out war, The Virus's death toll is rising, and the asteroid named Malthus Prime is on its way to end the human race... in exactly X.5 months, Y days and Z hours.

The world you're in probably resembles a Crapsack World verging on a Scavenger World. The trains are still running, though probably not on time. Everywhere it's ominously hinted that however bad the present is, the future will only get worse, and by the end, or at least by the next sequel, it has, and we get to see what things are like After the End. Just Before the End is usually a bleak Dystopia (or alternatively, a facsimile of the modern era) that is coming apart at the seams. Expect to see people Dying Like Animals. Graffiti and abandoned cars are usually a given. The Depopulation Bomb may have already dropped, leaving a Crapsack World or worse, but if it hasn't dropped yet, it's on its way... oh yeah, it's coming. Better get your $99 bottled water and your car batteries while they last, folks! Right here, at Joe's Apocalyptic Emporium! Alternatively, you might want to invest in a suicide kit: Thank God for State-Sponsored Euthanasia!

As many of the examples show, Just Before the End can either take place just before the impact of a Depopulation Bomb or after its impact, provided the effects of said Depopulation Bomb are not immediate: for example, if an asteroid crashed ten years ago but was only large enough to destroy a few cities at most, but it brought with it a deadly contagion which has reduced the world's population drastically in those ten years to the point that the contagion is daily news and everyone's expecting to die, then you've also got Just Before the End set in a Crapsack World.

Also known in apocalyptic literature as the Dying Earth subgenre.

Compare Signs of the End Times. Not to Be Confused With Denouement.

Anime and Manga

 * Narutaru starts about a year before the End. Eventually,.
 * Saikano begins with everything apparently peaceful, although the weather has gotten bizarre.
 * The manga is more hopeful, in that
 * The anime is not.
 * Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip), except that it paints it as a Cosy Just Before The Catastrophe that you might actually want to live in. The manga is about an android named Alpha taking care of a store in the countryside, who occasionally needs to go travelling around. Humans are starting to depopulate due to unexplained reasons; however, the "children" of humanity, the robots, are so human-like it's clear they'll carry on humanity's legacy and humans themselves seem to be pretty cool with this fate, the way an elderly person has accepted their inevitable death (even if they don't invite it).
 * Wolf's Rain takes place in a decaying world-turned-wasteland, dotted with Adventure Towns.
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion- though in NGE the world is less bleak, more savable, and more "actively being destroyed" than in others.
 * A particular review of the manga Berserk said that "It shows us how the apocalypse starts" & "what happens during the apocalypse."
 * Now and Then, Here and There manages to be set both Just Before the End and After the End. Human civilization has long collapsed, and now
 * Volume 2 of Phoenix starts this way. There are plans underway to restore humanity, but nobody seems to really believe in the future.
 * In episode 42 of the Kirby anime.

Comic Books
"Dr. Manhattan: In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."
 * Watchmen is set in a world that's teetering on the edge of a nuclear holocaust.
 * But then manages to avert and subvert it, as  is left open to reader interpretation. Doctor Manhattan puts it best:

"Death:I'm sorry. I can't let either of you stay here and watch. You see, this really is it. The universe is over. Its my job to put it all in order, now, and lock the place behind me as I leave."
 * Y: The Last Man has this atmosphere, for all that it centers on the titular last hope for natural reproduction. After all, he's one slim hope given that every male mammal in the world had died. Even if you knew he lived, it would be reasonable to assume this was the last generation of humanity.
 * Neil Gaiman's Signal to Noise features the Nested Story of a group of villagers gathering on a hillside on New Year's Eve, 999 AD, convinced that the world is about to end.
 * The Books of Magic series includes a scene where the main character goes to the very last minutes of time.

Film

 * Children of Men: After nearly twenty years of depopulation due to infertility, human civilization has virtually crumbled to dust. It's all the protagonist can do to stay properly drunk through the last few weeks of Britain's existence.
 * The original Mad Max, although Road Warrior and Thunderdome were post-apocalyptic. In Mad Max, Max was a police officer in a collapsing dystopian Australia, after a nuclear war and environmental disasters had just started to take effect.
 * Brazil may or may not count as this.
 * Another Terry Gilliam movie, 12 Monkeys, definitely counts as this.
 * Doctor Strangelove
 * Countdown to Looking Glass, which is a Cold War concluding in nuclear war from the perspective of newscasters.
 * Blade Runner (less clear in the book that humans are evacuating to the off-world colonies to escape the radioactive dust in Earth's atmosphere).
 * Beneath The Planet of the Apes: Let's just say it ends with a bang.
 * Conquest Of The Planet of the Apes: Ends with the revolution of Ape against Man.
 * The Canadian film Last Night.
 * Dawn of the Dead was set during the outbreak of the zombies and by the end of the movie the world is overrun, as far as we know.
 * Day of the Dead may or may not be set Just Before The End or After the End
 * Diary of the Dead too, as it takes place on the first night and we know what happens after that.
 * When Worlds Collide, except shocking inattention is paid to the fact that everyone on Earth but the named cast dies in the final act.
 * The Nicolas Cage film Knowing is about a list of numbers and dates predicting disasters. Only 3 are left when the protagonist finds it, the last one predicting a solar flare that will kill everyone else alive in the planet.
 * The protagonist in The Movie of the Book of The Time Machine stops by at a time where the the Moon is about to fall. He then fast forwards to After the End.
 * In The Paul Newman film Quintet, a new ice age has covered the earth. It is established that Earth will continue get colder till man cannot survive, so there is no real future. Some people have decided to pass the time playing Quintet, a kind of five-man Russian roulette game.
 * "Soylent Green is people!"
 * Terminator 3': Rise of the Machines

Gamebooks

 * Heart of Ice is set in a world where an insane weather control AI has turned the Sahara into an icy wasteland and is otherwise wrecking the global ecosystem (except when she's terraforming new ecosystems for her own creations). While there has been no specific world-ending event, almost all of the world's governments (except for the United States) above the city-state level have collapsed, and humanity is not expected to last another century.

Literature

 * Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
 * Fahrenheit 451 has
 * A Canticle for Leibowitz is an interesting case: it begins After the End, humanity spends a few centuries rebuilding, and by the end of the book.
 * Peter Watts' Rifters Trilogy reads basically like the trope description. The West Coast (well, the part that isn't a four-thousand-mile-long, one-mile-deep refugee camp) is run by the power company. The East Coast is an enourmous urban sprawl run by street gangs. The bit in between is run by Kudzu-4. The currency is the Quebuck, a new drug-resistant disease breaks out every 24 hours on average, and the vestigal remains of the North American government has been reduced to sporadically napalming the whole mess just to keep things down. This is the status quo. It gets worse.
 * The Elric of Melnibone saga begins just before the end, continues through the end itself, and concludes with the beginning of a new world.
 * Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.
 * Atlas Shrugged. The trains are literally running on time at the beginning, but by the end are not running at all.
 * Millenium by John Varley. The plot involves . Towards the end.
 * The War of the Worlds dips into this before the Deus Ex Machina pulls us back from it; it's not for nothing that the second half of the book is called "The Earth Under the Martians".
 * Jack Vance's The Dying Earth. The sun is big, red, and going out any minute now.
 * Gene Wolfe's New Sun trilogy of novels take place a looong way in the future (the techno-fantasy "post-historical" era where Stone-Age Man, the Modern Era, and the Galaxy-Spanning Imperial Era are all lumped together as the "Age of Myth"). But it's Just Before The End - the Old Sun is dying, reduced to a naked-eye object at high noon, and the world will either enter the Ragnarok of Eternal Winter or become the Garden-World of Ushas when the New Sun is ignited. The book follows the life of Severian, the poor bastard who's the one who actually gets to decide which future will dominate.
 * The Dark Tower series by Stephen King is set in a reality where the worlds are winding down. Civilization is crashing, people are getting weird diseases, and
 * The Last Days, the sequel to Peeps by Scott Westerfeld subverts this. Peeps, or parasite positives, or vampires, are biting everyone. People are afraid to leave their house because there might be feral cats or worse outside. The Internet and phones are failing. Basically, it's an apocalyptic world. But, it is revealed that there is a worm under the earth that comes out every thousand years.  It is never revealed how long it took for the world to be saved, though.
 * Olaf Stapleton's 1930 The First and Last Men. With its cyclic view of history and two-billion-year timespan, this happens all the time. We get details of the insoluble coal crisis that first destroyed civilization, and of the eighteenth human race as they try to seed other solar systems and wait for the sun to explode, having chosen to appreciate this tragedy as an appropriate part of the beauty of the universe. And then there's the afterword, where they're blowing each other up and eating their dead while the system is being scorched clean. Seeding work, such as it is, is done to provide any sort of purpose, and the consensus is that the species should have died in peace before it started to putrefy. Still, in their lucid moments, it is very good to have been Man.
 * The last segment of The Last Question takes place just before the heat death of the universe.
 * Actually, the last segment was After the End. The computer (AC) working on the Question was hidden away in hyperspace, which is apparently immune to heat death (or at least wasn't as close to it as normal space)
 * The Last Question is "How do you reverse entropy?" The answer:
 * Life As We Knew It by Susan Pfeffer. In this book, an asteroid has hit the moon, causing mass climate change. Infrastructure is failing, and there is a horrible flu going around.
 * On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Set in a world where a nuclear war has contaminated the entire northern hemisphere with radioactive fallout slowly being spread around the world by stratospheric winds, the book narrates the Australian population's attempts to live out their last days in joy..
 * The Arcia Chronicles are not set before The End of the World as We Know It per se but rather before the Final Battle. However, in that series, said battle can very well turn into the apocalypse. Although Normal People are still not aware of their impending doom, the knowledgeable characters all comment that their chances of victory are very slim. At one point, some characters visit another world that has lost its Final Battle and was devastated. They actually get to see its end in a vision. Let's just say that the local Physical God of War was nearly driven insane by said vision.
 * This motif is even more omnipresent in the author's next project, Reflections of Eterna, where the end of the world is already set in stone, and there's no escape, since it's already been postponed once. The bad news is that nobody (except a couple of aliens who are forbidden to communicate with anyone) on that world knows about the impending catastrophe and everyone happily contributes to its end. That Eterna is Low Fantasy, as opposed to Arcia's High Fantasy, probably contributes.
 * The Enemies Foreign and Domestic series by Matt Bracken.
 * The Robert Heinlein short story "Year of the Jackpot" takes place in 1952 when a confluence of the cycles of human civilization are causing humanity to go crazy. There is horrible weather, a nuclear war, and just when things are looking up, the sun goes nova.
 * Children Of Men by PD James (later filmed) starts with the world where there hasn't been a birth for eighteen years, and everyone knows this is the end. It's mentioned that examples of human culture and knowledge are being sealed in vaults to preserve them, if there's ever anything else to find them.
 * The Word and Void trilogy by Terry Brooks takes place Just Before the End, about 50 years before the impending fall of civilization; the follow-up, Genesis of Shannara, takes place during The End of the World as We Know It. His Shannara series takes place After the End, in a new habitable world.
 * The looming specter of The Others in A Song of Ice and Fire seems to indicate that the entire plot so far amounts to mere squabbles in the face of a truly cataclysmic future The Magic Comes Back scenario. “Winter is coming” indeed.
 * Sunshine has the protagonist facing a very bleak future for humanity in the face of the oncoming vampire and other paranormal creatures' onslaught.
 * Reckless Sleep is set in a future where a nuclear detonation on the floor of the ocean has torn the tectonic plates to pieces. By the start of the novel, the west coast of the United States is underwater with the east not far behind. The people that are left struggle through a miserable existence of constant earthquakes and volcanic ash clouds, seeking escape from the tiny living spaces, reprocessed food and rampant crime with the use of drugs and VR simulators. The whole of society has crossed the Despair Event Horizon because the world is eventually doomed to total collapse, and two missions to colonise a distant planet have ended in disaster.

Live Action TV

 * A few episodes of Sliders dealt with alternate Earths that were about to end.
 * From The Twilight Zone, "The Midnight Sun" is the story of a young woman and her elderly neighbor trying to survive in their apartment building as the Earth slowly drifts closer to the Sun, causing extreme climate change. She has to deal with day to day life in the increasingly deserted city, extreme thirst and heat, and crazed, murderous people just desperate to survive.
 * The first couple scenes of the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries and the TV Movie The Plan.
 * Caprica counts as well, although it's 58 years before the Fall and the characters have absolutely no idea of what's about to happen to them.
 * The Day After; which at its end shows the horrors of life the titular day After the End. Threads went further to 10 years after the end.
 * For most of the fifth season Supernatural appears to be doing this: Lucifer is unrolling his apocalypse across the globe, at a very slow pace, the humans are starting to notice something's going on, and Sam and Dean have no foreseeable way to prevent the end of the world. Then they do, of course.
 * The Speculative Documentary Supervolcano starts out After the End (the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera), then flashes back to five years before the end, and eventually catches up to the present story.
 * The Doctor Who three-parter beginning with "Utopia" has this: in "Utopia", humans are the last alive in a dying universe, and things are going to Hell pretty quickly. There only hope is a rocket to a place called Utopia.  In the next episode, it's revealed that
 * Several television series (in particular, Life After People) explore the impact humanity has had on the planet by constructing a hypothetical scenario in which all human life on earth suddenly and inexplicably vanishes. This allows the series to explore the condition of ancient monuments (such as the Colloseum in Rome), man-made structures (like Hoover Dam) and the natural world in a span of anywhere from ten minutes to three thousand years 'after the end'.

Music

 * Musical example: David Bowie, "Five Years" (from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars).
 * "Here Comes the Flood" by Divine Comedy.
 * Most of Jethro Tull's album, "Stormwatch". In particular, the songs "Dark Ages" & "Something's On The Move".
 * "Tomorrow Never Comes" by VNV Nation.

Tabletop Games

 * The Old World of Darkness was taking place just before five or so ends, depending on which specific game you were playing.
 * Exalted and Warhammer 40 K are also prime examples.
 * Albeit with most races having tiny light at the end of the tunnel, and many of them are aware of this slim chance. The Emperor's possible revival for mankind, the slumbering Eldar god's awakening, the full force of the Tyranid hive fleets. Of course, any one of those happening means all the other races get After The Ended.
 * Exalted has at least four possible Ends coming up: the Yozis breaking out of hell (which would resemble a cross between a nuclear war and a planet-sized child jumping on human ants), Oblivion swallowing everything, the world being unmade into the Wyld, or - quite possibly worst of all - the Solars regaining their ancient power and hubris. Over in Autochthonia, at the current pace it's only a matter of time before the Great Maker dies and consigns most of his people to horrible death.
 * Magic the Gathering's Fallen Empires expansion, which takes place after the Brothers' War but before the Ice Age.
 * For M:TG's many planes (but particularly Dominaria) this is a horrific, cyclic trope.
 * The Dying Earth RPG by Pelgrane Press, based on the Jack Vance novels.
 * Call of Cthulhu supplement Fearful Passages, adventure "Slow Boat". The far future setting where the PCs end up, complete with a large orange dying sun and a population made up of necromancers and zombies.

Video Games

 * Nie R is set in a world that is slowly dying despite everyone's best efforts to hang on..
 * Deus Ex. The setting of the game was described as "Five minutes before the fall of human civilization" by Warren Spector. The sequel, however, goes Apocalypse Not.
 * Despite making a nice page quote, the above statement from the Human Revolution trailer is somewhat invalidated by the fact that the game is a prequel to the original Deus Ex (though it's more likely a reference to the relative "golden age" of the prequel giving way to the Crapsack World of the original).
 * The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Life was still going on, though the people were aware of the impending Colony Drop and many had plans of evacuation (as if anywhere would be safe) and others were in denial. No Dystopia or Crapsack World yet, but the world of Termina is very much aware that it has three days to live.
 * The Player Character gets to relive this depressing period over and over again. Forget defeating the forces of evil, anyone who can live through that, at ten years old, and still be sane has to be a hero.
 * And he's already lived through Ocarina of Time.
 * Gears of War: The locust have destroyed all human goverment presence on the planet Sera except the Jacinto Plateau, which they break into before the first game starts.
 * Half-Life 2: Thanks to the Combine's suppression field, the youngest people on Earth are twentysomethings, and the Combine are slowly but surely intent on turning everyone into either a soldier for them, or the horrifying creatures known as Stalkers. But that's not all! Cut content from the game showed (and hints can still be found) that the Combine is also draining Earth's oceans and replacing its air with a toxic gas.
 * Final Fantasy VII hits this once Meteor gets summoned and the WEAPONs start showing up.
 * The later games in the Command and Conquer Tiberium series start heading in this direction, with GDI gradually losing the war to contain the spreading Tiberium.
 * By the time Tiberium Wars takes place, GDI has actually made some progress in removing Tiberium thanks to its new sonic weaponry. Then the aliens show up.
 * And the sonic weaponry tears into them like they were made of paper, and there is still enough of to keep the battle against tiberium afloat, and it's under control as of Command and Conquer 4.
 * The colony mission to eponymous star system in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is sent exactly because even despite there's enough goodwill to build and man the ship, this is quite possibly the last coherent effort at international cooperation, people are already aware things aren't going to end well, and the environment is coming apart at the seams.
 * Not that it was all roses - The backstory points out that the captain of the ship was assassinated en route, several others were almost assassinated, and the cooperation fell apart the second they landed.
 * And the game repeatedly points out that Earth goes completely silent shortly after planetfall. As in, totally silent on all frequencies. As in, Earth went boom.
 * Earth 2150 is an RTS with the goal of gathering enough resources to get off the planet before it blows. Mission environments and shots of the globe start with winter, slowly moving on to spring, summer, Sahara and Venus. It's quite effective since the game's non-linear enough that keeping up with the schedule is your concern.
 * The mostly-unknown predecessor Earth 2140 also qualifies, as the two main factions are fighting over the dwindling resources of the planet.
 * Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines takes place just before Gehenna, i.e. the end of the Old World of Darkness.
 * Pathologic : The mysterious town the game takes place in evokes this everywhere you tread.
 * Though most Shin Megami Tensei games are set After the End, Devil Survivor is all about the lead-up; whether said End happens or not is dependent on the player's choices.
 * It's a bit more complicated than that. Shin Megami Tensei starts Just Before The End, has The End of the World as We Know It occur, then time skips to a while After the End. Shin Megami Tensei II is After the End. The first two Devil Summoner games and some or all of the Persona series take place in a timeline where the End from Shin Megami Tensei was averted. Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne follows a similar pattern to the first game, except that it starts even closer to the end. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey takes place Just Before The End, with the player's mission being to find out just what this impending End of the World is and stop it if possible. That doesn't even cover all the spinoffs, either -- there's also the Majin Tensei series, Last Bible, and Devil Children.
 * The first two Resistance games (as well as the Gaiden Game).
 * A political version of this occurs in Oblivion. It's hinted at the end of the game that  From what we know of Skyrim, it's true.
 * Phantasy Star II. While giving many of the details would be highly spoileriffic, there's a reason that it's subtitled The End of the Lost Age. Even in the beginning, it's clear that the people in the cities are blissfully goofing off while bandits and accidental releases from the Biosystems Lab rule the wilderness, the planetary weather control systems are breaking down, and the Motavia government has a grand total of one agent (and a few volunteers who hear about his efforts and offer their assistance) to send to deal with the problems of an entire planet. It gets worse.
 * Wild Arms 2.
 * Super Mario Galaxy.
 * There is a very apocalyptic gloom throughout the final act of Dragon Age II, so much that even the resident Cloudcuckoolander Merrill lampshades it, saying "It feels like something is ending". Aveline tries to reassure her that it's gonna be alright, but.
 * Mass Effect 3 takes place in the galaxy during the opening stages of the Reaper invasion. Things are still running, but planets all over the galaxy are under siege. The entire game is a desperate struggle to find a way to stop the Reapers before they break the back of galactic resistance; late game, you can read an article detailing the future of the galaxy if the war continues. The projections show that the galaxy has less than a year before the entire economy completely collapses.
 * There is a very apocalyptic gloom throughout the final act of Dragon Age II, so much that even the resident Cloudcuckoolander Merrill lampshades it, saying "It feels like something is ending". Aveline tries to reassure her that it's gonna be alright, but.
 * Mass Effect 3 takes place in the galaxy during the opening stages of the Reaper invasion. Things are still running, but planets all over the galaxy are under siege. The entire game is a desperate struggle to find a way to stop the Reapers before they break the back of galactic resistance; late game, you can read an article detailing the future of the galaxy if the war continues. The projections show that the galaxy has less than a year before the entire economy completely collapses.

Webcomics

 * A world like this is briefly shown in the Sluggy Freelance mini-arc "The Fall," where we see what the Dimension of Pain was like just before the demons conquered it.

Web Original

 * The Fine Structure subsection "Endworld" takes place

Western Animation

 * When the Wind Blows was about a naive elderly couple preparing for, then attempting to survive a nuclear attack.
 * Generator Rex takes place five years after a nanite plague exploded across the world and began to mutate the ecosystem. By the start of the series, the human population's gradually dwindling away as people randomly transform into monstrous evos (since everyone's been infected, sooner or later everyone changes) and much of the world has been overrun and lost to normal humans. The situation has grown so desperate that Providence, a borderline Knight Templar organization devoted to fighting the evos and finding a cure for the plague, has the authority to nuke major cities (such as New York) if necessary.
 * To put this into perspective, consider that the population of Beijing, China, in Generator Rex, is around 15 million. Present day Beijing has a population of approximately 18 Million

Real Life

 * For all of recorded history, basically every generation has been positive that The End is upon them, generally due to current events that, at the time, seemed nigh-certain to lead to the collapse of society at best, and the destruction of life on earth at worst. The Great War and the following Plague, the Great Depression, World War Two, the spectre of nuclear war that hovered over the Cold War, and now the twin terrors of religious extremism/terrorism and environmental destruction/degradation.
 * The Roman Empire did not end with a bang in 476. The empire had been decaying at least since the mid-third century, and possibly even earlier than that. There was one last attempt to prevent utter collapse under Constantine, but those citizens of the Empire who lived after him (especially after 410) must have been aware that the Roman Empire was doomed.
 * The eastern part of the empire (usually called the Byzantine Empire today, but still known as the Roman Empire to its inhabitants) survived the cataclysms that brought down the western Roman Empire in the fifth century, though it too had a protracted Just Before the End period. For the last two centuries of its existence, it barely held on after being fatally weakened by the Fourth Crusade, falling to the Turks in 1453.
 * This can be the personal case for people with terminal diseases who have been given an estimate of how long is left before their death.
 * Some scientists think that we are living in what could possibly be the sixth mass extinction. And what makes this extinction event so alarming is that unlike the first five, which are caused by natural events, this one is caused by us.