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** ''Star Man's Son'' (a.k.a. ''Daybreak - 2250 A.D.'') opens generations after [[World War III]]. The protagonist is suffering from his culture's prejudice against [[Mutants]].
* In [[H. Beam Piper]]'s short story "The Answer", the protagonists - an American and a Russian - managed to survive the destruction of their respective nations, and are now working in South America. The titular answer is to the question, why was Auburn, New York, the first casualty of [[World War III]] - particularly since the Soviets then threw away the advantage of a first strike and didn't follow it up? {{spoiler|The town wasn't destroyed by the Soviets, but by a [[Colony Drop]] - specifically, of an antimatter meteor - and nobody recognized it for what it was until after one of the protagonists, who witnessed the destruction of Auburn and investigated it, witnessed the results of a similar, artificial antimatter experiment in South America.}}
* Reeves' ''[[Mortal Engines]]'' takes place after not only the Sixty Minute War, a conflict so devastating it caused centuries of geological instability and fundamentally changed the geography of the Earth
* M.P. Shiel's 1901 novel ''The Purple Cloud'' finds a man returning from a Polar expedition to discover that seemingly all other humans and animals on the planet have been killed by the purple cloud of the title.
* In Olaf Stapleton's ''[[Last and First Men]]'', 99% of humanity is wiped out in a huge geological upheaval, with humanity thrown back to the [[stone Age]] and forced to crawl back to dominance over several million years, and evolving into the 2nd, 3rd, etc Men. Eventually Earth must be abandoned when the [[Colony Drop|Moon comes crashing down]], and later Venus, Man's new home, is threatened and must be abandoned for a final home on Neptune. The book ends with the 17th (Last) Men awaiting the end as the Sun threatens to go nova.
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* The Pelbar heptalogy by Paul O. Williams is set in North America 1,000 years after a nuclear war, describing how the communities along the Heart River (formerly the Mississippi) are trying to reforge anything resembling a nation.
* ''[[The Chrysalids]]'' by [[John Wyndham]], who liked this sort of thing, is about a society recovering after a catastrophe, which the hyper-Christian characters call "The Tribulation" and is implied to be a nuclear war/disaster. In the protagonist's community, any living thing showing signs of genetic abnormality is considered a Satanic abomination, including human beings. His having telepathy is therefore something of a concern.
* [[Roger Zelazny]]'s ''This Immortal'' (which was originally serialized as ''...And Call Me Conrad''), which is better than his book ''Damnation Alley'' (which the movie of the same name is based on [[In Name Only]]).
* In the ''Pendragon'' novel, ''The Pilgrims of Rayne'', Bobby discovers that {{spoiler|the tropical island paradise of Ibara is actually part of Veelox, after three hundred years have passed since Aja Killian's time. The rest of Veelox is a crumbling wasteland and the people not living in Ibara aren't much better than animals.}} In ''Raven Rise'', {{spoiler|Third Earth}} could probably also fit this trope well.
* The Gold Eagle adventure series ''[[Deathlands]]'' takes place in a post-[[WW 3]] United States plagued by crazed mutants and power-hungry barons.
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* Manuel de Pedrolo's Mecanoscrito del segundo origen (Second origin typescript) deals with two young survivors of an alien attack on earth trying to repopulate it and preserve human culture, with the few other survivors they come across no longer being quite as sound of mind as they may once have been.
* Nevil Shute's ''On The Beach'' follows the {{spoiler|short}} lives of people living in southern Victoria, Australia, after the rest of the world has blown each other to bits with nuclear bombs. {{spoiler|Everybody dies, All of them. Yes even the baby. And the dog. They all die. Incredibly depressing, but still a brilliant book.}}
* In John Birmingham's ''Without Warning'' [[Alternate History|in 2003, just before the Iraq War]] a mysterious energy field called "the Wave" wipes out all higher primates (and about half of an apparently random selection of any species with a spine) in the greater part of North America (about half of Canada, 95% of the Lower 48 states, and about 80% of Mexico as well as about 75% of Cuba). [[It Got Worse|Things get worse]] when
* Most of the ''[[Dragonlance]]'' novels and adventure modules are set after the Cataclysm, an event in which a fiery mountain (i.e., meteor) fell on the city of Istar and destroyed it and much of civilization with it.
* Fred Saberhagen's ''Empire of the East'' and its sequels series ''The Books of Swords'' and ''The Books of Lost Swords'' are set on earth thousands of years after civilization was ''not'' destroyed in a nuclear war. Instead, the United States activated a device that actually changed the laws of nature to prevent the destruction of humanity by making nuclear fission so much less likely that the nuclear bombs wouldn't work. The good news is that it worked. The bad news is that changing the laws of nature also caused advanced technology to stop functioning, and caused magic to start working. As a result, civilization collapsed anyway, but it did eventually rebuild, albeit along rather different lines.
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