The post-apocalyptic world has been one of the most popular settings of speculative fiction since the middle of the 20th Century. To be certain, there were several examples of such fiction from earlier, perhaps the first of such being The Last Man by Mary Shelly published in 1826, which tells of a plague that reduced the world’s (Europe’s) population to a fraction of it’s former number, and ensuing descent of society into chaos.   The introduction of the atomic bomb at the end of World War Two saw a massive explosion of short stories, novels, and films about a world devastated by war, plague (artificial or natural), and/or other major…