Empty World Fantasy

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JoanDrake

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By which I mean a world in which a man, woman, couple or group wake up one day and find they are the only ones left in what seems a depopulated world. There's no great apocalypse, no disease, no invasion, and no billions of dead bodies. The people just seem to have disappeared. What happened to them is unknown. Everything else is the same. Think After People but as a fiction story with a very few, or one, person(s)left.


I remember seeing a movie like this once but forget what it was called and have seen nothing like it since.
 
A few novels spring to mind that might fit - George R Stewart's 'Earth Abides', Mary Shelley's The Last Man and The Purple Cloud by M.P Shiel (which in turn gave birth to the rather eerie movie 'The World, The Flesh and the Devil, albeit in a much altered form).

Most post apocalyptic fiction tends to have a reason for the wipeout (plague, nuclear war, environmental disaster et al), although, given the nature of post apocalyptic fiction the reason tends to be the least important aspect of the story and it's the rebuilding (or lack thereof) that tends to dominate. Sometimes, of course, as in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend or Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, the simple matter of survival is more important that either rebuilding civilization or, indeed the cause of the disaster (I think Romero hinted that the zombies were caused by a plague carried by returning astronauts, but it was a zombie movie rather than Outbreak, so the reason kinda got pushed to one side).
 
It's not entirely what you want but CS Lewis' Perelandra comes to mind. It's the second one of the Space Trilogy. It's the "Eden" story but the "Eve" has lost the "Adam".
 
Loved The Purple Cloud. Read it about a year ago, and it might be my favourite 'Where'd everyone go?' book. Highly recommend it, though because it was written in 1901, it's a bit difficult to read. My how language has changed.
 
William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land is an empty world fantasy on an epic scale. Like The Purple Cloud it was written over a century ago and is probably a much more difficult novel for modern readers - add the prose styling of the Edwardian Age to the cod-archaic style that Hodgson chose to use and you end up with a difficult but very rewarding read. Easily one of the finest works of dark imagination every produced (if not one of literary brilliance).
 
If you are interested at all in self published books there is one that the better half of it has the character in just this type of setting. It's part of a series and is somewhat YA and is written in a first person almost diary mode but this author does a great job of keeping it interesting and keeping the reader moving forward.

Stray (Touchstone) by Andrea K. Höst

After a certain point it deviates from the where is everyone to the explanation of where she is.
 
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