On Monday, 9 October 2023 at 22:30:17 UTC+1, pete...@gmail.com wrote:
> I know that Lynn is partial to the burgeoning post-EMP survival novel genre (Goodreads lists over 100 of them). Mostly, they seem to be imposed on (usually) the US by a nefarious foreign power, exploding nukes high in the atmosphere.
>
> But there are natural phenomena which can match or surpass man made EMPs. The Carrington event is long known, but recently we've found far more powerful 'Miyake Events', which can be 10x as powerful, and affect the whole planet simultaneously.
>
> Have such natural events been used as the hook for a story?
> https://www.newsweek.com/tree-rings-reveal-most-powerful-solar-storm-ever-1833028

<https://sf-encyclopedia.com> doesn't seem to
recognise the name of Miyake. But many stories
portray a natural global disaster or the situation
afterwards. It isn't necessarily sudden. I think
a recent piece by James Nicoll, at Tor.com,
mentioned a story where a shower of space dust
causes metal to evaporate or something.
In _The Day of the Triffids_, a bright display
of meteors leaves everyone who saw it blind
the next morning, after which some recently
domesticated plants, the man-sized omnivorous
walking triffids, understandably cause considerable
trouble, although it's not quite clear to me that
the blindness wasn't enough of a disruption
of the civilised world to make a novel. The triffids
did reduce an unwieldy cast of characters.

<https://thefinchandpea.com/2014/08/17/the-first-modern-post-apocalypse-novel-after-london/>
reports, with some editing by me, that
"Gothic and Romantic writers wrote the first important
End of the World fiction early in the 19th century. But the
nascent genre languished" until _After London_ (1885)
by Richard Jeffries, whose narrator doesn't really
know what happened to London and to civilisation
in England and probably worldwide, but it happened
pretty hard, and London is underwater.

A catastrophe that is our own fault seems to be
outside the field of your question. There's a lot of
those in fiction. And alien invasions, of course.
They seem to like de-civilising us.

In <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_the_Spirits>
a natural event of global cooling seems to be the
main cause of uncivilising the world, but "scientists"
are blamed for spoiling it first, and a significant
number of human "dwarfs" and also mutants,
and a giant amphibious sea monster outbreak
(one seen, but it's pretty big), imply that the natural
world took a beating from our scientific progress
before the cooling happened.