Fallout’s society includes vault dwellers (shown here) and those stuck on top
Lorenzo Sisti/Prime
This is the year of the bunker – at least it’s on TV.
We started in January, just like season two of Fallout (Amazon Prime Video) was up and running. It’s a lively alternate history, set hundreds of years after the United States was bombed, with a privileged few now living in underground “vaults” while the rest live in a wasteland atop monsters and mercenaries. Vault-dweller Lucy searches for her villainous father Hank, accompanied by The Ghoul, an irradiated gunslinger with no nose but buckets of gruff charm.
So come Paradise (Disney+), returns for its second season this month. The cataclysm here is a volcano-induced mega-tsunami that has ended civilization and forced the American elite to retreat under a mountain in Colorado. After tracking down the killer of US President Cal Bradford, Secret Service agent Xavier Collins has heard of survivors and sets off to find his wife Terri, while political intrigue continues inside the Colarado bunker.
And later this year, season three of Silo (Apple TV) is coming. Our third apocalypse was caused by the planet’s noxious atmosphere, which made the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. Residents of the “silo” are trapped in a bleak, highly stratified society with no knowledge of their history and records destroyed 140 years ago. Only the black market trade in “relics” from earlier times hints at what once was. But when engineer Juliette finds evidence of a conspiracy at the heart of the silo’s leadership, she begins to suspect that the surface might not be so toxic after all.
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No matter what flavor of bunker fiction you prefer, all roads lead to a hole in the ground
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There are even more fictional bunkers to hole up in, should you choose, like those in a disaster movie Greenland 2: Migrationor the musical The End. It is also no coincidence that the novel I who have never known menwritten in 1995 and set in an underground prison, went viral on TikTok in 2024.
Although this genre is hardly new – it goes back at least as far as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The poison belt from 1913 – its current popularity speaks to a widespread anxiety about our world that is not hard to understand. It is a place where responsibility is increasingly privatized, where you are either smart, rich or lucky enough to find security or be left to perish, where the impulse to dig away from outsiders is often encouraged. We’ve all heard the rumors about real-life celebrities buying doomsday holes.
What is clear is that whatever flavor of bunker fiction you prefer – the irreverence and ultra-violence of Falloutthe slippery murder mystery to Paradisethe maudlin intrigue of Silo – all roads lead to a hole in the ground. We are fixated on visions of the world ending, with the future shrinking to a vanishing point.
There are two ways to look at this. One view is that we have given up on making society better – having lost the war against our inherently selfish nature. Our only consolation is to alternate between imagining the exact nature of our end and imagining endlessly playing the old order through the privileged few in a bunker.
The other view—and the one I prefer—is that we count on the necessity of sweeping change: nothing short of a purifying fire will do. The characters we love in bunker fiction would not exist without such events. After finding characters to love in Fallout, Paradise and SiloI would like to think that bunker fiction reflects some real hope.
Television
Fallout: Season 2
Amazon Prime Video
Paradise: Season 2
Disney+
Silo: Season 3
Apple TV
Book
Bunker
Bradley Garrett, Penguin Books
The doomsday-prepper mindset may seem fatalistic, but in this fascinating non-fiction guide to end-times culture, Garrett reveals a more nuanced picture.
Bethan Ackerley is sub-editor at New Scientist. She loves sci-fi, sitcoms and all things scary. Follow her on X @inkerley
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