Catastrophe! Heroism! Paranoia! The dangerous romance of survivalist stories

Authors have been imagining societal collapse for decades - but could the reality be as dreadful as they think?

The man who claimed to have coined the word survivalist" called himself Kurt Saxon. The sinister godfather of survivalism was actually born Donald Eugene Sisco, a former journalist who spent the 1960s floating between far-right groups in California before deciding that none of them were serious enough. Sisco's passion for making his own bombs, which he advocated using on student demonstrators, cost him the fingers of his left hand. He liked to say that he was the reincarnation of a soul whose previous lives included a Roman legionary, a Nazi stormtrooper and the revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine.

Survivalism, or prepping, is experiencing a boom, from Silicon Valley billionaires to users of the Reddit board r/collapse. Elon Musk's entire career, for example, has been partly driven by apocalypse anxieties and his conviction that he alone can save the human race (details to be confirmed). The scenarios vary - climate catastrophe, renegade AI, another pandemic, nuclear war between authoritarian regimes - as do the responses. Some claim to be making rational preparations to survive in the event of civilisational collapse, while others seem unnervingly keen to see the world turned upside down. This can feel like a very 21st-century obsession, stoked by online conspiracy theories and the doomerism produced by 24/7 news, but Sisco was pioneering the doom business 50 years ago.