Catastrophe! Science Fiction has done a good many stories about death and destruction. H. G. Wells helped popularized this idea with his The War of the Worlds (1898), where a familiar scene is destroyed by invasion. In his case, the area around London. Later SF writers went bigger and bigger until entire solar systems were used as bowling balls. Edmond Hamilton got the nickname of “World Wrecker” for writing this cosmic-sized adventure. But let’s not act like more modern SF is all that much different with Star Wars and its Death Star blowing up Alderaan. And that nuclear explosion on Space 1999 got things going. The planet Vulcan destroyed. You get the idea.
The 1970s also spawned the entire Disaster Movie craze beginning with Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure (1972), followed by Earthquake (1974), The Towering Inferno (1974), Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979), When Time Ran Out (1980), and others. The thrill of escaping a world in chaos is an old type of story for SF fans. Filmmakers were also the fond the same kind of film with monsters (ie Godzilla).
The Pulps were no stranger to disaster fiction. First, reprinting old stuff in Amazing Stories, but later producing their own tales. Covers were a great place to show all the devastation. Not surprising, most of them are by Frank R. Paul.
This last one is quite apropos since it is Edmond Hamilton under that house name S. M. Tenneshaw.
Covers from Galactic Central.
