1. Nuclear devastation. Plenty to work with here, something like hope in the wastelands of not just the U.S., but anywhere in the world. Nuclear devastation would affect the entire planet, thus leaving an infinite amount of stories to be told of survival, direct or indirect, of mankind, animals, etc... Still plenty of potential here without going into cliches or copying already-existent material, such as that from the "Fallout" videogame series (which is an excellent, and well-developed vision of the future in my opinion, not to mention that I'm a big fan of the games because of the back story, gameplay, writing, etc...).

2. Global Warming. Again, more than enough to work with here to keep things fresh, especially since this result is more likely to happen than nuclear devastation. Stories of survival and hardship in many areas of the world would be a big draw, i.e. what would happen to the inland areas of the world when all the coastal peoples had to slowly migrate to them because their own lands are slowly being swallowed by the ocean?

3. Off-world Lifeform Contact. This is probably the most cliche of all the possibilities here so far, but I think there are far more stories to be told of an Earth that has made contact with other life (or other life that has made contact with us) to be told, whether it be bad or good. Chances are greater that our own peoples and governments would react completely different when it came to off-world life that the conflicts would be endless, leading to a story not even as much about the off-world life as our own inability to agree on a single course of action as a planet to handling a situation.

These are just three examples I thought of off the top of my head, and hope that maybe it can spark an idea or two. I know I just did for myself!

As for the post-apocalyptic, I'm a big fan of the genre so seeing this thread mentioning cliches (every genre obviously has them) struck at me and inspired me to come up with something fresh to avoid the above-mentioned (and below mentioned) cliches.

LOL!

Also, dystopias that partially reflect medieval European history and overlook the causal circumstances that; A, caused the Dark (Middle) Ages; B, transcended the circumstances that caused the Dark Ages.

"Bullets the curency of the next millenium"

and i took it to heart for i have started stock pilling them for the 21 Dec 2010 End of the world thing the history channel keeps talking about.

I'd like to see stories where the dramatic change event unravels slowly rather than quickly and is a work in progress rather than a done deal. Also, how 'bout have the reader aware but not the people in said world aware that life as they know it is ending / has ended , albeit slowly...

People in the middle ages still thought they were living in a Roman period long after the time when historians now consider that civilization ended. That's why you have folks like Charlemagne trying to get themselves appointed 'Holy Roman Emperor', or some such nonsense.

With most stories the gangs appear where there is no law, and they become the government. The gangs then go out and collect their "taxes" and eliminate anybody who might challenge their power. They will fight other gang or law for control over the region.
Most stories, such as in the MAD MAX series, has someone who is not going to bow to the gangs, hence the story.

For a post apocalypse story, simply have a group of guys deciding they are going to be in charge, then have someone resisting their control.

I would love to see a story from the gang's point of view. They are doing what has to be done, at least from their point of view, and cannot seem to break the stranger who is resisting them. For this story, the reader doesn't have to like the gang members or leaders, but the reader does have to understand why they are doing it.

Another story would be to have where everybody is trying to prevent global warming, and accidentally cause global cooling where we enter another ice age.

But I have heard that one of the predicted results of global warming is that the temperature difference in the oceans will change to the point that the Gulf Stream will phase out, and the warm water (and, I guess, air) it brings to the British Isles will stop, causing an ice age there, at least.

*****

I feel the need to cite favorite works in the genre.

Davy, Edgar Pangborn. Except for the narrative frame, which takes place (apparently) on one of the Azores, the action takes place in the northeast United States--only the United States is gone and a bunch of squabbling small kingdoms have taken its place. Civilization as we know it has vanished. Global warming has also taken place and the coastlines are altered. Yet the characters in the story come across as people who are able to put it aside and get on with their lives.

Nuclear War, Biological War, EMP Pulse destroying all electronic equipment, Aliens, Ice Age, Tidal waves, Asteroids, Quantum wormholes, Earthquakes, Global warming, Genetically engineered plants that eat humans, Time traveller with bomb, Disease/mutant insects that destroy all crops, Mutants, Zombies, God and the Devil etc.

Particular hate: No thought given to the fact that if a real apocalypse did occur, that is the end of the world, nada, Ragnarok. Thus there is no such thing as a post-apocalypse society.

Me? I'd start looking seriously at the present fertility statistics, who needs a futuristic event when mankind is doing so well at causing his own demise.
The last stats from the BMA in the UK were: 1 in 4 women could only reproduce through IVF, and 1 in 4 men were gay, our gene pool is decreasing. Without the aid of medical intervention, will humankind still be here in 1000 years?
So if there was a major disaster, and we did lose some of our technology base, we could be in real trouble...

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Gloves without fingers...we usually call them "gloves with holes."

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I still say insane bikers who have very little motivation for anything they do. (Especially when they wear fishnets).

I used to ride with a bike club in Orlando, where the motto was, "We don't go anywhere in a straight line." Why? 'Cos it's fun is why. One person's "fun" can be another's "Why'd they do that?" and a writer's "But what's their motivation?" Insane fun, mayhem 'cos it's mad, that's the motivation.

As Their Eyes Touched God

Haha, it's sort of like the difference between having jeans so long you've worn holes at the knees, and buying jeans from a company that wears the holes into the knees FOR you.

The "bomb" scenario was hot when the Cold War was still going on, but right now the chances of a total nuclear exchange seem even more remote than an environmental global catastrophe, so a Roadwarrior-esq type post-Apoc is almost a kind of alternate history. (And I do love the second Mad Max film, to be sure!)

I recently read Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle and while it was a terrific read and I enjoyed it a heck of a lot, I couldn't buy into the idea that the comet would literally wipe out the entire United States in the manner described. Even with the endless rain and the climate effects, the interior of the country would not be touched by tsunami and much of the infrastructure and governing mechanisms would remain intact. So while the impact of Hamner-Brown would be a massive event, it would not be civilization-ending in the way described in the book. At least I don't think so, based on events as they're described.

Maybe this is what makes so many post-Apoc settings hard to believe: they take the ramifications of a singular terrible event, and blow them out of all proportion. There is very little that could affect the entire globe, all at once, to produce the kind of total-end-game scenario that most post-Apoc fiction inhabits. Very little.

For a fresh take on post-apocalypse, I really liked "Dies the Fire" by Stirling, where the "apocalypse" was an global, completely unexplained change in the laws of physics (electrical circuits no longer worked, and chemical reactions were no longer fast -- ie. no gunpowder, explosives, etc. and none of our modern technology worked anymore.)

There is an Island off off Africa that is splitting apart. If half falls away, Florida would cease to exist, along with most of the east coast. It would make the Tsunamis of the Indian Ocean look like a ripple. you saw the effect of 911 and the recent scandals on world economy. consider if everything up to the Appalachians gone. There would be effects along the west coast of the Africa and possibly parts of Europe too What would that do to the world economy?
Placement of the disaster, however small, could devastate world economies.

One must realize that the Post Apocalyptic stories really have nothing to do with the cause of the disaster. It is all about people surviving the aftermath and what goes on from there. The only real effect of the type of disaster is that one might not go into certain areas for different reasons, such as radiation. Beyond that, these are really only survival stories and the cause is meaningless.
Try to start the story from the character in survival mode, the real start of the story, and not even mention the cause of the disaster. It could be that no one knows since there is no news at all.

I remember one scene of a post apocalyptic movie where the bikers were digging through the remains of the city. One of them said to the hero. "We are radiated. and we are active, so we must be radioactive."

It's interesting to note (but irrelavant)that the Greek root word from which apocalypse was derived means a "revealing or "unveiling" and has nothing to do with calamaties (except that calamaties happened to be what were revealed to John).

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I'm at a loss. Aren't "fingerless gloves" called "mittens?"

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FALLEN ANGELS by Niven, Pournelle, Barnes.

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One movie I saw (about 1966) was Crack in the World in which a volcano was creating an unstoppable rift in the earth's crust. Scientists tried, unsuccessfully of course, to stop it and a cone-shaped chunk of the planet hurtled into space.

Something much better is the novel Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (c.1959?) As this is so old, I don't believe that it was considered cliche at the time. This deals with the survival of a community in Florida after a nuclear war.