2 comments

1. It Ran Down is actually not too unmcomon a trope in sf, but it usually isn’t as flashy a means of Big Change as the quicker world-changing you cite. Brunner is a good guy to look to, and Frederik Pohl, with and without collaborators, often would explore this kind of future (usually compoounded by degrees with the other problems) for satiric purposes…THE SPACE MERCHANTS, «The Midas Plague,» and such deal with Earths in the throes of run-down societies (or those trembling on the verge of same), even as Pohl’s collaborator Cyril Kornbluth likewise explored run-down societies, most famously in his genetic-drift society story «The Marching Morons.» One of the most vivid and believeable of It Ran Down societies in fiction I recall is the recently late Thomas Disch’s ON WINGS OF SONG. Less devastatingly, there was THE CRASH OF ’79. Ron Goulart, that guy who’s also a crime fiction and fantasy/horror fiction writer, has also had a sizable amount of his career devoted to It Ran Down sf.

2. Mad Max, the first film at least, painted a world that semeed to have crumbled for econimic reasons. If you look at the police department that Max works for it seems like it’s the last element of a governemnt left, and it’s pretty ragged by the time we see it. In later films they add the war element to the mix. Otherwise I can’t think of any others where there isn’t something else that causes society to fall.