There have been many, many dark and dystopian perspectives on the future of mankind, ranging from sealing us into underground vaults to cryo-freezing us and launching us into deep space in search of the next earth.
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But steel vaults, it seems, appear to be the more favoured flavour of recent times.
This is where the lucky ones among us disappear underground and eke out a survival, of sorts, on awful reconstituted food and cobbled electronics while everything above ground - usually a result of an end-of-times war - turns to crap and civilisation as we know it evaporates in multiple nuclear strikes.
The outstanding Apple TV series Silo whet our appetites with a marvellous adaptation of the Hugh Howey books.
This was high quality, serious science fiction with excellent storytelling and genuinely engaging characters.
If you missed it first time around then double back because it's well worth it; Silo could well become a sci-fi classic provided that season two, due out soon, doesn't crash and burn.
But for a vault future of a very different kind, there's the Fallout series just released on Amazon's Prime Video.
It's a made-for-TV series adaption of the hugely popular Bethesda game series which removes the grit and reality of Silo and sends us into a warped and weird 60s-style future where big corporations control our destiny.
Their twisted corporate logic - as far as this viewer could determine - was that those with their hands on the wealth levers could make even more money by confecting a massive nuclear conflict, serious enough to send anyone who could afford it scurrying into the steel underground embrace of the Vault-tec protective underground, radiation-proof people silos.
Fallout's gameplay graphics and ideas are faithfully reproduced here including the clunky Pip-Boy wrist computers and beautifully detailed Atomic Age sets and designs.
It's a too-clever-by-half satire - if you enjoyed Starship Troopers, then this has a similar schtick - with plot holes the size of an open-cut mine.
It's best to ignore these, sit back and enjoy the ride - and the plethora of fine one-liners - which takes the viewers out of the vaults and up into the vast desert Wastelands, into the ramshackle town of "Filly", then back underground again where more dark and nasty secrets abound.
It's captivating in a darkly humorous, gore-filled and occasionally uncomfortable way, full of wise-cracking survivors selling fresh iguana and quick-fixes, to a sharp-shooting, nose-less Ghoul bounty hunter and armoured high-tech knights striding forth for the honour and conquest of The Brotherhood Of Steel, with their bag-carrying squires rushing, Monty Python-like, to keep up.
The central character, Lucy Maclean, is a exceedingly optimistic vault-dweller on a mission in a blue jumpsuit and her Dorothy-like Wizard of Oz encounters with denizens above and below ground vacillate between near-disaster and highly amusing.
For instance, midway through the series, there's a bizarre sex discussion between Lucy and her travelling companion Maximus which goes in a completely different direction than you'd otherwise expect.
The original Fallout games offered rich visual retro concepts and these roll on and on through the series. For those who love "out there" cars of the 1950s and 60s, don't miss the guest appearance of the bright yellow 1954 Kaiser Darrin.
Only 435 of these rare US sports cars, with their curious doors which slid inside the bodywork, were built before the car company, most appropriately, folded beneath the might of corporate rivals like Ford and General Motors.
