The destruction of Los Angeles has been a central theme or image in at least 138 novels and films since 1909. The City of Angels is unique, not simply in the frequency of its fictional destruction, but in the pleasure that such apocalypses provide to readers and movie audiences. The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or be swallowed up by the San Andreas Fault.

The tidal waves, killer bees, H-bombs, and viruses that occasionally annihilate Seattle, Houston, Chicago, or San Francisco produce a different kind of frisson, an enjoyment edged with horror and awe. Indeed, as one goes back further in the history of the urban disaster genre, the ghost of the romantic sublime — beauty in the arms of terror — reappears.

The destruction of London — the metropolis most persecuted in fiction between 1885 and 1940 — was imagined as a horrifying spectacle, equivalent to the death of Western civilization itself. The obliteration of Los Angeles, by contrast, is often depicted as, or at least secretly experienced as, a victory for civilization.