Thread: Post Apocolyptic

I love post apocalyptic stories, but while I've never really decided to do one, what would you destroy with?

There are so many options for how the current world could end, what would your favorite method be?

My favorite post apocalyptic novel is The Road. The author, Cormac McCarthy, never explains what happened, instead leaving it up to the reader's imagination to fill in that blank. I suppose that's my favorite method - leaving it up to the reader and getting right into the story.

While I share Hawke's love of the unexplained, I believe that even when the reader is never told why, the writer should still know. It gives certainty and logic to the story, even when the reader doesn't know why he/she can still sense that the writer has a reason for everything. If you have a specific scenario it may inspire some particular details that lend variety and originality to the post-apocalyptic world.

I've never really liked the nuclear holocaust scenario. I prefer biological mishap, freak virus, something that just goes out of control basically. I toyed once with the Nibiru concept, not as an alien invasion scenario, but simply the idea of this mysterious planet X that enters our solar system every so and so centuries. My idea was that when it did, if the Earth's orbit coincided and they came so close that the other planet's gravity created a huge pull, like the moon but greater, causing a tide to wash over the entire earth. It would be like the great flood basically.

Point is, I like different, but either way, think of what kind of post-apocalypse you want; wasteland, jungles reclaiming cities, waterworld, human evolution, radioactive desert, humanity lives underground, biohazard, urban anarchy, isolated surviving cities, and then just figure out what could have caused exactly what you're looking for, and what else would it cause. If you're writing post- apocalypse then the apocalypse is just means to an end.

What about tedium? Abject and complete ennui destroying 99% of the population. Brains leaking out their ears from the sheer hell of reality TV driven Saturday night last chance disco microwave herbal enema postmodern 'mortgage your soul' living. The last 1% have to find a way of living without starting the whole mess up all over again. And no. Will Smith can't be in the movie.

Wow, where to even begin with this. The reasons themselves are practically endless, you could go with some of the genre staples like nuclear war, super virus, meteor strike, and so on, or you could get really out there. Take Rifts for example, a pen and paper RPG, a really short version of the long explanation, mass death from war caused huge ley line flares and essentially ripped the world as we knew it apart. Perhaps nature decided to end human existence through evolution and our DNA started to break down, and humanity fell apart before we could stop it. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination of the author.

WolfieReveles has a good point as well, maybe the reason doesn't matter. It could be left a complete mystery, maybe you could hint at it as the plot unfolds, perhaps even use it in itself as a plot hook, maybe stopping a group of nut-jobs from making the same mistake twice.

If you do want to explain the reason, obviously it will have a major impact on the setting. You might try writing the story outline before determining the cause for the end of the modern world, that in itself could help you. I find a lot of times a story will, to a degree, write itself when developed enough.

Sam Delany's Dhalgren has a nice little disaster that remains unexplained through the whole book, a la The Road. I like Delany's book better...anyway something like half of my work is either just pre-apocalyptic or just -post. I'm hugely inspired by the British dystopians and by Lovecraft and his circle and like to mix some of those things into my narratives.
Robert McCammon's Swan Song and Allan Eckert's the Hab Theory are also good dystopic/postapocalyptic novels. McCammon's could be described as akin to the Stand without so much of the bothersome Judeo-Christian overtones.
My last apocalypse came about because of genetic meddlings, ad men, insurance companies, and crooked politicians. The previous one was an inundation of the earth's surface coincident with the rise of hoary old Cthulhu from his undersea city (I set that one to music and am working out how to make it work in verse). Nanotech gone awry and AI lack of conscience are also themes I've deployed.

Well written is the phrase of the day. Worry about that first. Write it well enough and we can work out that pesky logic thing later.

I've used Moderan's cocktail of corrupt politics, plots and genetic engineering. I'm planing to use magic-apocalypse of sorts. I've used various alien invasion techniques like biochemical weapons as retaliation, pest extermination and "if we can't have it, nobody can!" scenarios.

Some of my favorite post apocalyptic stories are set far enough away from the event, no one really knows the exact details of why or how, just the major even in a vague mystical way. A few were far enough that the event had been forgotten outside of a type of mythology.

If I were to write one, I think I'd go that route. Figure out the major event, then age the world a few centuries. Just enough of the previous world left to have those 'old places' that can be explored and the reader can identify with things the characters can't understand.

Brian Aldiss' Hothouse is a good example of that, as is Edgar Pangborn's Davy. Both take place well after the apocalypse, with Hothouse, also known as The Long Afternoon of Earth, taking place millennia after the fact, so far into the future that the human race doesn't even recall the event and have reacquired arborealism.

Post-apocalypse would surely imply loss of knowledge and possibly a descent into superstition. Mythologies would grow out of the memories of the past civilization.

Finally you could create various "creation"-stories (as in how the great world of postapocalyptia was born) that let the reader piece together a general idea of the apocalypse without giving any actual facts. The apocalypse might feel more fascinating if it's never really shown because people will just imagine what they want. It's like when you tell a kid "imagine the worst thing I could do to you, now imagine that I'm gonna do something much worse".

You also avoid getting a wise-ass douche nitpicking through the story to discover a minor error in your research only to post it on some forum to look smart.

Hire the wise-ass and have them do your research. Don't give em money, make em beta readers, something like that...those are tried and true ideas though. There's a novel that touts the fab four as gods of yesteryear (Samuel R Delany again). You know Davy? It's straight along those lines...Terry Carr's short Ozymandias is, too.

Some of my favorite post apocalyptic stories are set far enough away from the event, no one really knows the exact details of why or how, just the major even in a vague mystical way.

This is how I usually operate with post-apocalyptic stories as well. I did work on one for a while where genetically-engineered food caused widespread death over a period of a decade or so. The apocalypse was slow and no one knew what was happening, except some odd fringe 'home-grown organic' groups. I trunked it.