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Managing the Apocalypse
Managing the Apocalypse
This is a more coherent version of my notes for the Swancon 2012 panel Building a Post Apocalytic World. Luckily for me, the guests, Brandon Sanderson and Marianne de Pierres, were also on the panel. Brandon Sanderson is an excellent talk show host as well as author – he said afterwards that he really does do this all the time on a radio show back home – so he made it almost easy and was very good at wrangling my blank moments.
He asked the initial question, why do we like this scenario so much? I think it is the sense of hope these stories have. My favourite books on the subject all have it to some degree. The survivors of whatever catastrophe can't go back to how things were, but they acquire the power to work towards some sort of future, perhaps with much more freedom than they had in the past.
Some other things I think a writer needs to consider is how the apocalypse, be it pandemic/zombies/nuclear war/civil disorder, comes about. How, too, do your characters survive when most people don't? Is it blind luck? Did you watch the right movies, fail to receive the exciting new vaccine, or have you simply been preparing for years in your basement/back shed?
I also have a list of useful books to read as background. These are:
The Long Emergency – James Howard Kuntsler
(and to a lesser degree his fiction using his theories: World Made By Hand and Witch of Hebron)
The Weather Makers – Tim Flannery
The Next 100 Years – George Friedman (very USA-centric but still fascinating predictions for the next century)
Geoffrey Blainey's Short Histories. He's done one for The World, The Twentieth Century, Australia and many more. When asked why Short History, he said they were shorter than the ones he wanted to write, but the publisher stopped him.
There's a lot of material online, much of it nonsense, but it is possible to find useful and interesting pieces. One such is the Post Apocalyptic Blacksmith, who seems to be a fundamental Christian believing that we are in the End Times, who then goes on to write an extremely practical account of blacksmithing, or so far as I can tell. He advises the potential blacksmith of points to remember, of how far he should go when trying to repair guns etcetera and generally appears to be already living in the post-apocalypse, in his mind. He can be located easily by that title. We don't know when the Rapture will take place, he says, or what form it may take, which is why he's concentrating on practical aspects as well as the spiritual! I do not agree with his religious ideas but he is one serious character.
As part of my world building, I wrote a timeline, along which I placed the Nightside stories. A lot of it is not known to my characters, because they no longer have the easy communication of our times and the destruction of their society took place 15 years ago. I haven't used a lot of it yet and there's no guarantee I will, but it needs to be there to fill in a history that hasn't happened yet. The timeline begins in the early 2020s – so history is likely to catch up with me! – and goes on to 2050, the year of most of the stories. It mostly concerns Australia, since what happens beyond our shores has become much less important. In this maybe-history, the United States has lost its First Empire status, much as Rome once did. Enemies pressed it so hard that it was forced to call back its legions and defend its own shores, abandoning its foreign territories. Which one am I talking about? You decide.
My setting is Perth, Western Australia, the world's most remote capital city. Most of the state's citizens have been voluntarily evaculated to the more habitable Eastern States, though these areas are suffering an increase of violent weather and flooding. Major mining industries still exist in our north, being the main value of the state to the government, but they are managed from the east. A hard core of a few thousand people cling to the city and to the southern towns, where a network of semi-permanent camps exist under feudal rule. There is no electricity, except what people can rig with generators and increasingly rare fuel, and no support network.
The city is kept under surveillance from the east and a few investigators have ventured inside it. There is also some trading of goods via truckers from Melbourne and Adelaide. Some believe the trucks are organised by the former state government who are trying to look after the diehards. Some believe this is sentimental crap.
I'm planning for the other cities to fall over too, eventually. Extreme weather conditions may make some of their smaller settlements non-viable. It's possible that Indonesia or some other country will try to move in despite the problems, for the sake of the space. Or small islands which are actually drowning would have no choice but to invade. This drowning is happening now, with a group of islands called (from memory) the Carterets. Another small island nation is negotiating for land on Fiji where it can move its people. The name of this one eludes me for the moment.
Anyway, these are some of my ideas which folk may find interesting. I plan to talk more about some of my favourite fictional apocalypses later on. Perhaps there's a better venue for this than my own blog, so if anyone has any thoughts on this, please let me know.
This is a more coherent version of my notes for the Swancon 2012 panel Building a Post Apocalytic World. Luckily for me, the guests, Brandon Sanderson and Marianne de Pierres, were also on the panel. Brandon Sanderson is an excellent talk show host as well as author – he said afterwards that he really does do this all the time on a radio show back home – so he made it almost easy and was very good at wrangling my blank moments.
He asked the initial question, why do we like this scenario so much? I think it is the sense of hope these stories have. My favourite books on the subject all have it to some degree. The survivors of whatever catastrophe can't go back to how things were, but they acquire the power to work towards some sort of future, perhaps with much more freedom than they had in the past.
Some other things I think a writer needs to consider is how the apocalypse, be it pandemic/zombies/nuclear war/civil disorder, comes about. How, too, do your characters survive when most people don't? Is it blind luck? Did you watch the right movies, fail to receive the exciting new vaccine, or have you simply been preparing for years in your basement/back shed?
I also have a list of useful books to read as background. These are:
The Long Emergency – James Howard Kuntsler
(and to a lesser degree his fiction using his theories: World Made By Hand and Witch of Hebron)
The Weather Makers – Tim Flannery
The Next 100 Years – George Friedman (very USA-centric but still fascinating predictions for the next century)
Geoffrey Blainey's Short Histories. He's done one for The World, The Twentieth Century, Australia and many more. When asked why Short History, he said they were shorter than the ones he wanted to write, but the publisher stopped him.
There's a lot of material online, much of it nonsense, but it is possible to find useful and interesting pieces. One such is the Post Apocalyptic Blacksmith, who seems to be a fundamental Christian believing that we are in the End Times, who then goes on to write an extremely practical account of blacksmithing, or so far as I can tell. He advises the potential blacksmith of points to remember, of how far he should go when trying to repair guns etcetera and generally appears to be already living in the post-apocalypse, in his mind. He can be located easily by that title. We don't know when the Rapture will take place, he says, or what form it may take, which is why he's concentrating on practical aspects as well as the spiritual! I do not agree with his religious ideas but he is one serious character.
As part of my world building, I wrote a timeline, along which I placed the Nightside stories. A lot of it is not known to my characters, because they no longer have the easy communication of our times and the destruction of their society took place 15 years ago. I haven't used a lot of it yet and there's no guarantee I will, but it needs to be there to fill in a history that hasn't happened yet. The timeline begins in the early 2020s – so history is likely to catch up with me! – and goes on to 2050, the year of most of the stories. It mostly concerns Australia, since what happens beyond our shores has become much less important. In this maybe-history, the United States has lost its First Empire status, much as Rome once did. Enemies pressed it so hard that it was forced to call back its legions and defend its own shores, abandoning its foreign territories. Which one am I talking about? You decide.
My setting is Perth, Western Australia, the world's most remote capital city. Most of the state's citizens have been voluntarily evaculated to the more habitable Eastern States, though these areas are suffering an increase of violent weather and flooding. Major mining industries still exist in our north, being the main value of the state to the government, but they are managed from the east. A hard core of a few thousand people cling to the city and to the southern towns, where a network of semi-permanent camps exist under feudal rule. There is no electricity, except what people can rig with generators and increasingly rare fuel, and no support network.
The city is kept under surveillance from the east and a few investigators have ventured inside it. There is also some trading of goods via truckers from Melbourne and Adelaide. Some believe the trucks are organised by the former state government who are trying to look after the diehards. Some believe this is sentimental crap.
I'm planning for the other cities to fall over too, eventually. Extreme weather conditions may make some of their smaller settlements non-viable. It's possible that Indonesia or some other country will try to move in despite the problems, for the sake of the space. Or small islands which are actually drowning would have no choice but to invade. This drowning is happening now, with a group of islands called (from memory) the Carterets. Another small island nation is negotiating for land on Fiji where it can move its people. The name of this one eludes me for the moment.
Anyway, these are some of my ideas which folk may find interesting. I plan to talk more about some of my favourite fictional apocalypses later on. Perhaps there's a better venue for this than my own blog, so if anyone has any thoughts on this, please let me know.
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It's great that you've mentioned some useful resources. I just realised last week while rewriting some of my nano stuff, and reading the last of the Millennium books, that I don't know enough about programming and how the internet really 'works' - don't think I'll need to go into too much detail but I probably need to do a little reading, since three of my main characters are essentially computer techs.
Timeline is a good idea to set the book in a context, even if, as you said, the characters don't really need to know.
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Did you get it?
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I enjoyed your panel, muchly :)
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