An idea that I had about the Post-Apocalyptic genre

So the way that I generally distinguish between Action and Horror is that Action is where you want the protagonists to face the obstacles because you want the protagonists to win, whereas Horror is where you don't want the protagonists to face the obstacles because you don't want the protagonists to lose, and it feels to me that Post-Apocalyptic stories should inherently be skewed more towards the Horror than the Action.

• We've spent our lives becoming dependant on technology and infrastructure, but now most if not all of it is gone, and we have spent our entire lives not training for the basic skills of surviving without it
• Millions if not billions of people have died already, and the MC could be next at any moment

But the impression that I'm getting is that a lot of popular post-apocalyptic fiction like The Walking Dead is taking the approach of "Billions of people have died already, but MC didn't, and now MC has an excuse to be super-cool in all of the ways I wish I could be!" An action story, but one disguised as a horror story, and one that misses the point that the end of civilization is nothing to look forward to.

So here's an idea that I came up with recently:

A post-apocalyptic story about a doomsday prepper who's been planning her whole life to survive the end of the world, and Act I appears to be an action story because she has a better grasp on how to survive than anybody else does.

But then, from the beginning to the end of Act II, more and more gaps in her preparation start taking more and more of the center stage, and more and more of the focus is on how there's always something you couldn't have prepared for, but now every little thing that happens is a life-threatening emergency. We start seeing more and more hints that this is a horror story disguised as an action-story-disguised-as-a-horror-story.

By Act III, the story has shifted into full-on horror mode

Anybody else want to write their own story like this? I think it's general enough we wouldn't have to worry about anybody accusing anybody else of stealing from each other

 

I could try

 

Just PM me where to start

 

Now that you mention it, my saying "Anybody else want to do something like this?" was actually a lot more ambiguous than I intended

That was supposed to be "Does anybody else want to write their own story like this in addition to whatever story I also eventually end up writing like this?" not "Does anybody want to collab on a specific story that I've already started?"

Am editing the OP for clarity. Thanks.

 

No worries

 

That sounds incredibly difficult, but incredibly cool. Hats off to anybody who would try to write that.

Have you ever played a game called Soma? It's probably one of my favorite videogames ever. It's got kind of a similar premise, though it's a sci-fi horror game, not a zombie apocalypse thing. You think it's an action game, but slowly, this gut-wrenching existential horror creeps up on you.

This guy, Simon, signs up for an experimental brain scan. Basically, all it does is create a digital copy of his brain. During the brain scan, though, everything flickers and goes black. Instantly, he wakes up again, and something is terribly wrong. He's in a strange, horrifying underwater laboratory. He's not human anymore; he's inside a robot body. Is he hallucinating? Is he dreaming? What's going on?

Of course: he's not the real Simon. He's the digital copy from the brain scan. Someone put him inside a robot body.

And *drumroll* he's not in the modern day anymore. He's one hundred years in the future... after the apocalypse.

His "real" self is long dead. Almost every single human on the planet is dead. So he starts traveling through this underwater facility, trying to figure out what the fuck to do.

Eventually, he finds another person. There's a scientist named Catherine Chun who had an idea. She took digital brain scan copies of every person she could find, maybe about 100 people, and she created a digital world for them to live in. It's a digital utopia. She called it the Arc. It's basically just a hard drive. She wants to shoot it into space, where it will be safe for hundreds of years, feeding off solar power. There's flaws in her plan, of course... they're just digital copies, so they "feel" real, but they're living inside a simulation. But this is all the human race has left, a bunch of copies existing on a hard drive.

Catherine makes Simon a deal. Simon, in his robot body, needs to find the Arc, then find a way to shoot it into space. If he does this, Catherine says she'll put him onto the Arc with everyone else, and he can live happily ever after in digital utopia.

So he does it. He fights through this horrific underwater laboratory, full of mutants and monsters. He finds the Arc and shoot it into space.

And... Catherine puts him onto the Arc, just like she said she would, so he can live forever in paradise.

The thing is, though, Catherine doesn't move Robot Simon onto the Arc. She copies him onto the Arc. His new copy lives on in Paradise, but Robot Simon is still trapped inside the laboratory.

And then the game ends. That's it. You think it's an action game, but it's not. It's horror. There's no good ending. There's no winning.

anyway

I don't know why I typed all that out, it's just one of my favorite fucking games ever. Good luck if you decide to write that story, it sounds badass. I wouldn't try it. I don't think I'm that good.

 

Hmmm... oddly enough, I dont see this being too hard. Obviously, any form of writing is difficult at my level, but I could see something really great come from this, without having to delve far too deep. Apollo 13 style, but Post-apoc.

 

I think a lot of the "Robinson Crusoe" stories work a little like that in their initial stages, but I like the idea of things continually getting worse rather than better.

I'm always a sucker for stories without survivors though.

 

I'm actually writing something similar to this now, except its occurring in my story in real life rather than it being fiction She = me, thinks she's planned for every eventuality. Problems = I have no clue what I'm doing and what I thought was going to be some pretty good sci-fi is just a horrible load of crap.

 

I like this idea. There's also the added benefit of setting up an action hero and having them die not because they're being heroic and self-sacrificing but because they were arrogant and not good enough.

And as @CerebralEcstasy says, it's rather like life... but with zombies perhaps.

 

Oh, I couldn't agree more. I've just watched the first episode of the latest season of The Walking Dead (I may very well have to leave this thread because of spoilers) and that's exactly what I thought: where is the horror? This was supposed to be a horror story, not a war story. But I guess that's where it ends up when it's milked prolonged for far too long...

I like your idea for a story, and I enjoyed your thoughts in general.

Good post.

 

By the way, and speaking of The Walking Dead, there's a similar idea explored on the more recent Fear the Walking Dead, third season. It's about a ranch of preppers who seemed to have it all figured out but everything quickly falls apart. It was poorly done (in fact I don't think it was even done on purpose since a lot of reviews point out how badly prepared these preppers were) but you may want to have a look.

 

It seems like an interesting idea, not something I'd be able to do. Good luck with it.

 

This would be the premise of mine......

I was supposed to be on the winning side. Instead, I find I have been left behind because I didn't meet the qualifications of being a part of the holy army.

Inside my heart broke, but I knew deep down that as I had prepared, I wasn't giving it my all, nor had I earned the right to fight alongside him. My King.

Instead, I was left here to fend for myself among the demons and the heathens. Yet, I'm neither. What do I do now Lord? I cried inwardly. What do I do? No answer was forthcoming, it would seem I was worse than the demons, the heathens.

No more prayers, no more answers to them, I am scared and alone. I had prepared for the apocalypse, but wasn't prepared for Armageddon.

Thousands, hundreds of thousands fell that day, their bodies littered the ground as though paper and plastic at a dump. I had turned a blind eye, not seeking to help any of them, too consumed by my own survival. I knew that my days of hiding would soon be over though, one cannot hide from the angel of death, and he was coming for me personally.

I had failed to be the soldier I was supposed to be, and now I was preparing to die.

 

I'm going to write a story about an end of the world prepper, who emerges from her bunker after five years to discover Trump had pressed the three minute warning button by accident and everything was just fine.

 

Good idea

 

Of course a lot will hang on why the world as we know it has changed.

What if technology simply breaks down—an extremely possible scenario, given the way it's all so centralised these days, and the people who control this technology seem to be losing their grip on sanity—and modern life as we know it grinds to a halt? It could be a permanent breakdown, or one that goes on for a long time.

Think of what happens during a simple power cut. Then imagine this power cut is more or less permanent. People can't get money out of ATMs. Credit card systems have failed. Heating systems no longer deliver gas, etc, and you don't have an old-fashioned fireplace, and if you live in a cold country, you are in trouble. Ditto finding some way to cook food, if you're lucky enough to have stocked up beforehand. Shop doors won't open and cash registers don't work. Transportation of goods grinds to a halt because fuel is no longer available, etc. Water treatment plants no longer function, so even getting safe drinking water is an issue, right from the start. And etc.

You can just about imagine what chaos this scenario would produce, even over a short-term period. Look at Puerto Rico as an example. And that was an isolated case, and the rest of the world still carries on while Puerto Ricans slowly get their lives back on track. If this kind of disruption happened to a much larger slice of the population, everything would quickly break down. We are overpopulated, and attempting to deal with the real needs of a large population in this kind of scenario are very limited. Only very primitive societies that are self-sufficient and are not really dependent on technology would be likely to survive. (And become targets for exploitation.)

However, it would be a lot different if most of the world's population was killed off by a virus (as in the Survivors TV series) leaving the environment as we know it pretty much intact, and a lot of scope for starting over. If you are physically fit, you can glean cans and long-life packs of food, seeds, medicines, useful tools and devices, move into abandoned homes that are more adaptable to a non-technological lifestyle, etc. Of course your main immediate problem will be gangs of people who are trying to accumulate more than their fair share of the leavings, both for their own use and for marketing purposes. So you'll need to very quickly learn how to defend yourself, attack places that cache food and other supplies, and to hide if you can.

(Survivors is a VERY interesting TV series—both the Terry Nation original which was made back in the 1970s, and the more recent remake. Both the original and the remake were prematurely cancelled, but they certainly raise pertinent issues in a realistic way, and both are well worth watching.)

It would also be a lot different if things go belly-up due to an environmental disaster (lack of water, too much water due to ice cap melting, new ice age, toxic ecosystem as a result of pollution, volcanic ash clouds obscuring the sun, meteor hitting earth, nuclear war and radioactive fallout, etc.) I think that would be the most difficult scenario to deal with. The first two mainly deal with human nature and how people react to adversity. In both cases, the scope for building a new world exist, if folks can come to terms with the fact that life as they know it is over, but there are opportunities to start again. So that makes both of them potentially 'action' stories. The third scenario is much more stark, however. I don't see humanity surviving the poisoning or physical destruction of our planet. That, I suppose, is where the true horror lies.

The skills and mindset of people would differ, depending on these scenarios. Having a lot of expertise in surviving off the land isn't going to be much help if the land itself is poisoned or stripped of animal and plant life. Having lots of weaponry and the will to enforce your own well-being isn't going to help if there is simply no food around, and you don't know how to produce it. Knowing how to live off land that's not poisoned isn't going to be much help if your eyeglasses are broken, and you can't see very well. Or you're diabetic, and can't get the medications you need. Or if gangs of thugs rob you of everything you have.

It's one of the reasons I'm not a fan of 'zombies' in this kind of scenario. They're a silly invention, aren't they? They don't actually exist. They will NOT be a problem we'd need to worry about. Reality would be bad enough.

 

There's a pretty good Straight Dope column, When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?
that talks about how long you'll have power for in an otherwise non-catastrophic breakdown (power plants and transmission lines intact, not bombed). TL;DR: Less than a week.

 

If the power goes off for good then most people's money will simply cease to exist. The main reason for the 2008 financial crisis is that most 'money' is purely theoretical, existing only as credit rather than currency and there isn't enough cash in the world to account for it all.

Anything that wipes out the database on which that credit is recorded also destroys that 'money'. The majority of the world's population would find themselves immediately and completely penniless.

 

Have I had this conversation with you before?

"Cash" is also largely theoretical. It's just paper. Mints could print more of it any time they wanted if they needed a physical representation of the digital wealth people have accumulated.

I think maybe you're looking for some sort of "gold standard" system, and I can see why that might have its advantages. But treating "cash" as significantly more real than digital representations of wealth doesn't make sense to me.

 

You might check out the novel One Second After by William Forstchen, for ideas. It follows what happens over the course of a year in a small town in North Carolina after the USA (and some other areas around the globe) are struck by EMP attacks, wiping out the electrical grid and everything that has a microchip or computer.

Brings life to a halt to all communication, virtually all travel and commerce. With our interconnected and just in time delivery society, and lack of survival skills by the vast majority of the population...sets for a pretty harsh post-apocalyptic reality.

 

Yeah. Cash only matters in the short term, as it did for the people of Puerto Rico. After the hurricane, they could no longer buy things with cards, etc, so they needed cash. This only worked because they were pretty sure that, sooner or later, 'normal service' would resume. It was just a means of exchange till electronic payments were restored. However, if the outage was permanent, you're right. Cash wouldn't mean shit to anybody who didn't harbour some rose-coloured belief that it would all come back.

I think people would learn the real value of real things, real quick!

It's one of the things that makes Survivors such a compelling show to watch. One of the things that is suddenly of great value in that kind of scenario is expertise. Somebody who had been a medical practitioner, for example, was in huge demand. People with a mechanical bent who could fix broken machinery were as well. Folks who understood farming and growing food were sought after. Anybody with a real skill that would help in that kind of environment was prized and treated with a great deal of care.

 

I've played a lot of TTRPGs that are based on PA worlds. Rifts was my favorite:



I think the appeal of the genre is that the PA setting allows for technology that's good for the story, while getting rid of inconvenient technology, and giving lots of room for the story due to all the anarchy.

Let's say I want to write a story about a gunslinger with two ray guns. He's on the run from a group of alien bugmen because they eat their wives after they give birth and he thinks it is wrong, so he saved one - his new girlfriend. He has to steal a hovercar and drive over the Atlantic ocean to get away from them and has cool adventures dealing with talking fish people.

So, lets say I put this in the real world - doesn't matter all the alien stuff and ray guns and talking fish. I still have to deal with satellites, cameras, cell phones, people radioing for help, large groups of trained and organized gunmen, police and soldiers and blah blah blah - maybe all stuff I don't know about because I don't care about it. Writing the story goes from being pulp cool to some kind of Jason Borne knockoff.

So I set the story up - terrorists nukes ended all nations fifty years ago. 7 billion dead. Boom! Now we're talking. He has a ray gun cause he found it. The bad guys can't radio because they don't know how to make one. Whatever.

 

I really like your overall idea. I'm keeping the above quote because my brain suddenly stated, very firmly, that the reason for post apocalypse stories is the same as the reason for orphaned child protagonists. And I see that as the desire to get all of the authority boundaries out of the story.