Some of the themes with a lot of the Dystopian/Post Apocalyptic books and films involve the world after some kind of major disaster, war, disease, or some combination of the three. But most of these stories take place in the future and I'm tinkering with the idea of a kind of alternate 2014 where the Big Event happened in the early 1800's. So far for ideas I have a major plague that wipes out most of the world's population, causing panic and war until enough people develop an immunity against it to slowly rebuild society. A few major natural disasters come to mind like a Super Volcano, or something devastating enough to temporarily knock humanity back into the Dark Ages but still leave them mostly intact enough to recover. Any thoughts or suggestions?
I like the super volcano, myself. Disease has a lot of messy things to deal with while the effects of a true super volcano are straight forward. A flood basalt event has so much to work with as far as regions wiped out. A super volcano could have caused a climate catastrophe. I like the idea of having it occur a century ago. Most stories have the war or apocalyptic event occurring in the future.
My google-fu is failing today. I seem to remember something about how the dark ages might have been caused by meteoric dust decreasing the sunlight. Less light means it's really cold and the crops don't grow as well. Basically famine and less energy to do things not directly related to survival. There was also a belief in how many people the world could hold, or the breaking point between how many people needed to grow food and how many others could do other things. The Industrial Revolution made those estimates a curiosity instead of useful to apply to a world with farming machines. It sounds like a fun amount of research if you like that aspect. Basically figuring out what they had in 1800's, what might have survived, what might have still been invented afterward, what societal pressures changed... I could imagine some elements of steampunk without it properly fitting into the genre. Maybe the get-ahead-iveness of Europeans contaminated Native American Tribes, leading to a completely different tech progression that could stand up to the first wave of invasions in 200 years.
The LittleIce Age. Wiki says: Dr Plait, (The Bad Astronomer and a friend of mine), is a reliable source for science based conclusions: What caused the Little Ice Age? He presents a detailed discussion of the Maunder Minimum (period of seriously decreased sunspots on the Sun) being unlikely, and he rips the Daily Mail for inaccurate reporting on the role the Sun played.
