I've been thinking and I have a few questions. How real should fantasy be? What flavor of Apocalypse do you favor?
I've been a writer and community journalist for most of my life.
I love Science Fiction and I'm a huge fan of credible, original, and well written and well crafted Post-Apocalyptic stories of survival. The operative phrases are "credible, well written and well crafted".
Like every other writer of apocalyptic fiction, I love the genre.
I also love frisky writing. When I decided to craft my story, I chose a different vantage point from which to observe the collapse of technology, the internet, and civilization.
My story is told through the eyes of my MC, a homeless Vietnam veteran whose life changes when he accidentally stumbles upon the secret home of a cult of female preppers living off the grid for fifteen years.
The ladies of Liberty Mountain believe they, along with the knowledge they've saved, can prevent the fall of a new dark age.
My job is to create a fantasy as real and as credible as reason allows. Each word, and every thought, and deed must ring with truth. All must be within the arena of plausibility.
Too many of the books out there tend to center around prepper-super-heroes armed to the teeth with enough weapons in their private arsenal to fight World War III single handedly.
The assumption being that everyone left alive, except for a few, has turned zombie. Mobs roam the streets with an unquenchable thirst to murder you and steal all that you own. Murder and mayhem rule the land.
In the days of the lawless West, the lives of murdering bandits did not end well. Does anyone seriously believe things would be different after TSHTF?
Communities and people will band together to defend themselves and to survive.
While this may make for an enthralling tale, I don't believe it is very realistic. I suspect the transformation from what we are today to what we will become will be much more subtle and nuanced.
There is no doubt such an event would profoundly change our culture and society. I don't find credible, the typical (and predictable) storyline of the shit hitting the fan followed minutes or hours later by the total collapse of society with barbarians ruling the streets. Seriously? Look at history. It doesn't happen that way, at least not in reality.
The plagues which flourished in the middle ages wiped out 1/3 of the population of Europe They were among the most devastating pandemics in human history, killing between 75 to 200 million people.
Nonetheless, society did not crumble, folks did not become barbarians. People and civilization survived, changed and did the best they could with what they had.
The Irish Famine killed or displaced a quarter of the population (1 million died and another 1.5 million people emigrated to other lands, including America.
I seriously doubt that people today are less resilient or more flawed than our ancestors. A series of catastrophic events such as the CMEs depicted in my book would most assuredly be devastating, but not likely in the way portrayed by most Apocalyptic writers. At least that is my premise.
Since it's all speculative fiction, I could be as right or wrong about future events as the next person.
Secrets of Liberty Mountain: Yesterday's Tomorrow*
103,800 Words/45 Chapters
Please read and review.
https://storiesonline.net/s/20838/secrets-of-liberty-mountain
*A.K.A., Secrets of Liberty Mountain: No Man's Land