Zach's Stories!

In reply to your most recent e-mail, Z...

I am, as always, incredibly interested in your creative endevors. A post apocolyptic setting seems right up your alley, especially since you've already pre-ordered all the inspiration you'll need. Another setting variable beyond what you've already described is urban vs rural. Have you thought about where your characters live? Personally, when I think future, I think urban (i.e.: I am Legend). It would be neat to mix that up a little bit.

I also think that your end of the world scenario is different from what has been done before. Most stories are, like you said, set in a nuclear winter or whatever that leads to mass deaths. I imagine that running out of resources would cause quite a few deaths, but not on the level that other stories have. I'm curious to see what the world would look like with 8.3 billion suddenly poor people fighting for survival.

Now I wanna read The Stand again...

the problem with urban is that there is more people there, leading to fewer resources per person (even though they start with more). I personally believe that the best way to survive a mass disaster would be to always keep moving and stay away from urban centers...

The thought was that after the world ran out (or came close to it) that people boarded colony ships and left for who knows where...but not everyone. I want to make the word just kind of empty with scattered villages and the like...but yeah, that's the current plan, it'll be nice to kind of blend technology and a tribal culture together. I'm also kind of thinking about what will be most valuable in the future, if you think of a resource that would be invaluable to such people in such a state please let me know.

I imagine that a future with depleted resources would lead to an interesting value system developed around scraps of remaining technology. I imagine that most power plants are down, so electricity isn't really an option for the survivors. Anything that runs on whatever futuristic batteries are still somewhat functional will be worth fighting for. I can picture a band of 30-40 people living in what used to be a hospital waging war on their neighbors to get a generator that can power a machine that provides some sort of life saving cure for their emotional/spiritual leader.

Food will be hard to come by. In our dystopia, I see it coming in two varieties: foraged/farmed, and canned. Obviously, there is a finite amount of canned food around from before things went to hell, so access to it will be important for some communities. If the story is set far enough into the future, I can imagine farmland being closer and closer to unusable as urbanization crawls across the world. Farmland would then be a scarce resource, as would the knowledge, skills, and tool required to use it.

Weapons are the third major resource that I imagine. I can picture a community having access to 12 guns and, say, 375 bullets. They must decide how to use this incredibly limited resource: should they hunt for meat, or save it for defense?

The more I think about this world, the more I wanna read about it. Write me a novel, Zach. Have it on my desk by, say, Thursday?