More Apocalyptic Adventure
Post apocalyptic adventure stories are pretty common in science fiction these days…and most of them read like they are shot from the same gun. Seems like.
Help for the intrepid reader in search of more unique post-apocalyptic reading is at hand however.
What you may not know is that post apocalyptic stories and books spring from the vast and deep well of adventure books that span the centuries. It’s just a sub-genre.
Where the sameness comes in is that the bulk of writers are copycats. Instead of doing their due diligence research they dig deeply into their shallow well of experience. Or, they simply ape that which is currently working hoping to tear off a piece of the action as it were.
Imagination gets one only so far. Imagination void of personal experience produces bland text. A workaround is to research the desired topic and then re-write that in an apocalyptic sort of way. Many authors fail to do even that. They binge on The Walking Dead and call it a day.
So happens that there is a WORLD….WORLDS of study material out there. More to study than a human being can do in a lifetime. And all an aspiring author who has all the tools except for the personal experience needs to do is latch onto a tiny drop in the pipeline to produce a humdinger of a good and unique reading experience.
Come. Let us investigate. Interesting think pieces for readers and authors as well, each of them brand new because you have never seen anything like it!
Survival Apocalypse is here – Are You Ready?
Are you ready for your own Survival Apocalypse? More prescient than the author realized. Survival prepping now required.
Battlestar Galactica Ending- Mystery Solved!
From 2009- What the frak was up with the last show of Battlestar Galactica?
BG was the ultimate in futuristic apocalyptic TV fiction, though to my knowing it has never gotten credit for such. However, the ending left many people baffled, particularly Baltar’s final remark about the one true BG god. At last the mystery is solved. Probably. Read my theory…which just happens to be correct.
A Piece Of Rope
From 1914 let’s see how a simple piece of rope saved Captain Robert Quinton from being killed and eaten by ravening cannibals over in the sultry Solomon Islands in the South Pacific back when it was eat or be et days.Not a bad idea for post apocalyptic characters about to be overrun by post modern cannibals, actually.
It’s a short piece, full of action, imagination, and bloody adventure. We already know he survived…but how?
Buried Alive! A Boy Discovers his own Survival Apocalypse!
From 1906 we have an innocent story about a kid lost in a hay mow and in danger of imminent suffocation. For the city boys a hay mow is a big pile of hay. In this case stacked next to a barn, most likely to be conveyed up to the hay loft.
Most likely the short story is aimed at the youth of the period. A pompous person or modern snowflake would infer that the creation was written so as to warn farm youth to stay far away from piles of straw. A more circumspect examination would reveal that the story was made to SELL. Pure and simple. And it delivers value for the money.
What I, as a writer doing his research could do with this ditty is to modernize it a bit, put the post apocalypse to it and put the protagonist in a really bad spot buried alive with feral post apocalypse types bent on his destruction…even if he manages to escape. A good adventure story turns the screws on the hero relentlessly! Whether you’re a reader or a writer you can learn something from this interesting story written more than a hundred years ago.
Blessed Are The Myth Makers
This time an article from 1908. A brilliant writer, John L. Cowan presents several extraordinary and very well forgotten glimpes into historical treasure hunts on the North American continent going all the way back to the 1500’s. It’s all about the gold.
As we know today gold was literally underfoot for early explorers had they just looked down. I’m very keen on this sort of insight, and I mine it vigorously for re-imagination purposes in my SURVIVAL APOCALYPSE novels. So happens that Hernando DeSoto may have trod the very ground that my youthful hero, Jedidiah Reuel walks 100 years after our world goes all to hell. Not joking about this. He was in or very close to THE CHOCCOLOCCO VALLEY in 1540. And some of the ground he walked on looks a lot like some of the ground covered in my novels.
The Deadly Aurora (Old name for Electromagnetic Pulse)
All post-apocalyptic fiction has its beginning after a calamity of some sort. Aside from the big disease, most often you’ll find that society collapses after an EMP ( Electromagnetic Pulse) event. I will assume that you, as a customer of post apocalyptic fiction are already somewhat familiar with the concept.
My SURVIVAL APOCALYPSE novels are founded on a huge solar caused electromagnetic pulse radiation event that collapses society. I don’t belabor the point and I doubt that any of my characters are even aware that they are where they are because of a belch from the sun. It’s 89 years later, after all when we pick up their plight.
There is, as you may be somewhat aware, a body of evidence that a “modest” EMP event took place in 1859. Chances are good that if you have put any time into it, it is only with regurgitated material. Come along with me and read up on contemporary descriptions of those fateful days in September 1859. You may find that the long dead of those days hardly even noticed it. I can promise you that if anything similar happened today, we’d notice it. And at the end of a year 90% of us (citizens of the USA) wouldn’t be noticing anything at all.