Post-apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre I’ve always been enamored of, ever since I read THE STAND as a teenager. That Stephen King book was influential in that I saw just how epic a story could be, how broad an image the tale could create. It also made me want to write. 

I started writing my first post-apocalyptic (PA) story after I graduated from dental school. Like THE STAND, I used a disease as my event. In my story, however, I decided that the virus created in the lab would be targeted—it would seek to destroy the warriors of a nation. Now, if you were targeting soldiers, you might think that the population group you need to look at would be young adult males, maybe right around 18 years old. Is it plausible to think that they would look for some sort of genetic marker that what we call adulthood might trigger? I mean, scientifically, the marker is probably puberty, but for my purposes, I had the pathogen attacking 18 olds. Give or take, obviously…not everyone has things happen at the same time. Maybe they are also looking for something that preferentially targets males, and maybe they also look for a cutoff age, maybe 40-ish?

But maybe this virus gets out before it reaches that point. Maybe it just leaves kids under about 18 years old. And maybe, however unlikely this is scientifically, it is 100% effective against its target population. 

So yeah, the thing I started writing back then left a bunch of kids. They don’t know the stuff I just talked about above; they simply know that adults are dying, and they’re the ones left in charge. I never did finish it, though recently (within the last couple of years) I started rewriting and adding to this story again. I like it. It interests me.

But it begs the question: What are the ways that the world could end? And by the end of the world, I don’t mean that the planet is destroyed—I mean that our way of life—our civilization—is disrupted in a grand way. Most people die, leaving those survivors about whom the story revolves. 

So we know about disease. We recently experienced a global pandemic, the first one of our lifetimes, for just about all of us. We saw the deaths, experienced this loss very personally. But it was nowhere on the scale of a PA book. As of April of 2023, approximately 1% of the people who contracted COVID died from the disease, or from complications due to the disease. That’s not apocalyptic, not in terms of the kinds of stories I’m talking about. It’s unlikely to ever occur at that scale. Even the Black Plague only killed 30-50% of Europeans in 1348. 

Still, it’s kinda fun to imagine what would happen if, say, 90% (or more) of the population was killed off by a disease. 

Hugh Howey put his spin on this with his SILO series. Instead of a biological agent killing off the population, Howey imagines a technological agent—a nanobot—that will turn on at a certain point and kill anyone who hasn’t been treated with “preventative” nanobots. This isn’t totally clear in the early books of the series; in WOOL, for example, they assume that they are safe in their silos because out there exists the pathogen. In this way, though, Howey kills off 100% of the population outside of the survivors that he wants to tell the story of.

So pandemic/disease is one of the apocalyptic events that can lead to an interesting, fun story, but it is not the only one, not by a long shot. It probably isn’t even the most likely, not on the scale that we see in PA fiction. There are many others. We’ll get into them in future posts…I hope.