Monthly Archives: April 2025

As you can tell by reading this series of posts/articles, I may or may not have given a lot of thought to post-apocalyptic scenarios. I think the authors I’ve referenced in these articles have pretty much touched every base there is to touch with respect to the variety of ways our world could end. Are there issues that we haven’t thought of? Probably. I can think of a few examples off the top of my head of real life giving us new material for our consideration and analysis, which writers then wrote about.

Remember December 31, 1999? Everyone was wondering what might happen when the computer clock clicked over to 2000? Most everything was in a 6-digit date format. What would happen to all of our systems when that year went to double-zero? Would everything shut off? Reset? Would we lose the records of everyone’s wealth?

Movies and books were written about this in advance of the date. But no more, because fortunately, nothing much happened. Whether this was because we switched to an eight digit format for dates, using the full number for the year (like, this year is 2025, so the date is 03/20/2025, the first day of spring), or was it simply because the computers didn’t care what the date was as much as we thought they might? I don’t really know.

Remember 2012? Some people (not me) were worried that the world would end that year, because the Mayan calendar ended that year. Whitley Streiber notably wrote a book called 2012 about a potential apocalypse, which I read, but which I can barely recall anything about besides the title. Nothing prevented an apocalypse at the time, because there was nothing apocalyptic about the date. It was just a number!

Perhaps we face some more serious issues today. We have a climate crisis approaching, whether natural or helped along by human civilization. So we are trying to find alternative energy sources. We have them, but we don’t know if they are feasible in the short or long run. What if we begin using one extensively, but there are unforeseen consequences to wind, or solar, or hydroelectric? What about nuclear solutions? Fusion is still not commercially useful to us, but we continue to research it. What if, when we finally make it work, its use has unforeseen consequences?

So which of these scenarios seems most likely? Duh…zombies!

Just kidding. If we’re simply talking about what’s most likely to happen, it’s a pandemic. We just had one. Instead of making our response teams more robust and implementing a more efficient early warning system, we did the opposite. That can’t lead to anything good. But a pandemic in reality is not going to be 99% fatal. Even if it’s more serious than COVID, it isn’t going to kill off humanity, at least not if it’s a naturally occurring bug.

I think we can rule out aliens, because, unless they (or we) find a way to circumvent the known laws of physics, our civilization will die out long before they ever find us, or travel this far. And while I think climate and weather are going to change our lives, not to mention our economies, all over the world, I don’t think we will see a mass extinction event from it. Humans will still be around when it’s all said and done.

No, what I think is the most likely scenario is that a comet or asteroid hits the planet, causing it to become inhospitable to any kind of life, especially human life. A dinosaur killer, to be clear. It’s happened before. It’s going to happen again. It’s more a question of when than if. And who knows? Maybe we will have the ability by then to simply swat the object away like it was an unwelcome insect attacking our planet.

So, the books I am writing right now—two are different takes on the disease apocalypse. I think I talked about all of my PA fiction in earlier posts. I don’t want to rehash it in this post, just to point out that I have about a hundred thousand words done on the one where only adults are killed and kids are spared. It still feels far from done, but I keep plugging. Another is where a shadowy group of people, including government folks, moguls/oligarchs, and other rich people, decide to kill off the world. I was inspired for this one by Hugh Howey’s WOOL series, but after a brief email exchange with Mr. Howey, I realized that my ideas wouldn’t work in his world (it started out as an attempt to write something in the Silo world, since Mr. Howey had generously allowed others to write in his sandbox, so to speak), so I changed it to something else. Then I realized that a third pandemic-inspired story I’d started but which was languishing could fit as part of this tale, so I worked it in. I believe this one is already over a hundred thousand words.

And the last one I talked about in the dinosaur killer post, because my idea is that the moon’s orbit destabilizes and it comes crashing into the Earth. I’ve finished two books, each about fifty thousand words, and I actually started a third book (because trilogies work well in PA fiction, I’m told)

I stay up at night sometimes thinking about stuff like this—not because I’m particularly worried about it, but because if I come up with something new, different, interesting, or some combination of those three, I want to write it. Be assured that if I come up with the next original post-apocalyptic scenario, you will find me talking about the stories I write about it on the pages of this blog or wherever I’m promoting my work.

I don’t have that new idea yet, but if you don’t want to miss it when it comes to me, keep checking back hereabouts! Thanks for reading, if you’ve made it this far!

This is how the world ends – Part 6

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I’ve so far avoided the big one: War. We have lived with the idea that we are in possession of weapons that could make the planet uninhabitable for virtually (but not quite) all forms of life, and plenty of stories have been written about such an apocalypse, including Aden Cabro with his Island Survival series and Boyd Craven, with his long The World Burns series and plenty of others. Of course, the seminal post-nuclear war stories are ones like Neville Shute’s ON THE BEACH and David Brin’s THE POSTMAN, both set after a nuclear apocalypse.

There are two types of nuclear devastation. In Shute’s novel, it is the devastation from the nuclear bombs themselves, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, multiplied by a hundred. In Brin’s story it may involve some bombs as it is definitely post-war, but a lot of the problems are created by the destroyed electronics because of the nuclear EMP that knocks out technology. Craven and many other PA writers use EMPs to destroy tech in their stories, which can (and often does) lead to a story set in the sub-sub-genre of “prepper” fiction.

One of my favorite EMP stories is William Forstchen’s ONE SECOND AFTER, in which a college history professor (who happens to be retired military) is thrust into a leadership position in his small North Carolina mountain town. The story focuses on the people and how they live, how they defend themselves, and how they move past the apocalyptic event—a classic post-apocalyptic story. (I also loved PILLAR IN THE SKY, a book by Forstchen about a space elevator.) Like the Niven and Pournelle book, this one has a bit of everything in it.

War might not be nuclear, however, and actor/director Levar Burton wrote his debut novel AFTERMATH about a post-civil/race war America also dealing with devastation brought on by a killer earthquake at the New Madrid Fault in the middle of the country. It highlighted the aftereffects of a destructive war made worse by natural disaster, including financial collapse and civil unrest brought on by the assassination of the first African-American president days after his election in 2012. (He missed the mark on that—Obama was elected in 2008 and survived two terms as a popular president, generally.) This scenario seems more likely today than most of the others, at least in the United States. But that’s a political discussion for another time (or never, at least at this blog).

Nuclear holocaust, EMP, or a different kind of war? Dan Simmons, in his book FLASHBACK, describes a United States where left-wing policies have left us vulnerable to an economic war of some kind. As it’s been a while since I have read it, and I don’t generally agree with Simmons’s politics, I don’t recall exactly what happened—just that the United States are a shell of their former self, with Japan (or is it China?) calling the economic shots. In Simmons’s view, the policies are enough to create a dystopia where the drug called “Flashback” is used to relive happier times. It’s not survivalist or apocalyptic in nature, but it is definitely a future created by a different kind of war entirely.

I’m sure I’m missing some sorts of war that would cause an apocalypse, and thus lead to a post-apocalyptic world. When I was a kid, I wrote a story about me and my friends fighting off a Russian (?) army after they invaded and conquered the United States. A bunch of junior high kids fighting a fully trained army, and winning? I know, totally unrealistic—but totally fun for me at that age. Could that happen? It seems unlikely that another country would be able to invade and hold a country like the United States—one that is not only the strongest militarily, but also protected by allies on the north and south and oceans on the east and west. It would take a Manchurian Candidate of some sort to create the conditions where such a thing could happen. Life imitates art? Probably not, but who knows?

In the final post of this series, I’ll have a few final thoughts, and maybe give some insights into the PA fiction I’ve written (and am writing) and which I hope to publish some day.

This is how the world ends…Part 5

We see that there is often overlap between the sub-sub-genres—after all, how many different ways are there to kill off very high percentages of humans? Seems like it’s either supernatural, infectious, or environmental so far. But there is another way to kill off large numbers of humans, and that is with something not alien, not sentient, but extraterrestrial—I’m talking about a dinosaur-killer type of event. An asteroid or a comet on a collision course with our planet would do the trick, ending massive amounts of human lives immediately and probably killing off a large percentage of the rest of humanity in its aftermath.

One can have all sorts of fun with this sort of story. After all, different types of catastrophic events would result from the extraterrestrial objects impacted on the planet. In the oceans—we would get tidal waves and tsunamis. On land—probably earthquakes and large amounts of debris into the atmosphere. Can you imagine the fun one might have researching what might happen depending on where the singular huge body impacted? Size would matter, too. A writer could research the heck out of that and find out how much energy would be transferred and how that transfer would impact our planet’s environment—or one could simply wing it, starting with the idea that all the theoretical knowledge in the world won’t be one hundred percent accurate and what actually happens will be what happens, not what we think will happen.

There are plenty of examples of this type of story, but my favorite book by a longshot is one by Larry Niven and Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I’m talking about LUCIFER’S HAMMER. This book has it all. It’s written from a hard SF writer’s angle, with everything checking out according to the best knowledge of the day. It’s a classic survival story. It goes into details about “prepping” for doomsday when a television producer and director takes the warning from a wealthy amateur astronomer seriously and decides to prepare for it, figuring he can always use the information he gathers while gathering supplies for a project in the future (considering his prepping to be research). It has politics and intrigue and weaves everything together for an incredibly satisfying (to me) result.

Niven and Pournelle also took a stab at the alien apocalypse sub-sub-genre with their novel FOOTFALL, but while I found it enjoyable, it didn’t stick with me or inspire rereads over the years like LUCIFER’S HAMMER did. FOOTFALL combined two things—the aliens, instead of using disease, are throwing large rocky projectiles at the planet, demanding total surrender or death. It has a veritable cast of hundreds, and while it’s been a long time since I’ve read it, it was the first thing like it that I’d ever read.

After reading Bryan W. Smith’s LAST DAY, a book about the leadup to an apocalyptic event (an impending asteroid impact on the Earth) where the primary focus is on the horrors that humans, unshackled from the rule of law and unworried about the future consequences of their actions, are capable of, I wrote my own pair of short novels, which are tentatively titled LUNACY: MOONSTRIKE and LUNACY: AFTERMATH, which describe the events that occur in a small town in Indiana after the knowledge that the Moon’s orbit has become unstable and it is on a path that will have it colliding with the Earth becomes public. I tried to explore some of the things that Smith explored, as one storyline focuses on an evil man indulging his dark desires now that consequences are off the table. But other storylines explore what a governmental response to the impending event might be and how regular folks might survive it. I have to admit, it was a lot of fun to write, and I look forward to publishing it myself someday. I am considering combining those two stories into one larger book with maybe 2 parts—books 1 and 2, perhaps.

There is a biggie that I haven’t mentioned, but I will get to it in my next post…how’s that for building anticipation?