Academic Essay - Uniform Independence – How Indie Authors Toe the Line

So, as part of my master’s, I delved into the world of Post-Apocalyptic indie authors. As you probably guessed from the title, the results weren’t exactly glowing for current industry trends. This essay did okay, not as great as the Romanticism one, only getting a 2.

If you’ve an interest in writing a Post-Apocalyptic indie novel, and want to learn about the current state of the market, read on.

Uniform Independence – How Indie Authors Toe the Line

Publishing has changed drastically in the past decade, with independent authors able to break away from the big publishing houses to write the stories they want while interacting with and selling directly to their audiences. But, as with any period of rapid change, the bad must be taken with the good, and the unintended consequences of these rapid changes are often late to reveal themselves. Due to the hyperconnectivity in the age of social media, indie-authors are able to directly interact with their fans, as well as with one another, in real time, allowing indie-authors to learn and adapt to feedback from their readers. Through tens of thousands of indie-authors exploring the process together through trial and error, a streamlined path to success has been discovered. Over a decade in, and the corners of the self-publishing world have all been mapped out, and those wide-open vistas of creative freedom and potential now have a super-highway carved straight through them. Whether it is the stories within the books, the covers on the books, or the marketing done around the books, the entirety of the self-publishing process has been codified and formalized to a formulaic degree. While exploring the standardized self-publishing scene in the age of social-media, this essay will focus on post-apocalyptic narratives published by indie-authors.

1.     The Indie-Author Scene

Traditionally, the big publishing houses were the ones who decided which books were published and which ones were not. Authors would write their manuscripts before mailing them off to a publisher, sometimes waiting months or even years to find out if they had been accepted or rejected. More often than not, most traditionally published authors would receive little to no money for their efforts, their only reward being the joy of having been chosen (Morrissey 52). Those authors who gained enough success would get a literary agent, who would do all the backend work for them, leaving the author to focus on the art of writing. That all changed in 2008, when the publishing of e-book content took off with the development of e-readers like the Kindle, Nook and Kobo (Cutler 87). Through the combined rise of electronic formats as well as electronic distribution networks, the book production pipeline that was traditionally the domain of the old publishing houses was deconstructed and reassembled online. Layers of approval, control and wait times were dissolved as the gatekeepers were removed and authors were given access to a digital distribution pipeline (Bankhead 10). Though some, having previously seen the gatekeeping publishing houses as a form of quality assurance, feared that this direct access to consumers would result in the market being flooded with low-cost, low-quality books, the opposite resulted – it was a golden age for consumers (Waldfogel 196). Self-published books, long decried as the worst-of-the-worst dregs, scraped from the bottom of the publishing barrel, started to attract reputable titles that began to shift public opinion (Landgraf 44) This sounds like a great time to be a writer, but a golden age for consumers does not always carry over to the creators of the content they are consuming.

There are many ways of being an indie-author, as there are multiple sources from which the value of a literary work can be generated. For some, selling millions of books will legitimate their work, others want to generate cultural capital while others are simply happy to appear in print. (Eve 20) To make a living as an indie-author is, first and foremost, to be a small business owner. While there will always be an artistic element to the production of stories, in pursuit of making a career from writing the author must consider their story a product first and foremost. The frantic, anything-goes-style scene of early indie publishing continues to mature towards a more serious business space as the market stabilizes with self-publishers trending towards business-owners rather than just writers (Cutler 87). Far from the days of Victorian literature, where writing was considered an artform, indie-publishing has more in line with the early 20th century era of pulp fiction. The basics of putting together a good pulp story remain, all that has changed is the delivery system. The Kindle changed everything, and that spells opportunity for the writer who wants to make some money (Bell 8). The self-published stories that sell the most online are not high-art pieces of literature that will be remembered for centuries, they are escapist pulp stories that are designed specifically to be quickly produced and quickly forgotten.

Considering that being a successful indie-author is more about business than art, it is no surprise that the largest online group of authors, 20Booksto50k, is focused on sales, rather than craft. When it comes to their advice on craft, the one golden rule of writing an indie novel is “write to market.” Write to market is all about picking a genre that is not already oversaturated with content, then giving that market exactly what it wants (Fox 44). Being an indie-author is not about writing the stories you want to write; it is about writing the stories that other people want to read. Indie-authors want to write stories that their readers will love, but have also accepted that they are writing escapist fiction, connecting a series of mundane plot points, and not crafting the next Great American Novel (Allen 53). With aspirations of quality all but abandoned by the self-publishing community, indie-authors have instead reached for that other trait – quantity.

In the age of social media, with algorithms tailormade to spike an individual’s dopamine receptors with pinpoint accuracy as they simultaneously drain their attention spans, the only way to stay relevant is to stay present. While traditionally published authors can go a year or two (or thirteen) between releases, indie-authors are part of the ever-changing online media landscape and are thus required to release far quicker to stay relevant. Not only do trends change quickly, but audiences tend to forget online personalities unless they are interacting with their audience on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. It is a given that indie-authors will have at least some kind of presence on at least one of the social media platforms, so that they can engage with their peers and audience. On top of this, group consensus suggests that the most efficient (and safest) method of reaching the fans is via a newsletter that they can subscribe to, which is a direct pipeline to the audience free from the potential risk of interference that social media platforms pose. On top of all of this remains the all-encompassing fact that indie-authors are content creators, and all their other efforts will be for naught if they are not releasing another book. While indie-authors can make a living off of selling stand-alone novels, it is easier to sell ten books to one person than one book to ten people. While there is a read-through drop off with each successive novel in a series, it is far more lucrative to continue writing books in a series that the audience is invested in. The best marketing for the first book in a series is the latest book in a series, as each release bumps up the sales of those that came before it (Martelle 152).

2.     The Post-Apocalyptic Genre

When it comes to traditionally published post-apocalyptic stories, the genre explores the full gamut of end-of-the-world scenarios. Mutants, doomsday weapons, demonic invasions, roaming black holes and other reality ending events, it all gets explored in traditionally published post-apocalyptic stories. The trends of the post-apocalyptic genre change over time because traditionally the post-apocalyptic genre is dependent on what is happening in the real world (Trevena 14). That is not the case with indie-published post-apocalyptic stories, however. When it comes books exploring the end-of-the-world by indie authors, the vast majority of the market is composed of preppers, and so this is the primary market that indie-authors can cater to. The prepper community is largely comprised of middle-class urban folks seeking rural, working-class knowledge because they have an abject fear of the collapse of civilisation (Beech 45). Preppers want clean and wholesome stories about realistic apocalypses (such as EMP, nuclear war, pandemic, coronal mass ejection events), that validate their way of life while also teaching them little titbits of survival knowledge. The (distant) second biggest audience that reads post-apocalyptic stories is focused entirely on zombie narratives. They are fans of the cult classic zombie horror films and are not interested in any post-apocalyptic story that does not have zombies. With these two markets being the best that indie-authors can choose from when it comes to writing post-apocalyptic stories, one can see why a lot of indie-authors choose to cater to the preppers.

One would think that the prepper market would allow for more variety in what the indie-author is able to write, considering that there is only so many ways that a zombie can bite someone. This does not turn out to be the case, however. “There are only two main plots in post-apocalyptic fiction: “The Road” and “The Siege.”” (Chase 85). Whatever end-of-the-world scenario that an indie-author chooses to write for preppers quickly fades to the background as the characters are entirely focused on either getting home, or defending their home. Preppers are not interested in the end-of-the-world scenario, they just want to see what happens when the prepper stand-in characters are forced to defend themselves from other survivors. It is why EMP stories are so popular, because the initial apocalyptic event wipes out the electricity grid, taking away modern technology, but then there is no lingering after effects beyond that. It is effectively a clean apocalypse, one that levels the playing field and allows the prepper stand-in characters to justifiably defend themselves from other survivors who were not as ready for the end.  

With such a large percentage of the post-apocalyptic market skewed so heavily towards such a narrow band of potential post-apocalyptic narratives, it is easy to see how the genre has lost a lot of its creative potential. With multiple online communities spread out across various social media platforms, all focusing on post-apocalyptic fiction, or at least its prepper sub-genre, most indie-authors simply cave-in and end up writing prepper fiction. The audience that currently exists for self-published post-apocalyptic stories is effectively stifling the market and causing the genre to stagnate. Paradoxically, the most creative and varied post-apocalyptic narratives are to be found in traditionally published novels.

3.     The Audience and their Author

As with any public facing figure, but especially like other internet celebrities, indie-authors are not so much leading their audiences as they are riding the wave of a passionate and fickle mob. Considering their entire livelihood is so dependent on catering to their audience, it is not too hard to see how a single misstep in terms of their online persona or in the content of their books could spell disaster for an indie-author’s career. Readers can be fanatical in their expectations, and woe betide any indie-author who dares break one of the very strict genre-specific rules (Trevena 18). Along with their books, the indie-author themselves, or at least, their internet persona, is as much a part of their brand as their books are. With this in mind, it is clear how indie-authors are quite susceptible to the phenomena known as audience capture.

A content creator is captured when they tell their audience what they want to hear, and is rewarded for doing so, and then they repeat the process until it spirals into a self-reinforcing feedback loop (Weinstein). In this manner, an indie-author can start out writing a story they do not particularly want to write but they are doing it to meet audience expectations (write to market), only for that story to be a success. They gain accolades, and an audience, and in order to maintain that momentum they write another story they do not really want to write while engaging with the audience they have garnered. Eventually, when they have an entire series in their backlog, and an audience that loves reading their work, they might try to write the book they have always wanted to write. But it is not received well, and their audience, all connected via social media, forms a unified front and turns on them. The audience does not want the book the indie-author has always wanted to write, they want the kind of books that got them the audience in the first place. This is (hopefully) when the indie-author realizes that their own audience is not actually there for them, but for the online persona that they have created and the content that persona has released. At this point the indie-author can either abandon the persona and probably lose most of their audience and financial stability in doing so, or they can choose to allow the persona to subsume them entirely.

When it comes to dealing with audience capture, there is really only three ways of handling the phenomenon. The first is for an indie-author to find the overlap between what they want to write and what sells. This may work out perfectly, as the indie-author might just happen to love writing in a genre that has a large reader base. But, more often than not, the indie-author will have to choose to write stories that are tangentially within the same genre as the type of stories they are passionate about writing. In this way, the indie-author sort of gets to write the stories they want to write, and the audience is getting what they want. The second way to avoid audience capture is for indie-authors to write under a pseudonym, which allows authors to write for different audiences without them cross-contaminating. If an indie-author has built an audience from their Clean Romance novels, that audience does not want to be getting updates about the indie-author’s latest Body-Horror project. Writing for two, or more, audiences is not just twice as many books that an indie-author needs to produce, it is also twice the newsletters and twice the social media engagement. It is not an easy path to walk, but it is one that more indie-authors are having to take in order to meet their creative, as well as financial, goals. Finally, the third way for indie-authors to avoid audience capture is to just write and publish the stories they want to write – regardless of what any particular audience wants. It is unlikely that they will ever gain a large audience, as they are not writing exactly what any one audience wants to read, and though it is unlikely that they will be able to make a living from their writing, they can take consolation in the fact that they will be able to write exactly the kinds of stories they want to write.

4.     One Cover to Rule them All

Just as stories have a set of genre conventions that they need to follow, book covers also have a series of genre conventions that they are required to follow in order to be considered effective. This is because a book cover is not just a piece of cool art, it is a message that you are sending to potential readers. If the book has an unappealing cover, it is not going to be obvious who the book’s audience is (DeWild 22). For this reason, investing in a professionally designed book cover is standard in the indie-author scene (Nelson 155). Traditionally, when browsing through a book store, where there are potentially thousands of other books, a book needs to be able to not only catch the readers eye but also convey what sort of story is within. This battle for the attention of potential readers has only gotten fiercer in the digital space. Online shopfronts not only have other books displayed, but also advertisements that are given top priority. Alongside all this interfering noise, a book cover has to catch the readers eye and convey what sort of story the book is, all while doing so as a thumbnail. In this way, as has ever been the case, the book cover is the first and most important aspect of marketing a book (Fox 41).

In conclusion, the indie-author scene has been around for long enough that the industry has developed a lot of standardized practices. Though there is nothing forcing any indie-author to follow any of these practices, they are tried and true and have led many indie-authors to financial success. These successes have not come without their negative consequences, however, as these practices have created an industry focus on a formulaic approach to writing. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the post-apocalyptic indie-author community, where the market is dominated by a large group with a niche interest. Though we are at a point in history where the corners of the self-publishing world have all been mapped out, and we can safely make the journey along a well-maintained super highway that was laid down by those that came before us, those wide-open vistas of creative freedom and potential still remain. All that is require is to step off the beaten path.

Works Cited

Allen, Jewel. Rapid Release: How to Write & Publish Fast For Profit. E-book ed. Jewel Allen, 2016. Kindle.

Bankhead, Henry. “E-Book Self-Publishing and the Los Gatos Library: A Case Study.”, Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries, Purdue University Press, 2015, pp. 5-20, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wf4dpf.5. Accessed 3 Feb. 2024.

Beech, Jennifer A., and Matthew Guy. “CHAPTER FOUR: Fat Guys in the Woods Naked and Afraid: Rural Reality Television as Prep-School for a Post-Apocalyptic World.” Counterpoints, vol. 494, 2017, pp. 45–59, www.jstor.org/stable/45177653. Accessed 14 Feb. 2024.

Bell, James Scott. How to Write Pulp Fiction (Bell on Writing). E-book ed. Compendium Press, 2017. Kindle.

Chase, Jackson Dean, Writing Apocalypse and Survival: A Masterclass in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction and Zombie Horror (The Ultimate Author's Guide Book 4), Jackson Dean Chase Inc., 2018. Kindle.

Cutler, Robin. “Ingram and Independent Publishing.” Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries, Purdue University Press, 2015, pp. 83-102 www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wf4dpf.11. Accessed 3 Feb. 2024.

DeWild, Melissa, and Morgan Jarema. “Supporting Self-Publishing and Local Authors: From Challenge to Opportunity.” Purdue University Press, 2015, pp. 21-26, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wf4dpf.6. Accessed 3 Feb. 2024.

Eve, Martin Paul. “Authors, Institutions, and Markets.” Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict, Open Book Publishers, 2016, pp. 11-42, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1sq5v00.6. Accessed 3 Feb. 2024.

Fox, Chris. Launch to Market: Easy Marketing For Authors (Write Faster, Write Smarter Book 4), CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017. Kindle.

Fox, Chris. Write to Market. E-book ed., Chris Fox, 2016. Kindle.

Landgraf, Greg. “Solving the Self-Published Puzzle.” American Libraries, vol. 46, no. 11/12, 2015, pp. 44–47, www.jstor.org/stable/24604302. Accessed 30 Jan. 2024.

Martelle, Craig. Release Strategies: Plan your self-publishing schedule for maximum benefit. E-book ed. Craig Martelle, 2019. Kindle Edition.

Morrissey, Ted. “PAST PERFECT: The Pedigree of Self-Publishing.” The North American Review, vol. 301, no. 2, 2016, pp. 52–52, www.jstor.org/stable/44601216.

Nelson, Elizabeth. “The Romance of Self-Publishing.” Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries, Purdue University Press, 2015, pp. 149-158, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wf4dpf.16.

Trevena, A. How to Destroy the World: An Author's Guide to Writing Dystopia and Post-Apocalypse (Author Guides Book 2) E-book ed. A Trevena. Kindle.

Waldfogel, Joel. “How Digitization Has Created a Golden Age of Music, Movies, Books, and Television.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 31, no. 3, 2017, pp. 195–214, www.jstor.org/stable/44321286.

Weinstein, Eric. “Audience Capture” The Portal, 06 Sep. 2021, https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Audience_Capture

Academic Essay - A Link Between Romanticism and Post-Apocalyptic Narratives

So, I’m doing my Master’s degree in Germany (it’s on hold atm on account of the new-born… and also I’m now in Taiwan) and I’m trying to find ways to explore the Post-Apocalyptic genre wherever possible within the course. Whenever I manage to write something that has links to my favourite genre, I’ll post it here after I get graded.

This piece was particularly fun to write, and I managed to get a 1.3 on the final grade, which is far better than I could have ever hoped. So, if you’ve got some free time, and the inclination - feel free to take a look.

A Link Between Romanticism and Post-Apocalyptic Narratives

A towering mountain range, a sweeping valley, a rolling thunderstorm over the sea, humanity has stood in awe of the destructive power and majestic beauty of nature since our inception. Humanity has perpetually existed at the fickle whims of nature, with our various civilizations being collective efforts to carve out a place within it. As these civilizations developed, and humanity was safeguarded from the threat, and beauty, of nature, we continued to find ourselves drawn from the safety of civilization to explore nature’s rugged allure. But what could happen if the walls of civilization were removed entirely, and humanity were trust back into nature? If Romanticism was the birthplace of the Sublime, then the Post-apocalyptic genre is where it now resides. This essay will explore the similarities between Romanticism and the Post-apocalyptic genre, focusing on Mary Shelley’s Romantic text Frankenstein in contrast to Cormac McCarthy’s Post-apocalyptic novel The Road, with particular attention to the literary concept of the Sublime via representations of nature and ruins.

1.     What is the Sublime?

Though it has lost much of its nuance in the modern day, the closest synonym we have for the sublime is the traditional meaning of the word “awesome”. When an encounter with something that is so overwhelmingly powerful, the viewer is left dumbstruck by the grandeur of it. The viewer is overcome with awe as their mind grapples with the beautiful terror of the sublime phenomenon. As a type of aesthetic appreciation, the sublime has elements of pleasure, attraction, and admiration, but there is also an element of fear (Cochrane 125). The contrast in scale, of the viewer and the sublime phenomenon, is a key element, as an encounter with the sublime reveals the vast disparity between the viewer and the phenomenon in terms of size, power, or time. The sublime, as depicted in literature, is a conveyance of this awe as author and reader enter an emotional resonance via the language of the text itself. Though it has an affective structure as well as a rhetoric, the sublime has a fluid movement across generic boundaries and so is not a genre itself (Ramazani 175).

1.1            Sublime – Nature

Nature itself has often been the subject of sublime depiction in literature, with the forces of our very own world being able to overpower any single one of us without resistance. There is a vast amount of beauty in the world, but it is a world that humanity have been forced to struggled to survive in for thousands of years. It is only recently that humanity has developed the technology that allows us to survive all but the worst that nature has to offer and even then there are natural disasters that continue to destroy everything and kill anyone they encounter. The illusion that we are in complete control of our own home planet is shattered all too frequently. 

            A rocky mountain that towers over the surrounding country side, its snowcapped peaks obscured by the clouds that hang high above, is a prime example of the sublime. Not only does its naturally formed structure dwarf anything that humanity has created, an avalanche that could result from its windswept peak could wipe out a town, let alone the potential destruction caused by any one of its rocky outcroppings shearing loose and tumbling down below. On top of its physical size and potential for wide spread destruction, the mountain itself is antediluvian in age. The mountain is so old that it defies human comprehension. As large as the mountain is at the time the viewer gazes up at it, that is all that remains after its millions of years of endurance. The mountain has seen epochs start and end, watched as species rise and die out, over and over, it has stood the test of time. As diminished as the mountain is from its initial form, a mere shadow of its original self, the mountain still towers over any collective human endeavour, let alone any individual human. A person who stands at the foot of the mountain can gaze upward and appreciate its beauty. They might be able to see its peak, but they will never be able to comprehend the forces that went into its creation, how long ago it was formed or how long it will remain after they are gone.

            It is more direct, if not easier, for a painter to depict a mountain and invoke the sublime in the viewer than it is for an author to write about a mountain and convey that same experience. An author can, with the proper combination of adjectives, create such a cumulative force that the reader is able to visualize some approximation of the mountain the author wishes them to visualize (Staver 486). The more talented the author, the more fine-tuned their selection of adjectives will be, resulting in a more accurate visualization on the behalf of the reader. The author cannot directly show the reader the mountain itself, but they can lead them towards summoning it forth in their imaginations, as well as the feelings of the sublime that follow with it, with the proper word choice.

1.2       Sublime – Ruins

Ruins are a core aspect of both Romanticism and the Post-apocalyptic genres. Far from simply interesting set pieces for the narrative to work within, ruin are sites of history, loss and potentially violence. Ruins symbolize long-gone grandeur, a melancholic representation of how fragile civilization is (Romantic Ruins). Often conceptualized as disjointed fragments, ruins elicit notions of mortality, the fleetingness of time and of the sublime (Scarbrough 448). Ruins are the physical remains of civilization, structures abandoned by humanity and taken back by nature. Structures are originally constructed to be both functional and aesthetic, but once they become ruins, having lost their functional purpose, they are merely aesthetic (Ziolkowski 266). In literature, ruins become symbols of decay, the transience of humanity and the power of nature itself. In the time of the industrial revolution, ruins would have been a nostalgic critique of modernity and industry. What use was all the efforts of urbanization when even the greatest structures of the past eventually fell to ruin? Was it worth despoiling nature, uprooting people from their ancestral homes and relocating them to the cities, if it would all fall to ruin and return to nature anyway? A powerful narrative symbol for Romantic writers, ruins could transfer deep emotions as well as historical information because they were not simple structures but were also imbued with the histories of their former inhabitants and events that occurred within (Lake 447). The Romantics found ruins to be the perfect vector for the sublime, as they were objects that brought to mind the inevitable decay of history, the callousness of nature and the inexorable march of time (Korsmeyer 431).

Ruins are similarly positioned to be the perfect symbol for the Post-apocalyptic genre that they are considered a thematic keystone. While the Romantics only had use of all the ruins that had come before them, Post-apocalyptic authors also have access to those ruins, all the ruins that have appeared since then, as well as all the ruins that could potentially exist if modern society were to fall to an apocalypse. This layering of ruins, built by different people from from different eras, did not originate with modern Post-apocalyptic authors. Writings left behind by the Anglo-Saxons tell a tale of a culture that views itself, literally and metaphorically, built upon the ruins of previous cultures (Estes 61). The presence of ruins locks the connection between past and present, by keeping the remnants of the past in front of those who remain alive in the present. For the Post-apocalyptic genre, ruins could symbolize the comforts and excess of the world before the apocalypse, or they could symbolize the hubris that lead to the apocalypse itself. The potential symbolism of ruins also depends on the viewer, if they were alive before the apocalypse the ruins will represent the disparity between the past and the present, but if they were born after the apocalypse then they will only see remnants of a world more alien than any foreign culture. Ruins are given meaning by the viewer, acting as a canvas for speculative strategies that tell us more about the viewer than the ruin itself (Estes 62).

The type of ruins that appear in literature has also subtly shifted over time, but the repercussions of this are significant for the themes that are available to writers. In the era of the Romantics, the types of buildings that would have been available to become ruins was limited. Houses and other small structures, if built of stone, would have been in plentiful supply, but they were typically built less sturdily and were more likely to be repaired and reinhabited, or simply dismantled to aid in the construction of another near building. Castles, forts, churches and abbeys were grand structures that would have taken years to build and would have potentially stood for centuries, as they were typically made of solid stone. These structures are already laden with symbolism and meaning upon their construction; castles were home to nobility or even royalty, forts were sites of military conflict, while churches and abbeys were holy sites of faith that were typically built on consecrated grounds and sometimes even had accompanying graveyards. The original meaning and symbolism of these structures would still be there when they became ruins, but there would also be other layers on top of that. The splendour of the original architecture, however overgrown by nature, demolished by conflict or modified by subsequent inhabitants, still radiates from within (Zucker 130). Ruined castles stand forlorn, their once noble inhabitants fallen from grace and forgotten, ruined churches were once houses of god that now stand abandoned by the divine and are home only to the dead. The types of buildings that would have had the opportunity to become ruins for the Romantics are very different to the types of buildings that become ruins for the Post-apocalyptic writers.

Post-apocalyptic authors, while they do have access to most of the older ruins that the Romanics had access to, tend to focus on the ruins of the modern world.  Modern architecture does not fall to ruin like the architecture of old, modern materials do not decay in the same way as the simple materials of solid stone blocks and thick oak beams. The increased complexity of modern building materials allows for easier production, but at the cost of structural longevity. Modern buildings themselves decay faster, but the materials used to build them stay around longer. The ruins of modern architecture refuse to relinquish their stored culture to nature (Huyssen 20). Even in that fact there is meaning to be found, that structures built from man-made materials do not last as long as those built with materials taken straight from nature. It is a generally accepted fact, if an unconscious one, that long after the last skyscraper tumbles down, the ruins of ancient Egypt will still remain. Conversely, modern architecture is not without its symbolic opportunities. It is by mere fortune that a ruined city of skyscrapers tends to look like a graveyard of towering tombstones when all the lights are out and all the humans have left. Paved roads and concrete dams crack and break as the years wear on and they are no longer maintained, showcasing the constant battle between civilization and nature. Suburban homes sag under the strain of trapped rainwater, or are inhabited by wild animals that once again claim the streets as their own. Survivors travelling along broken and weed-choked roads is a central trope of Post-apocalyptic fiction (Kaup 226). Whatever modern architecture there was has fallen to ruin and decay, and the amplitude of nature seizes upon our abandoned efforts to return them to the colossal, spiritually charged landscape (Baker 304). All the technological advancements of humanity are revealed for what they are in the ruins of a modern building. Steel beams rust, glass shatters while concrete cracks and crumbles, humanity has spent its existence attempting to distance itself from nature but in the end it is revealed that we were never apart from it. Ruins are the intersection of the beauty of nature and man-made beauty, creating a sublime beauty that is greater than either when taken individually (Hetzler 54). 

2.     The Romantic Genre

Romanticism, as a literary movement, sprung from Europe in the late 18th and early 19tn centuries as a reaction the literary movement of Rationalism. Romantic texts focused on emotion, individualism, and imagination, while celebrating the beauty of the natural world and the subjective human experience. In a quickly industrialising world, the Romantics tapped into a nostalgia for more pastoral times in their depictions of the majestic beauty and raw power of nature. This yearning for a simpler time focused the Romantic’s attention on the past, specifically on medieval history and mythology, as well as the physical ruins of buildings. Overall, it is arguable that the greatest legacy of the Romantics is their codification of the concept of the sublime. In a world that was being destroyed and paved over by industry in the pursuit of profit, as masses of people were leaving their ancestral homes to move to the cities, the sublime was the answer to such wide-spread dehumanization. The transcendent wonder and overwhelming awe of the sublime, both thrilling and terrible, sparked emotions that many readers at the time had thought long buried by the modern world. Is it any wonder that these moments of the sublime were to be discovered in the remote corners of the natural world or in the ruins of the past itself, as far from the smoke-clogged, depersonalized urban present that the Romantics could reach?

            Another interesting aspect of the Romantic Literary movement was its focus on individualism, and the subjective human experience. With the enlightenment in full swing, science and rational thinking were filling in the corners of the map and erasing much of the mystique of the world. Despite the innumerable technological and social advancements that the enlightenment brought, the price of all this advancement and understanding was that it also made the world seem a bit more mundane. Society, as a whole, was forging ahead and it would have felt as though individuals were ether lost in the crowd or being outright left behind. Romanticism tapped into this by exploring the full gamut of emotionally charged narratives, with characters that bucked the norm and forged their own paths through life. Romantic protagonists were passionate characters who had high-highs and low-lows, as they often rebelled against the societies that surrounded them. Oftentimes these characters would leave the very mundane real world behind and step into a realms of fantasy, interacting the with supernatural. In almost every aspect of its creation and execution, literary Romanticism seems to have looked at the modern world of its era and decided that it had erred somewhere and was no longer fit for task.  

2.1       Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the story of one man’s search for knowledge above all else, and the dire consequences of that all-encompassing pursuit of knowledge. Though Victor Frankenstein lives a blessed life, given the best education while surrounded by the sublime vistas of Europe, his exploration of the sciences results in an abomination that is simultaneously as horrific as it is beautiful. An old adage states that ‘you don’t know where the line is, until you cross it.’ In simpler terms, sometimes you do not know something is wrong until it is too late and you have already done it. Victor Frankenstein’s creation of the Monster, a supposed blasphemy against nature itself, was one such foray across the line of acceptability. Monsters, as fascinating and frighting as they are as outcasts from our system of self-definition, mark the boundaries of cultural values (Kirk 7) This so-called sin against nature, created outside the bounds of acceptable society, wreaks havoc on his creator before leading him on a chase to the furthest and most inhospitable reaches of the planet where humanity rarely treads.

            Just as the landscapes in Frankenstein are described to evoke the Sublime, so too is the creature itself. It is frighteningly powerful and hauntingly beautiful, both in a way that leave the viewer feeling a sense of unease and dread. Frankenstein knows that the creation of the creature was wrong, and so abandons his creation and hides its existence from society at large. In this way, created outside the norms of society, and forced to live outside its bounds, the creature has more to do with nature than of civilization. Subsequently, despite being a creation of man, the creature is more of a force of nature than of humanity’s civilization and reveals itself more of a sin against humanity than a sin against nature itself. The sublime is a transcendental impulse, one that is ultimately self-destructive to the point of being apocalyptic (Ramazani 171). The creature is eloquent and elegant, rugged enough to exist on its own, able to learn and survive in the harshest of wildernesses that would kill most humans. Part of the dread the creature inspires in people is the fact that it is superior to humanity in almost every fashion. Frankenstein’s ultimate reasoning behind refusing to create the creature a bride was the fear of what would happen to humanity if he did so.

In an often-overlooked element of the narrative, Frankenstein could be viewed as an apocalyptic text. At the end of the text, Frankenstein’s creation states that it will flee to the furthest reaches of the world and self-immolate, but there is no guarantee that he follows through with this promise of suicide. Furthermore, alongside the countless sightings of the creature across the continent, there is the documentation of the very text itself. With verifiable proof that the creature did in fact exist before, all an aspirational scientist with questionable morals would need to do is follow the clues left in Captain Walton’s letters that tell of Frankenstein’s journey in order to replicate the process in the creation of another inhuman creature. There were no shortage of conflicts in the late 1700’s that would warrant the scientific research into the creation of such a powerful abomination. Were the narrative to continue beyond the original text, it is not difficult to see how thing in the world of Frankenstein would quickly begin to unravel. With the proverbial genie out of the bottle, it would be impossible to get it back in, and Victor Frankenstein’s sublime transgression against human civilization could spell doom for the human species long after his own death. The letters he sent could have been published by Captain Walter’s sister, the originally intended recipient, in a recognizable England, or they could have been published by another creature in a wholly new society bereft of its human creators.

3.     The Post-apocalyptic Genre

An exploration of the world’s end is innately sublime, however it plays out. The sheer immensity of the apocalypse, once the domain of the gods alone, is awe-inspiring in its significance. A baseline definition of Post-apocalyptic fiction is narratives that focus on the depiction and exploration (literal and metaphorical) of globalized ruin (Hicks 6). Up until the 19th century, grand disasters were attributed to the divine, awful and sublime acts of god where the difference between life and death was a matter of fate, but during the 20th century, humanity was horrified to realize that we could be agents of our own demise (Nye). This shift in public perspective caused most authors to move their focus from the Apocalyptic genre to the Post-apocalyptic genre. The primary difference between the two genres is that the Post-apocalyptic narrative casts the apocalypse as an origin, as the beginning of a new story rather than the more obvious end of another (Brent 57). After the Second World War the world was a ruin, a shadow of what it once was, because the apocalypse had already come and gone, and representations of the apocalypse were now a matter of retrospection (Berger 389). Post-apocalyptic narratives can have scenarios that are more realistic and plausible in nature, all the way to fantastic and supernatural. Whatever form these stories take, they share an aesthetic and geographical focus with post-industrial ruins, delivering a form of Anthropocene-porn (Lorimer 130). After the old world dies, those few that survive to sift through the ruins are forced to find new ways to live in a world that is irrevocably changed, just as they themselves are changed. The mere fact that an individual survives the end of the world while billions of others die, often by luck alone, is itself a brush with the sublime. The Post-apocalyptic genre, in its depictions and exploration of unimaginable destruction and aesthetics of ruin, can be considered the epitome of the sublime (Hicks 110) The core element of every Post-apocalyptic narrative, the ruined civilization of humanity brought back to nature, is a manifestation of the sublime.

Post-apocalyptic narratives are almost universally set within the ruins of our own earth. The shock of seeing recognizable monuments and buildings brought to ruin necessitates an earth-based narrative (Brent 60). As an individual would be shocked to see their home in ruins, regardless of where that home is, this requirement of setting Post-apocalyptic stories on earth is for the readers, rather than the characters within the narrative. A fictional world only ever depicted in ruin was never whole to begin with, but a depiction of well-known real-world locations is much more evocative in its disparity between fiction and reality. A Post-apocalyptic story asks its readers to imagine their world, but to imagine a version of it where they, and everyone they know, is dead, or where all the buildings they are familiar with are laying in ruins. Beyond the off chance that a version of themselves is present within the text, a Post-apocalyptic narrative asks its readers to imagine a world where they are longer present. Whatever the particulars of the apocalyptic scenario that played out in the narrative, all the generational efforts of human endeavour were not enough to stand in the face of it. When the collective resistance of humanity crumbles in opposition to the overwhelming power of the apocalypse, what hope does an isolated band of survivors, or lone individual, have of surviving the aftermath? Not only are characters in a Post-apocalyptic narrative faced with the physical and moral struggles of day to day survival in a ruined world without modern civilization, they are burdened with the fact humanity as a whole failed.

It can be said that the only real difference between an Apocalyptic narrative and a Post-Apocalyptic narrative is that some characters survive the apocalypse in the latter.  This is because when it comes to the end of the world, from Norse Mythology to the Bible, there is usually just enough survivors to allow for an honest chance of a new beginning (Lisboa 53). While the survivors find themselves physically surviving to live in the ruins of the old world, their metaphysical lives, of who they were in the old world, are just as ruined as the rubble around them. Living on after the end of the world is a radical break that requires a transformation into a new model of selfhood (Kaup 11). As lucky as they are to survive the end of the world, these survivors are still products of the old world and thus bring with them old-world problems. Whatever form the new world takes, its foundations are often flawed with prototypes of the same mistakes that brought the old world to ruin, allowing the process to repeat indefinitely (Lisboa 54).

In this way, the Post-apocalyptic genre has more in common with Romanticism than one might initially think. Stories from both genres carry within them an innate notion that something about the modern world is wrong, that modern society has taken a misstep somewhere and forgotten itself. While Romanticism remedies this notion by focusing on the corners of the world that remain untouched, or by exploring the fantastical, Post-Apocalyptic narratives deal with it by destroying the modern world and getting back to basics. While the Romantics want to get at the heart of what it means to be human, the Post-Apocalyptic authors make the claim that the essence of humanity is revealed by the apocalypse (Berger 10). While Romanticism focuses on the impassioned individual and their emotional experience of life as they chafe under the restraint of modern society, Post-apocalyptic literature showcases what happens to the masses who lack individualism and are too reliant on modern society when it is ripped away. Narratives in both genres are open to the inclusion of the supernatural, though neither are reliant on its presence. Both genres have a nostalgic element to them, Romanticism has a fascination with an idealized past, while Post-apocalyptic literature instead focuses on the luxuries that were lost in the apocalypse. Characters in Romantic narratives often rebel against tradition, feeling constrained by the established norms of society, but characters in a Post-apocalyptic narrative are liberated from society, in a sense, when it is upended by the apocalypse. The focus on the exotic present within Romanticism is represented in Post-apocalyptic narratives by the new and strange cultures that have emerged in the wake of the apocalypse. Characters in both genres find themselves abandoning the superficial trappings of modern society in favor of focusing on the essentials of life. Finally, the sublime plays an active role in both genres as characters are exposed to the elements where they witness awe-inspiring phenomena and take part in terrifying experiences that are beyond mere-human understanding.

3.1 The Road

The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy, is a story about a father and son, known as The Man and The Boy, travelling across a post-apocalyptic United States of America. They are travelling southward because in the ruined world, the weather is growing harsher by the year and the father thinks their best chances of survival lay in the south. Far from the action-packed tales of other Post-apocalyptic narratives, The Road is a haunting narrative about maintaining a moral core amid the depraved decline of humanity. Though the story is one based on a realistic depiction of earth, the narration follows the lead of Romantic writers and dips into fantastic elements of dreams and interpretation which add a surreal element to the story. It is never revealed what exactly caused the apocalypse in The Road, but the widespread aftermath is clear and all-encompassing. The world itself seems to be dying around them, and each step they take they encounter a landscape that is decaying, as though some spiritual aspect of nature is dead. But McCarthy does not just lament the loss of the natural world, for there is a tenderness to his depictions of man-made remnants of civilization, too (Hardwig 44). There is a sense of loss for both civilization as well as nature, and The Road treats their passing with all the sombreness of a eulogy.

            The Man is the primary guide and protector of the Boy, whom he sees as an object of purity and goodness in a fallen world. The Man is not only protecting the Boy because he is his son, but also because he sees his son as one of the last remnants of untainted purity and goodness left in the world. Despite the horrific bleakness of the world that is dying around them, filled with roaming gangs that have given in to their bestial natures, McCarthy manifests the sublime through The Man’s descriptions of The Boy, regarding his beauty as being equated with inherent moral goodness (Wilhelm 135). Much like the Romantics, McCarthy paints an idealized vison of the past. The Man is plagued by his life from before the apocalypse, a world that is cast as Edenic in comparison (Edwards 58). Despite the fact that the seeds of the apocalypse are already buried in this Edenic view of the past (Edwards 58), The Road’s suffusion of the sublime into the pre-apocalyptic world suggests an acknowledgment of our luck of living on this side of the apocalypse (Hardwig 49).

Despite this bleak view of the present given to us in The Road, there are still moments of peace to be found in the decay. Amid seeing burning forests collapse under their rotting weight, running from cannibals, and finding the bodies of those who lost the will to carry on, there are moments of physical and spiritual respite for The Man and The Boy. A scene where father and son are able to bathe in a waterfall, and another where they find some morels growing in a dead orchard nearby, are pastoral and sublime (Walsh 53). But these moments of respite do not just come from the natural world, they also find a storehouse of food and safe place to sleep. As well as this, when winter is setting in and things are looking bleak, they find a house, where they are able to trim their hair, change their clothes and take warmer blankets from a deceased couple who still lay on the bed. Far from seeming like moments of deus-ex machina, these strokes of good fortune come across as a hand guiding the pair through the darkest of days. Despite the Man’s death at the end of the book, The Road suggests that this is part of a grander plan as The Boy is able to join a wandering family and is never left alone in the world. The world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is so bleak, but it is written so in order for the seemingly mundane moments of light to shine all the brighter in contrast.

4.     The Apocalyptic Sublime

There is a horrific peace to be found in the widespread destruction of all life on earth. Post-apocalyptic narratives offer readers a sublime experience, in that they open the door for them to contemplate the end of time on a human scale (Horner & Zlosnik 57). As with Romantic authors, Post-apocalyptic authors are tapping into an often unspoken notion held by the public at large that something has gone awry with civilization, which is why these narratives resonate with so many readers. No more bills, business meetings, university assignments, family dinners or taxes, all the non-essential noise of the modern world would be stripped away and life would recede back to the basics. Who would you become in such a scenario? Freed from the constructedness of modernist foundations and put into a state of instability, the sublime experience of the apocalypse is potentially liberating (Gunn & Beard 284). It should be noted that there is no guarantee of a better life after an apocalypse, merely a chance to start again with a radically different playing field and a new set of rules. For individuals who have not ended up with the life they would have wanted in this world, it is no stretch of the imagination to see why they might find this radical paradigm shift an acceptable trade. What are billions of deaths in comparison to a legitimate second chance of achieving happiness? This is why thoughts of the apocalypse can create surprisingly alluring feelings of uncomfortable pleasure, it is the promise of transformational change that has traditionally been unachievable (Alexander). A Post-apocalyptic novel shows what life could be like were all the worst parts of society to be swept away, the so-called villains of the world would be brought out into the light for the protagonists to tackle head on. Post Apocalyptic novels are a form of wish-fulfillment, a manifestation of the if-only daydreams of a lost generation who escape into fantasies of exploring a ruined world bereft of humans, discovering hidden communities of survivors and fighting off one’s neighbours (Brent 50).

            Just as nature is a focus in Romanticism, so too does the power of nature reassert itself in a Post-apocalyptic narrative. People may think that humanity is secure in its domination of the planet, but it only takes some severe weather to reveal how tenuous that control is. Civilization is itself a bulwark against the more extreme aspects of nature, while every other species on earth adapts to its environment, humanity has spent generations modifying our environment to suit ourselves. Bereft of the protective layers of insulation that civilization brings, humanity is thrown back to the stone age in terms of combatting the elements. A blizzard that would have been a minor inconvenience in the old world, with central heating and a working power grid, now threatens the lives of everyone in the region. Wildfires rage across the countryside unchecked, cyclones arrive without warning, a drought ruins crops for years, earthquakes topple already failing infrastructure. Packs of wild dogs, no longer man’s-best-friend but returned to the ways of their own lupine ancestors, stalk the weed-infested streets. Without the countless generations of defences against nature, humanity is reduced to little more than cave-dwellers, hiding out in abandoned buildings, and waiting for the manifestation of nature’s wrath to pass. While this would no doubt be an issue of grave concern for anyone actually going through such an appalling scenario, for those reading about it in a Post-apocalyptic novel it is nothing if not riveting. Getting to live vicariously through a protagonist with modern sensibilities, who is forced to combat the elements in the ruins of our own civilization, is simultaneously familiar yet also alien. That juxtaposition is one of the places in which the Post-apocalyptic genre manifests the sublime, that disconnect between what was and what now is. Looking out a high-rise window on a rainy Friday night, watching the near-infinite lights of the city flash, is mundane. Camping on the top floor of a skyscraper to avoid predators, listening to the wind howl through the shattered windows as you look out over the deserted and overgrown city is sublime.

In conclusion, Romanticism and the Post-apocalyptic genre have a lot in common. Both the Romantic and Post-apocalyptic genres stem from times of great social upheaval, and at their cores they are both explorations and critiques of modern society. The Romantic literary movement was a response to enlightenment values, rationalism and a quickly industrialising world. The Post-apocalyptic literary movement was a response to horrors of World War II and the burgeoning notion that modern society is not as stable as we would like to believe, but also that life might continue onward after such an apocalyptic event. Both genres have a focus on nature and ruins, as was explored with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Both genres depict nature as a sublime force that is simultaneously powerfully destructive and majestically beautiful, a force that humanity has been attempting to insulate itself from for generations. Ruins are the remnants of such attempts at insulation from nature, the remains of abandoned structures that stand on the previous frontiers of society. These ruined structures are representation of the sublime, carrying it in their metaphorical themes of isolation, the transience of human endeavour, and the decay of both time and history.  Both Romantic and Post-apocalyptic literature have the potential to be narratives of deep and layered meaning, and their capacity to house and represent the sublime is a link that should not be overlooked.

Citations

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Prepper Fiction

I’m an Indie-Author who focuses on Post-Apocalyptic fiction, but one that finds himself at odds with the broader Post-Apocalyptic Indie Author/Audience scene. Most successful Indies who write Post-Apocalyptic fiction actually only write within a very narrow bandwidth of the genre, focusing on what should be it’s own sub-genre of Preper Fiction. It’s fine if you want to do that, but it’s really not something I want to do. I’ve known I don’t mesh well with the broader PA-Indie Author scene for a while now, but it’s always been hard to nail down why. But I just got into a brief, but revelatory, discussion with an Indie who is far more successful than I am - and now I think I know why.

Prepper Fiction, as the name suggests, focuses on Preppers - which also reveals their protagonist’s key aspect - they’re prepared. The implications of this were only made crystal clear to me during this discussion with the other, far more successful (I cannot stress that enough) Indie. To summarise his rather long point, he basically said -

“My character was a good guy, smart, popular, successful, helped out in the community and church. He almost did everything right… but he never asked ‘what if’? and so his unperparedness for a tomorrow that wasn’t like today lead to his downfall. I want people to think about this character, and not be like him.”

To which my reply was -

“So, basically, what you’re saying is - “Jack was a really great guy, but he wasn’t a Prepper… so he died.”

The conversation jackknifed and he denied my synopsis of his longwinded post and suggested I read his book, which I kindly refused. But it did get me thinking about his argument, and where I’d heard it countless times before.

Back in the good old days, where the biggest concern in society was how annoying the Christians could be, they always had this weird argument about heaven. It was basically that it didn’t matter how good a person you were, if you didn’t follow Christ then you’d go to hell. You could house the poor, care for the sick, donate blood and save puppies, but if you didn’t adopt this one particular lifestyle, then all that was in vain and you’d suffer the consequences.

It’s the same argument…

It’s no suprise that the biggest readers of Prepper Ficiton are American Christians, they’ve been freaking out about doomsday forever. They spend their entire lives preparing for the Day of Judgment, when all the non-believers who didn’t think like them will finally understand that they were fools and ohhh if only they’d listened to the ever so wise and saintly Christi-I mean, Preppers.

It’s the exact… same… argument.

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to figure it out, but this throw-away discussion with one of my betters has laid out exactly why I hate Prepper Fiction. Imagine having the audacity to think you could prepare for the end of the world? Imagine staring down zombies, nuclear war, EMP, coronal mass ejection or an actual pandemic (because those are the only scenarioes they deal with) and thinking, “yeah, I got this.” It’s the exact same audacity that allows people to walk around thinking, “anyone and everyone who doesn’t follow my way of life will burn for eternity, but I’m going to be rewarded for eternity.”

For the most part, beyond the inciting incident, the apocalypse doesn’t even play a role in Prepper Fiction - it’s just there to kick things off and break the world order we’re currently stuck with. This is because Prepper Fiction is simple wish-fulfilment - of a world where everyone who doesn’t think like the reader dies and the slate is wiped clean. Any antagonists who manages to survive the end of the world in Prepper Fiction are either evil “heathens” to be killed or unprepared “atheists” who should’ve listened and prepared while they had the chance. Prepper Fiction isn’t about people surviving the end of the world, it’s about people prepared for the end of the world surviving, and being proven right.

But the thing is - the apocalypse is the end-of-the-fucking-world, it doesn’t take sides and it doesn’t give a shit how prepared you are. A meteor is going to kill millions, the resulting tsunamis will kill millions more and the subsequent famines will kill billions after that. Fuck your little cabin in the woods and collections of bullets and beans. You’re not going to be rebuilding shit after that, certainly not your little utopian light of civilization you think you’re carrying. You’re gonna hide out in your cabin in the woods for a few weeks and then wonder why you’re suddenly getting sick. As you start firing blood from both ends you’ll remember that there’s nobody to run the nuclear powerplants and so they’ve all gone into meltdown and they’re spewing radiation all over the country side. The last thing you see, as you die scared and alone, is your bug-out-bag full of expensive gear.

I was never a Christian, and I’m not a Prepper, and even though people can and do make bank by catering to this audience, it’s just not something I’m interested in… but fuck me if this link between the two wasn’t a massive reveal for me.

New Post-Apocalyptic Novel - The Land of Long Shadows

It took me much longer than expected, but I’m finally releasing my next post-apocalyptic novel!

Just look at that cover. You know some crazy shit is about to go down.

The basic gist of it is that I drunkenly set things in motion that rippled out like a cascading cluserfuck and consumed most of my creative energies for the past few years. But, it’s finally complete and ready to be ejected out into the world… like a stinking turd, or a demonically possessed stillborn.

“Why would he phrase it like that?!”

Because, my nonexistant interlocutor, I want to set your hypothetical expectations in order. The Land of Long Shadows, to put it mildly, is not a nice story. It is a story about the worst of the worst that humanity has to offer, stuck in a crapsack world without any hope in sight. There are no heroes in The Land of Long Shadows, and the day cannot be saved.

Just as it isn’t a short read (coming in at 142,000 words), it’s not a straight-forward read, either. The literal world has ended on a fundamental level, and there’s some reality warping, timey-whimey shenanigans going on. Just when you think you soul can’t take the strain from all the horrible characters, your mind will start to crumble from trying to get a grasp on the plot and setting. Transgressive Ficiton really can be a certain kind of fun, sometimes… from the right angle… under the proper lighting… at the exact time of year.

Anyway, I’m aiming to release The Land of Long Shadows on August 12th, 2023, just two weeks away from the time of writing this. With all this prep for release going on, I’m already hard at work on the sequel as well as a few other post-apocalyptic projects. So, stay tuned for all that.

Days Gone - A Flawed Gem

I recently bought, finished and got the Platinum Trophy for Days Gone. Getting the Platinum is not something I usually bother with, usually I only put in the effort for games that I love the most. They’re all Post-Apocalyptic, open world games too - Mad Max, Horizon Zero Dawn and now Days Gone. There’s probably something too that, but I’ll look into it later. This post is specifically about Days Gone, and how I put in the extra time after the main story was complete because I thought the game was worth it.

Spoilers. Duh.

Look, I’ll deal with the negatives right off the bat. This game isn’t complete, and despite first being announced way back in 2016, only to be delayed until 2019, it could have used a lot more time in the oven. There are many technical issues that just seem like small things that a more experienced studio or director would have been able to handle. Dialogue popping up at weird times, often in the wrong sort of tone. Cut scenes and conversations that looked like they were meant to be cut from the game, somehow made their way into the game alongside their replacements. A few weird character animations. It’s all really minor stuff that just looks silly and would’ve been easy enough to fix. I don’t know why these issues are still there, especially when they could just be patched, but they are. Despite all this, the biggest issue I ran into was the load times, which were consistently atrocious. This is the biggest issue I had and it’s far from a deal breaker, just a niggling annoyance, so make of that what you will.

In terms of story, you’re cut off from whole sections of the map until they game wants you to go there. But instead of blocking you off organically, with something as simple as a fallen tree across the road or blocked tunnel, you get this big warning on your screen and then you’re teleported back to the play area. Along with this, cut scenes were filmed to play with certain time/weather settings, so the clock would always advance until the developers had things playing out exactly how they wanted. It worked overall, but it never really felt as organic as it could have. It’s like the developers wanted an open world game, but one with a very linear and controlled story.

That’s the negative out of the way, and so now onto the positive - I freaking love Days Gone (pun intended). The world is pretty well thought out, and the Freakers are an ever present threat that’s constantly evolving as the story progresses. Two years prior, an infection spread across the globe, and still-living zombies (picture the infected from 28 Days Later) are rampaging across the globe. Deacon St. John, a member of the Mongrel Motorcycle Club, throws his injured wife on a helicopter to get her to safety while he helps his fellow gang member, Boozer, get to safety. He looses track of his wife, spends the next two years acting as a Bounty Hunter and Freaker Killer until the events of the game. He’s a fairly typical Post-Apocalyptic protagonist, out for himself and those closest to him, but eventually he starts opening up and helping out others. It’s actually a pretty well played out character arc, and this is in no small part to the acting of Sam Witwer, the actor who lent his voice and appearance to Deacon St. John.

One of the interesting things about Days Gone is that you’re pretty consistently killing women and children. Now, that sounds like a weird point to make, so let me clarify. In zombie games, you often kill female zombies as well as male zombies. They’re already dead, so it’s never been that big of a deal to kill them. Living female enemies, however, has often been something of an issue. People just don’t like gunning down women, even when they’re trying to kill you first. I remember there were female enemies in Horizon Zero Dawn, but they were few and far between - far, far rarer than the male enemies, which you would kill en mass. Mad Max only had male enemies to kill, except for a single woman that you fight in Thunderdome. Even the shining beacon of Feminist gaming, The Last of Us, had you murdering female Infected, but no uninfected females during game-play. So much for equality?

But then in Days Gone, there are plenty of women who are Marauders, Vagrants or Rippers - and you’re killing them pretty consistently. Along with this, there are children enemies in the game too. Granted, they’re Freakers called ‘Newts’, so they’re basically still under the umbrella of “zombies are already dead, so who cares?” but they’re there none the less. It’s nothing compared to the gunning down of orphans in Fallout 1 or Fallout 2, but still there’s this strange feeling of uncomfortable awkwardness when you smash a Newt into the ground with a baseball bat. I’m not one who takes pleasure in mowing down women and/or children, merely someone who likes to see that aspect of the world realized realistically. At one point, the characters themselves even discuss how uncomfortable killing a Newt makes them feel.

It sounds weird, but if you want a realistic game then this is what you want. Why aren’t there female Hunters, or Infected children in The Last of Us? Where are the females fighting for the Roadkill or Buzzards in Mad Max? If women are equally as badass as men, which Horzion Zero Dawn purports to proudly put forward, then where are the rest of the female enemies? This is something that Days Gone gets right, because there are women fighting right beside the men. They’re not just NPC’s selling wares or defending camps either, they’re rushing in to kill you with baseball bats and rifles. It just makes sense, from a Post-Apocalyptic standpoint and from an equality standpoint. Good representation isn’t just about having more female protagonists, it’s about having more females everywhere - including in the role of cannon fodder for the games protagonist.

So, yeah… that rant explains why I’m so awkwardly happy to be killing women and kids in a video game.

The world of Days Gone is amazing. Set in the ruins of Oregon, Days Gone has you riding a motor bike through back hill forests, sandy deserts and blasted tundra. Your bike starts out noticeably shit (because where do you go if you start off with the best gear possible?) but as the game progresses you steadily upgrade it, and it quickly becomes a joy to ride. You get better and better weapons to fight the Freakers, and this is probably my only other issue with the game. You’re getting this ever expanding arsenal of firearms when I would have preferred to see something like in The Last of Us. Bigger and better guns are cool, but it doesn’t exactly help push the Post-Apocalyptic narrative, so for me I would have preferred to have a few guns that get modified. You’d still get the ever improving firepower, it’s just that it’d be the same guns being tinkered with, which is basically what the Post-Apocalypse is all about. Nothing speaks to the hardship of the world’s end than not having access to the firepower you once did, instead having to modify and make do with your initial weapon.

Anyway, you ride around helping out various camps, each with their own flawed views and methods of survival, and you quickly find yourself wrapped up in the greater events of the world. The main things you do in Days Gone is collecting scrap and hunting Freakers - both of these activities remain consistent throughout the game. Far from the eclectic junk bonanza of Fallout 4, collecting scrap in Days Gone is streamlined and simple. Scrap, fuel, kerosene, cloth - you only really need to collect the basics. In terms of hunting Freakers, you can take them on one by one but the real draw is against the Hordes. Literally hundreds of Freakers all swarming their way across the world map in a constant migration between their nests and feeding grounds. These Horde battles can be dramatically intense, but it usually just ended with me running and gunning, cheesing them with Molotov’s and Heavy Machine Gun Fire. They’re fun, but due to game-play mechanics they rarely play out as intended.

In terms of characters that fill the world, there’s a pretty decent swathe of personalities to encounter. There’re a lot of assholes, but there’s usually some sort of justifying reason behind why they are the way they are. Whoever they are, and whatever their defect is, it’s always interesting to watch Deacon interact with them. Say what you will about an ex-Army outlaw biker being married to a researcher with a Ph.D. in Botany, it allowed the developers to craft a story that was both world shaking and personal at the same time.

There’s a cult of psychos known as the ‘Rippers’ and while yes, they do go around ripping the shit out of people - they’re actually named that for the way their leader ritualistically carved “R.I.P'“ into his own forehead. Let the past die, wash away the mental suffering with physical suffering and you’ll be free to “Rest In Peace.” It’s a nice little bit of word play that I’m kicking myself for not thinking of. Anyway, the point here is that people are talking about the Rippers hunting down two bikers from the Mongrel Motorcycle Club, which is obviously Deacon and Boozer. Deacon thinks they just have it in for them because they’ve killed a few of them, but eventually you find out that the leader of the Rippers, Jessie, is actually a former member of the Mongrel Motorcycle Club as well. The thing is that Jessie had his gang tattoo burnt from his back with a blowtorch before the apocalypse, by both Deacon and Boozer. He started the Rippers cult because he was obsessed with the way that a persons whole identity could be burnt away in a flood of pain. He inflicted suffering on hundreds of survivors in a twisted attempt to free them, because he admired the way the Freakers were free from suffering.

Eventually Deacon and Boozer team up to go kill Jessie, and the story spirals upward to more world spanning heights. You eventually find your wife, and she’s working with a paramilitary organisation who are trying their best to preserve humanity. They’re well armed and supplied, and it looks like they may be able to save mankind, but there’s the little issue of their leader being a religious zealot who executes anyone who doesn’t adhere to his strict moral code. Eventually you work with your wife, the botanist, to learn that her research was used in the creation of the Freaker Virus. So while Deacon helped create a monsters of man that plagued the survivors, his wife helped turn men into monsters that plagued the survivors. It’ll admit that it strains credulity, but it was a neat way to personally tie your characters into the story beyond being just some guy and girl who’re saving the world.

You deal with this paramilitary force, going in and taking them out in your usual explosive style, and then you and your wife are finally united and free. After the game, the government agent who helped you find your wife lets you know of a far greater conspiracy that he’s involved in. He’s infected with the Freaker virus, though he’s somehow managed to avoid turning into a mindless Freaker. All the good stuff with none of the drawbacks, except being ugly as sin. I’m sure we’ll find out more about this in the sequel, which I hope takes less than 3 years to be released.

Days Gone is a pretty fantastic game if you’re into open world survival simulator or just Post-Apocalyptic games in general. I didn’t realize how sick I was of the Fallout series’ 50’s schtick, until I was cruising through the ruins of a realistic and modern looking Oregon. People lamented not having photos of loved ones, because everyone had used smart phones to store their photos, and high tech medical facilities sprung to life once you started the generators. It was a breath of fresh air to see a more serious Post-Apocalyptic tone, as opposed to the more lighthearted and gimmicky alternatives. Days Gone is a flawed game, but despite that I still think it’s a fantastic Post-Apocalyptic title that is well worth playing.

Return to Form... and an Old Post-Apocalyptic Book!

Hey folks, sorry for the massive hiatus, literally three months since my last update, life has been sort of hectic of late. Living overseas is never easy, and some days are a lot more stressful than others. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about, I’m here to talk about updating the Post-Apocalyptic Writing Guide!

It’s been a year since I released the guide, and it’s garnered some great comments and reviews… but the things with guides is that they have to stay current. With that in mind, I’m going to update and re-release the guide. A version 2.0, if you will.

Because of this, I’m opening the floor to my Post-Apocalyptic tribe - if you’ve got something you think should, or shouldn’t, be in there, then let me know! I’ve got my own changes that I want to make, sure, but I’m happy to listen and take on board any thoughts or criticisms that Post-Apocalyptic creators and fans have. I want this to be the quintessential guide, and for that I need all of you. There’s already a long list of names in the front, people who’ve helped out, and I’m more than happy to have yours in there too.

If you’ve already got a copy, then flip through it and take some notes. If you haven’t got a copy, then just email me at JJShurte@Gmail.com and I’ll send you one for free. One of the tribe, S.T. Campitelli, has already written up a five page document that’s full of some really helpful stuff, I’m seriously impressed and doubly grateful. But I don’t care who you are, as long as your a fan of the genre, I’m open to any and all input.

Thanks in advance, and best of luck out there!

PS - Yes, I’ll try to update more.
PPS - Yes, I’m still working on my fiction… when I can.

Van Helsing - Really That Bad

So, I sat down and watched season 3 of Van Helsing and despite what I said in my last blog post on the subject - it’s doubled down on the man-hating social justice rhetoric and become a clusterfuck of a show. Along with the ridiculous propaganda it’s peddling, the storytelling of the show has devolved into absolute absurdity. It’s not trying to appeal to a broad audience anymore, it’s not even pretending to appeal to a wider audience, it’s purely a radical feminist girl-power romp through the post apocalypse.

Vanessa Van Helsing is a fucking joke of a protagonist - she snarls and stomps her way through this season. I guess they’re trying to show her devolution into a vampire-like being, but she’s just an absolute arsehole. As an example - Axel, the marine with multiple tours of combat duty before the vampire outbreak, is trying to enter a building with some form of tactical awareness, but Vanessa just gives him the finger and waltzes inside. I get that they’re trying to portray her as an experienced combatant who is also superhuman, but this “badassery” would be described as “toxic masculinity” if it were in a male character. She literally kills an innocent man, just to drink his blood, and then forgives herself in the next episode and it’s never brought up again. She even admits that she killed a guy in the first season despite knowing he wasn’t the murderer in their group, simply because she wanted too. To put it as bluntly - she’s just a cunt of a human being.

And the show has totally reverted to it’s original anti-male narrative, where if something bad is happening then it’s typically a man’s fault. A male nurse hits on a side character, who rebuffs him because she’s a lesbian, and he ends up attacking her in a psychotic rage. Both those things already happened in the first episode of season one, but they decided to reuse it for some bizarre reason? If the leader of a group is male then they tend to be evil, or they’re gay and get killed, or they’re female. It’s a female prisoner, who is chained to a really weak and effeminate male, who stages a riot on a prison bus which allows everyone to break free. Axel finds his long lost sister, just like Vanessa found her long lost sister… just like Mohammad found his long lost sister… and it turns out she was kidnapped and used as a sex slave by some guy who ends up having memory loss.

And the worst example, the one that nearly had me evacuating my bowels out of sheer outrage, was the castration. There’s this twitchy vampire that’s been awkwardly convulsing his way through the series and in this season he’s decided that he wants to join this sisterhood of badass vampires… and they decide to let him join, but only if he has his nuts taken off. As ridiculous as that is, the worst part is that he actually fucking begs them for it…

“Yes, do it. Make me like you. Make me a sister.”

Sorry to break it to you, but having your nuts taken off doesn’t make you a woman - it just makes you a shitty male. And not only does he have his nuts chopped off to join an all-female order of vampires, they go ahead a lop off the sacks of a whole bunch of other male vampires they force to join their ranks. They’re fucking undead, they don’t even procreate. I guess there’s the symbolic gesture of it, but what’s the point of the castration in terms of the story beyond some appeal to a batshit insane form of feminist extremism? How about I write a story about women being forced to get hysterectomies in order to join a gang… let’s see how long I survive after writing that.

Beyond this inane pandering to an ideology of victimhood, the storytelling itself has completely gone to shit. All the main cast of characters are either immortal or immune to the vampire plague, even though there’s multiple strains of it now. Someone is even healed from near death by being bitten by a vampire, despite also being immune to the virus. The vampires can’t figure out if they’re burning in the sunlight or if the clouds provide enough cover for them to walk around without protection… but it doesn’t even matter anymore because there are “Daywalkers” now. And no, despite making a joke about the shows similarities to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they couldn’t even give a nod to the fact that they stole the term from Blade. I guess Buffy gets a nod because that had a chick lead, but since Blade was a dude then he can get fucked.

The secret organisation Blak Tek also plays a bigger role in this season but they’re just as stupid and just as mustache-twistingly evil. They’ve set up a safe zone in Denver but it’s all about experiments on unwilling human test subjects and forced labor in prison camps. There’s a bunch of elder vampires who are two dimensional and a prophecy being told by some literal hag who just appeared this season, and it all ends with an ascended Sam standing off against Vanessa and her newly resurrected Van Helsing ancestor. And you just know that the fight isn’t going to happen at the start of season 4 because it’ll be forestalled somehow and dragged out for the entire bloody season.

Van Helsing at least appeared to be correcting it’s course by the end of season 2, but it totally reverted in season 3. It’s shit storytelling combined with a failed attempt to pander to ideologues that’s created this absolute abortion of a show. Vanessa Van Helsing isn’t a strong female character, she’s a shitty male character being played by a woman. There’s still a few half decent characters in this show, but they’re few and far between… it’s like wading through an ocean of shit to find a dime or two.

I’m sure I’ll see season 4 at some point, because it got renewed for some reason, simply for closure more than any interest in seeing where the story goes. It’s clearly not written for people like me, it’s a show that preaches to the already converted under the guise of trying to illicit social change… and it can’t even tell a half decent story. But for some bizarre reason these Van Helsing posts are some of my most popular content - which both perplexes and irritates me to no end. Gotta give the readers what they want though, even if it’s a crazed rant about a lame-ass show. I’m just glad I haven’t had to pay to watch this tripe…

The Ultimate Career Goal

So I’m sitting here thinking about all the different apocalypses that I want to bring upon fictional versions of Earth, or some other human-inhabited planet, and I got to thinking about my long term career goals. What do I actually want to do in terms of being an author, especially one that focuses so heavily on the post-apocalyptic genre?

Well, I wrote a writing guide for the genre (which can be found here), so that’s one milestone already done. But something else I can do, is put my time/money/sanity where my mouth (or fingers?) are and actually write a story for each and every post-apocalyptic scenario that I listed in the guide. That’s a grand total of 36 different possible scenarios to work with. Now, planning to write 36 books is a hell of a lot easier than actually writing 36 books, but as the saying goes - anything worth doing is going to be bloody hard work.

Or maybe that was just my old man’s version of it?

Anyway, as I’ve said before in various locations - you rarely get just one single type of post-apocalyptic scenario at a time, there’s a cascading effect that tends to ripple through the system. For instance, you’re always going to get an Economic Collapse and Social Decay scenarios when you end the world… that’s just a natural byproduct of everything going to shit. Now, I can try to tap into this and use those ripples to get ticks in multiple boxes from a single story, but that’s not really what I’m going for.

With that in mind, although it’d certainly be easier, I’m looking at the long term achievement of having a story written in every single scenario. By the time I’m done, I’m hoping to have a catalog of post-apocalyptic stories that cover every possible scenario imaginable. I don’t want to write EMP or Zombie Apocalypse stories over and over - I want what variety I can get while also staying within the genre.

And to be honest, each of those 36 scenarios has some serious fucking wiggle room. That’s a lot of different ways for the world to end, and I’m confident that I can bring something unique to each and every scenario there is. As always, the only real issue is time. It’s not gonna happen overnight, but it will happen.

Why a House Can't Always be a Home After the Apocalypse

You see it in Post-Apocalyptic stories all the time, people living in anything and everything except houses after the world has ended. It’s not just for shits and giggles, though the reasons are not always readily apparent either. Why would people choose to live in a baseball stadium, a hotel, an office building, subway stations, military bases, shopping malls, prisons, casinos or a dam? Why not just live in a house like a normal person?

Well, the answer is because Post-Apocalyptic times aren’t normal, and neither are the people who live in them… and they certainly don’t have the same needs that we do in a pre-apocalyptic world.

The thing with Post-Apocalyptic times is that there’s generally something out there that wants to kill you. If it’s not radiation, zombies or mutants then it’s other people. For that reason, a simple house just won’t cut it as a base of operations. You need something that you can easily defend and most modern houses aren’t built to protect you against determined assailants, let alone radiation. Windows are a massive weak point, and even a dead-bolted door isn’t going to save you. And this is all assuming the house is still relatively new as well, add a few years before the apocalypse, let alone after, and you’ve got a seriously insufficient structure on your hands.

Next, you’ve got resources to consider. Chances are that running water is going to be a serious concern for your survivors… primarily because they’d like to continue being survivors. Most modern houses, oftentimes whole towns or sometimes even cities, aren’t build close to fresh water. With our modern water network, people can live in the middle of a desert and still have fresh, clean water at the turn of a tap. That kind of luxury generally dries up once the apocalypse kicks in. Once the taps stop working and all the bottled water runs out, you discover why towns were historically founded on river banks.

Now, it’s entirely possible that you live in a remote town with a river running through it - the zombies don’t know where you are and you’ve still got a reliable source of fresh drinking water. Good for you, you get to keep living in your home. Maybe you can shore up your defenses; board the windows and make some kind of wall… but whatever is out there will likely get through eventually. Why not just move into the local super market? It’s a lot closer to the river, it’s packed full of food and it’s a massive building made from steel and concrete. Besides not having that “homey” feel to it, it’s got everything you’ll ever need.

There’re a lot of things to consider when choosing where to live after the world ends; space, resources, defenses. You’ve got to weight each of these things against the others, because each site will have it’s own pro’s and con’s, and their viability will depend on what sort of apocalypse you went through. What’s good in a Zombie Apocalypse won’t be as effective in a Nuclear War scenario, and vice-versa.

You’ve just got to find the best place you can, then settle in. The primary paradoxical problem is that the better the location is, the more likely it is to be a target for other survivors. Which is just another factor to take into account when choosing your Post-Apocalyptic housing.

The Bastard's Curse

On the first of September last year, I did a Twitter poll, asking people to help me come up with a random plot. As with any kind of crowd sourcing, it turned into an absolute clusterfuck and spiraled out of control. And so here we are… 166 days later… and the project is finally being released.

It took way longer than expected, but there was a fair amount of real world drama and the core idea changed a fair few times… but it’s done.

Writing in the 3rd person was actually a pretty big challenge for me, it took an interview with the main-man Evan C. to figure it out - but I usually write in the first person because I have a background in oral storytelling. So yeah, 3rd person was difficult, but I’m happy to report that feedback has been good and I’m content with sending this out to the public… for free.

Well, kinda free? I’ll give it to you, for free, if you sign up to my email list… yeah, that’s what’s happening here.

If general opinion of the story warrants it, then I’ll be happy to write other short stories in this world. It actually turned out to be a pretty unique setting, and I’d like to explore it further. Combining Lovecraftian Horror with the post-apocalyptic genre came with some interesting challenges.

Feel free to rip the shit out of it, as always I’m always more interested in getting better than having my ego stroked. This is a slight step outside my wheelhouse, so I’m more than willing to take on some creative criticism in order to get better at it. Whether you love it or hate it, let me know what you think!

Anyway, without further rambling - if you’d like to collect your free copy of The Bastard’s Curse, then just click here!

Let me know if there’re any drama’s with the links… I’m no good with this high tech wizardry.