Nick Cole's Blog - Posts Tagged "wool"
Post Apocalyptia is the Only Acceptable Schadenfreude
schadenfreude
noun, scha·den·freu·de
"a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people."
Apocalypse Tomorrow
The world ends as we know it, and you feel fine? Or at least you enjoying watching movies about it like the coming Mad Max: Fury Road, or reading about it in the myriad of PA books available.
For most people the world ending is a source of fear, trepidation, concern even. Some go to great lengths to survive promised nuclear Armageddons or threatened global pandemics. Supplies are purchased in bulk, skills are learned, weapons stockpiled, all in hopes of surviving the worst case scenario ever imagined by the writers of any Bruckheimer summer blockbuster. But for others, it’s the ultimate game of Survivor.
For these, the end of the world is a source of pleasure. Reading pleasure, that is. Welcome to the wild and wonderful side street alley Science Fiction calls Post-Apocalyptic fiction, or PA for short.
Once we pass through the greats of the sub-genre, i.e. Canticle for Liebowtiz, Earth Abides, The Road, etc., we get down to the pulp fiction. Here we find the Former Navy Seal who can do just about anything, the saavy teen phenom with a penchant for solving her problems with a bow, and even the ‘prepper’ who’s learned every skill and stockpiled everything one might need to survive. This last book might usually begin with a laundry list of supplies similar to the IKEA shopping fantasy one finds in a Stieg Laarsen novel. So don’t be surprised when the protagonist pulls out that pair of wound-specific medical clamps from within the bunker.
Once we have a firm hero in mind, the Post-Apocalyptic world is revealed. To be more specific, what’s left of the world is revealed. Our hero journeys through the fallen Starbucks and fortress Wal-Marts of a crumbling world turned upside down.
And this is where I find the beauty of Post-Apocalyptia.
I love to imagine the ‘What If’ particulars of ‘what if it all went sideways’. I have been doing this for some time. I suspect this habit may have begun on the Sunday evening before that fifth grade State report assigned at the beginning of the year was finally due. Why did I pick North Dakota?! Since then, when things get rough, the bills are due, I didn't get that job, or it’s someone’s wedding, I tend to engage in a bit of Catastrophic Dreaming. It happens a lot, even when I’ve got a few minutes to kill on the road. For example, I give you this happy accident: Just a few days ago I was driving to downtown Los Angeles. It was a Saturday and all the freeways were jammed. Eventually the 710 slowed to a crawl and the traffic report blared that things didn’t look so good for the 5 and 101 interchange. So, taking the path less traveled, I cut up Firestone Boulevard all the Way to Alameda, turned right, sighted the towers and office buildings of downtown and made a straight dash for my destination. A word of note here, this area is Rodney King Riot Country. Since 1992, it has been a place you don’t willingly enter. So I hadn't, ever in fact. It wasn't altogether safe, but it wasn't as bad as my imagination had envisioned it in all those years of driving the 710, and when I turned onto Alameda, I found Post-Apocalyptia.
I found a long line of salvage yards ringed with barbed wire. Tall concrete warehouses with few window openings. Wide spaces to see your enemies coming. All in the southern shadow of the heights of Downtown Los Angeles.
I thought, as I usually do when dreaming up global destruction, how would this place hold up given the end of the world? When I’m at Anthropolgie watching my wife shop, I usually find the answer is, not well. Malls, the obvious 1980’s B movie screenwriters’ choice for setting the end of the world tale, in my opinion won’t hold up too well. Hard to defend, obvious targets, too many entrances. Or if I’m watching my favorite player not hit homeruns for the Angles, I think, wow, Anaheim stadium would be like a Post-Apocalyptia Castle sitting astride two freeways, like some medieval fortress from which a minor warlord might torment the local population.
Back to the salvage yards south of downtown Los Angeles - great places. Already set up to defend their loot. Lots of scrap to construct armor, both personal and vehicular. Off the beaten track. A great place to hunker down and plan your next move.
This is Post-Apocalyptia. This is PA fiction. The thrill is in the setting. Envisioning the ‘what if everything I know doesn't work, burns down, or I must flee from’. Regular Science Fiction and Fantasy ask you to envision sometimes impossible landscapes. So unless you’ve been to Outer Mongolia and Death Valley, I don’t think anyone’s got a really firm picture of Mordor. And I still can’t even get my mind around Alastair Reynolds’ Glitter Band from The Revelation Space Novels. But my neighborhood two years after a viral doomsday. The skeletal remains of New York City. A burning IHOP surrounded by zombies. I can picture that.
And therein lies the special thrill PA readers seek when delving wastelands both suburban and desolate. The thrill of what happened at the mall. The airport. The deepest depths of The Wasteland. PA readers want to see what End of the World tricks the writer can play with these places we live in, pass along the highway or have seen in the movies. It’s fun.
What will become of this place?
What will become of me?
Nick Cole is the author of The End of the World as We Knew It.
"In the future, an artist specializing in historical records creates a piece of art based on three separate accounts of the Pandemic. What follows is a patchwork tale of survival and horror as two lovers struggle to survive the undying dead and the collapse of an America turned charnel house. Told as memos from Ground Zero, and later in the journal of a Dark Tower-like quest by train and foot across a nightmare landscape of ruined cities and raving corpses, the three accounts reveal more than just the grim realities of society’s collapse. The Notebook meets The Walking Dead in this stained glass depiction of the end of the world as we knew it.'
Get it here:
http://amzn.to/1JgW5Fq
noun, scha·den·freu·de
"a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people."
Apocalypse Tomorrow
The world ends as we know it, and you feel fine? Or at least you enjoying watching movies about it like the coming Mad Max: Fury Road, or reading about it in the myriad of PA books available.
For most people the world ending is a source of fear, trepidation, concern even. Some go to great lengths to survive promised nuclear Armageddons or threatened global pandemics. Supplies are purchased in bulk, skills are learned, weapons stockpiled, all in hopes of surviving the worst case scenario ever imagined by the writers of any Bruckheimer summer blockbuster. But for others, it’s the ultimate game of Survivor.
For these, the end of the world is a source of pleasure. Reading pleasure, that is. Welcome to the wild and wonderful side street alley Science Fiction calls Post-Apocalyptic fiction, or PA for short.
Once we pass through the greats of the sub-genre, i.e. Canticle for Liebowtiz, Earth Abides, The Road, etc., we get down to the pulp fiction. Here we find the Former Navy Seal who can do just about anything, the saavy teen phenom with a penchant for solving her problems with a bow, and even the ‘prepper’ who’s learned every skill and stockpiled everything one might need to survive. This last book might usually begin with a laundry list of supplies similar to the IKEA shopping fantasy one finds in a Stieg Laarsen novel. So don’t be surprised when the protagonist pulls out that pair of wound-specific medical clamps from within the bunker.
Once we have a firm hero in mind, the Post-Apocalyptic world is revealed. To be more specific, what’s left of the world is revealed. Our hero journeys through the fallen Starbucks and fortress Wal-Marts of a crumbling world turned upside down.
And this is where I find the beauty of Post-Apocalyptia.
I love to imagine the ‘What If’ particulars of ‘what if it all went sideways’. I have been doing this for some time. I suspect this habit may have begun on the Sunday evening before that fifth grade State report assigned at the beginning of the year was finally due. Why did I pick North Dakota?! Since then, when things get rough, the bills are due, I didn't get that job, or it’s someone’s wedding, I tend to engage in a bit of Catastrophic Dreaming. It happens a lot, even when I’ve got a few minutes to kill on the road. For example, I give you this happy accident: Just a few days ago I was driving to downtown Los Angeles. It was a Saturday and all the freeways were jammed. Eventually the 710 slowed to a crawl and the traffic report blared that things didn’t look so good for the 5 and 101 interchange. So, taking the path less traveled, I cut up Firestone Boulevard all the Way to Alameda, turned right, sighted the towers and office buildings of downtown and made a straight dash for my destination. A word of note here, this area is Rodney King Riot Country. Since 1992, it has been a place you don’t willingly enter. So I hadn't, ever in fact. It wasn't altogether safe, but it wasn't as bad as my imagination had envisioned it in all those years of driving the 710, and when I turned onto Alameda, I found Post-Apocalyptia.
I found a long line of salvage yards ringed with barbed wire. Tall concrete warehouses with few window openings. Wide spaces to see your enemies coming. All in the southern shadow of the heights of Downtown Los Angeles.
I thought, as I usually do when dreaming up global destruction, how would this place hold up given the end of the world? When I’m at Anthropolgie watching my wife shop, I usually find the answer is, not well. Malls, the obvious 1980’s B movie screenwriters’ choice for setting the end of the world tale, in my opinion won’t hold up too well. Hard to defend, obvious targets, too many entrances. Or if I’m watching my favorite player not hit homeruns for the Angles, I think, wow, Anaheim stadium would be like a Post-Apocalyptia Castle sitting astride two freeways, like some medieval fortress from which a minor warlord might torment the local population.
Back to the salvage yards south of downtown Los Angeles - great places. Already set up to defend their loot. Lots of scrap to construct armor, both personal and vehicular. Off the beaten track. A great place to hunker down and plan your next move.
This is Post-Apocalyptia. This is PA fiction. The thrill is in the setting. Envisioning the ‘what if everything I know doesn't work, burns down, or I must flee from’. Regular Science Fiction and Fantasy ask you to envision sometimes impossible landscapes. So unless you’ve been to Outer Mongolia and Death Valley, I don’t think anyone’s got a really firm picture of Mordor. And I still can’t even get my mind around Alastair Reynolds’ Glitter Band from The Revelation Space Novels. But my neighborhood two years after a viral doomsday. The skeletal remains of New York City. A burning IHOP surrounded by zombies. I can picture that.
And therein lies the special thrill PA readers seek when delving wastelands both suburban and desolate. The thrill of what happened at the mall. The airport. The deepest depths of The Wasteland. PA readers want to see what End of the World tricks the writer can play with these places we live in, pass along the highway or have seen in the movies. It’s fun.
What will become of this place?
What will become of me?
Nick Cole is the author of The End of the World as We Knew It.
"In the future, an artist specializing in historical records creates a piece of art based on three separate accounts of the Pandemic. What follows is a patchwork tale of survival and horror as two lovers struggle to survive the undying dead and the collapse of an America turned charnel house. Told as memos from Ground Zero, and later in the journal of a Dark Tower-like quest by train and foot across a nightmare landscape of ruined cities and raving corpses, the three accounts reveal more than just the grim realities of society’s collapse. The Notebook meets The Walking Dead in this stained glass depiction of the end of the world as we knew it.'
Get it here:
http://amzn.to/1JgW5Fq
How I Destroyed the World
Every book has got to begin somewhere. Often the circumstances, though seemingly fantastic, say as found in a Space Opera, are still pastoral. Setting is the way life is, and the characters within have only ever known it that way. But in the world of Post-Apocalyptic fiction, or PA fiction, the change from pastoral to doomsday is part of the tale.
And that’s where readers of PA find the sweet spot…
They want the world turned upside down, shaken not stirred and served into a cracked martini glass at a roadside fortress gas station where everyone wears leather, drives souped-up Dodge Chargers and carries a shotgun. Maybe. Or at least some of them do.
But first we’ve got to depart the regular gas station, and that 44 oz. Big Gulp we can have any time we want. Or, life as we currently know it. To do that, the PA writer needs to set the stage. The opening act is the final act. Or simply put, the world’s got to go.
So for those who read this blog, I’ll outline how I blew up the world. I don’t do this in the book, The Old Man and the Wasteland. So, here’s how it all went down…
We start with a new 9/11.
A terrorist cell manages to poison most of lower Manhattan with a dirty bomb and then a Mumbai-style ambush against first responders. After a week, the last of the terrorists have been killed and the casualties are enormous and mounting, due to radiation sickness. Manhattan is finished and a global capital is effectively terminated.
An American President, politically moderate before the attack, shifts wildly to the militant-right as the nation calls for a bloodletting. American forces airstrike three middle-eastern capitals. Let’s go with Damascus, Tripoli, and Tehran. An American expeditionary force lands in North Africa with the intent of a Sherman’s March to the Sea-style invasion in an effort to devastate the Muslim world.
Mid-invasion, a charter airliner flashing the correct Homeland Security transponder codes, explodes at high altitude over the Northern Hemisphere of the Unites States. The powerful EMP disables most everything from cell phones to toasters to early warning radar detection systems (Unless they happened to be switched off at the time of the pulse.) Within hours the city of Dallas experiences a high yield, low altitude nuclear explosion delivered by terrorist cells operating out of Mexico and piloting drone aircraft.Help Wanted
The next day, it’s Seattle.
Miami.
Pittsburgh.
For the next two weeks, a city a day is destroyed by drone-piloted, nuclear weapon carrying aircraft. The bombs are mostly low yield but there are some medium-yield bombs.
Emergency services are strained and collapse.
American citizens abandon their cities en masse.
A coalition of Muslim countries announce that the drone strikes, funded and powered by Chinese technology stolen from U.S. developers, will continue until The American Army, currently driving toward Saudi Arabia, surrenders completely.
The President of the United States authorizes a full scale nuclear strike by bomber aircraft against all the major capitals of the Middle East. Bombers receive their codes and commence their attack.
A Chinese fleet preemptively strikes the Northwestern United States. The President authorizes the use of T-LAN nuclear ordinance to repel the invasion.
China launches her entire nuclear arsenal in response to the loss of her fleet.
America retaliates with all her silo-based nuclear weapons.
Russia invades Central and Western Europe. Nuclear weapons are exchanged by France, England, and Germany against targets on their own soil and in Russia.
Pakistan and India exchange nuclear weapons.
News and information, accurate facts, a clear winner in any conflict is beyond determination. The world is beset by raging wildfires, disease, and starvation at heretofore unimagined levels. Within months, months of darkness due to the ash cloud that surrounds the earth, a mini ice age descends across much of the planet. A two year nuclear winter ensues.
Pictured from space by the few remaining Satellites that still circle the planet, the Earth is much the same. Except that it is completely dark on the sunless side of the terminator. Gone are the lights of cities and civilization that once burned in the night. Only the occasional large-acreage forest fire, burning out of control, can be seen in the night.
Thirty-eight years later, a survivor considered Seventy-Eight days unlucky, departs his village at dawn. He will either find something of use to his village or never return. His only companions are the words and wisdom of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Thus begins...
The Old Man and the Wasteland
http://amzn.to/1INZ1HC
And that’s where readers of PA find the sweet spot…
They want the world turned upside down, shaken not stirred and served into a cracked martini glass at a roadside fortress gas station where everyone wears leather, drives souped-up Dodge Chargers and carries a shotgun. Maybe. Or at least some of them do.
But first we’ve got to depart the regular gas station, and that 44 oz. Big Gulp we can have any time we want. Or, life as we currently know it. To do that, the PA writer needs to set the stage. The opening act is the final act. Or simply put, the world’s got to go.
So for those who read this blog, I’ll outline how I blew up the world. I don’t do this in the book, The Old Man and the Wasteland. So, here’s how it all went down…
We start with a new 9/11.
A terrorist cell manages to poison most of lower Manhattan with a dirty bomb and then a Mumbai-style ambush against first responders. After a week, the last of the terrorists have been killed and the casualties are enormous and mounting, due to radiation sickness. Manhattan is finished and a global capital is effectively terminated.
An American President, politically moderate before the attack, shifts wildly to the militant-right as the nation calls for a bloodletting. American forces airstrike three middle-eastern capitals. Let’s go with Damascus, Tripoli, and Tehran. An American expeditionary force lands in North Africa with the intent of a Sherman’s March to the Sea-style invasion in an effort to devastate the Muslim world.
Mid-invasion, a charter airliner flashing the correct Homeland Security transponder codes, explodes at high altitude over the Northern Hemisphere of the Unites States. The powerful EMP disables most everything from cell phones to toasters to early warning radar detection systems (Unless they happened to be switched off at the time of the pulse.) Within hours the city of Dallas experiences a high yield, low altitude nuclear explosion delivered by terrorist cells operating out of Mexico and piloting drone aircraft.Help Wanted
The next day, it’s Seattle.
Miami.
Pittsburgh.
For the next two weeks, a city a day is destroyed by drone-piloted, nuclear weapon carrying aircraft. The bombs are mostly low yield but there are some medium-yield bombs.
Emergency services are strained and collapse.
American citizens abandon their cities en masse.
A coalition of Muslim countries announce that the drone strikes, funded and powered by Chinese technology stolen from U.S. developers, will continue until The American Army, currently driving toward Saudi Arabia, surrenders completely.
The President of the United States authorizes a full scale nuclear strike by bomber aircraft against all the major capitals of the Middle East. Bombers receive their codes and commence their attack.
A Chinese fleet preemptively strikes the Northwestern United States. The President authorizes the use of T-LAN nuclear ordinance to repel the invasion.
China launches her entire nuclear arsenal in response to the loss of her fleet.
America retaliates with all her silo-based nuclear weapons.
Russia invades Central and Western Europe. Nuclear weapons are exchanged by France, England, and Germany against targets on their own soil and in Russia.
Pakistan and India exchange nuclear weapons.
News and information, accurate facts, a clear winner in any conflict is beyond determination. The world is beset by raging wildfires, disease, and starvation at heretofore unimagined levels. Within months, months of darkness due to the ash cloud that surrounds the earth, a mini ice age descends across much of the planet. A two year nuclear winter ensues.
Pictured from space by the few remaining Satellites that still circle the planet, the Earth is much the same. Except that it is completely dark on the sunless side of the terminator. Gone are the lights of cities and civilization that once burned in the night. Only the occasional large-acreage forest fire, burning out of control, can be seen in the night.
Thirty-eight years later, a survivor considered Seventy-Eight days unlucky, departs his village at dawn. He will either find something of use to his village or never return. His only companions are the words and wisdom of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Thus begins...
The Old Man and the Wasteland
http://amzn.to/1INZ1HC
