#postapocalyptic fiction

[technicallyclassyperfection]

Via print:

[catgirl-kaiju]

in my post-apoc setting, pre-war automated fast food restaurants have become deadly ambush predators that trap any and all animal life to turn into meat that they can serve to customers. some serve customers and then "recycle" the customers after they've finished eating, others only trap lone customers when there's no one else around to see, and some pick customers at random to use for meat. but some folks have also learned that they are relatively safe to eat from if you keep them supplied with a steady source of meat and help the rogue restaurants trap other animals to use for meat.

anyway, i'm normal

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Debbie Urbanski’s ‘After World’

Debbie Urbanski's debut novel After World is an unflinching and relentlessly bleak tale of humanity's mass extinction, shot through with pathos and veined with seams of tragic tenderness and care:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/After-World/Debbie-Urbanski/9781668023457

I first encountered Urbanski in "An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried," an experimental short story on Motherboard's brilliant Terraform science fiction portal:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwvgeq/an-incomplete-timeline-of-what-we-tried

"Incomplete Timeline" is a list of climate remediation steps "working back from human extinction," like "increased military fortification of national, provincial, and state borders," "the founding of several utopias," and "redefine the word wilderness."

These items begin with a climax, or perhaps an anticlimax: "The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus."

This is the jumping off point for After World, which expands this final item to the action of a wrenching tale whose backstory is the list's remainder. Sen Anon – the story's semi-protagonist – is 18 years old when the world learns that every person alive has been sterilized and so the human race is living out its last years.

The news triggers a manic insistence that this is a good thing – long overdue, in fact – and the perfect opportunity to scan every person alive for eventual reincarnation as virtual humans in an Edenic cloud metaverse called Gaia. That way, people can continue to live their lives without the haunting knowledge that everything they do makes the planet worse for every other living thing, and each other. Here, finally, is the resolution to the paradox of humanity: our desire to do good, and our inevitable failure on that scor8e.

And so the Earth is converted to a place of mass suicides, as people gurn and mug while boarding airplanes filled with explosives so they can go out in a literal blaze of glory. The food will run out soon, and the government makes sure everyone has a suicide pill for the day when the hunger grows too intense. Not everyone is lucky enough to get on one of the suicide flights, and, being eager to see themselves off before they harm the planet further, just hang themselves in the garage or jump off a roof. They are counted as heroes, but also nuisances, because disposing of the bodies is a lot of work.

But some people – young people – are given a mission to live on for as long as possible. These are the observer/recorders who are charged to spend the last days of the species closely watching the return of the natural world, the seeing off of humanity, and to write it all down in longhand in a succession of notebooks that are taken away by drones. This is part of the story humanity cooks up for itself about extinction being a noble choice, rather than a chaotic act born of desperation.

Sen Anon is one of these observers, and her mothers take her to a remote cabin to live out (and observe) the last of humanity's days, ensuring she is settled in and then killing themselves. After all, without them, Sen Anon's limited food supply – meagerly supplemented by drones in proportion to the quality of the observations in her notebooks – will stretch further.

Much of the novel takes the form of Sen Anon's notebook observations, countersunk with an omniscient third-person narrator who is revealed to be [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc, a software agent involved in the project to recreate all those dead humans in the Gaia metaverse.

[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very unreliable narrator, who reprograms itself through the course of the story, all the while muttering asides to itself about the theoretical basis for telling Sen's story this way. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc struggles with a supervisory AI that has been charged with overseeing all the [storyworkers], but which can't – or won't – rein in [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc as [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows more involved in Sen's life.

This experimental storytelling style (supplemented by found texts from humanity's dying, like a glossary of terms to be retired and new terms being created by a linguist who is starving to death as they complete their task) creates a contradictory narrative distance and closeness.

It's a curiously flawed omniscience that's allows Urbanski to capture the yawning, bottomless horror of the climate emergency of today and on the horizon. I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of sustained, deepening existential dread that After World created, chapter by chapter.

To sharpen this, Sen's mothers – scientists who were given exceptions to the no-child policy because their work was deemed essential to the now-abandoned project of saving humanity – are grimly supportive of the mass suicide project. When Sen's own horror creeps up on her, her mothers are sharp and often unkind, with only the smallest flashes of love and sorrow for their daughter escaping their facades, all the more vivid for their rarity.

In contrast, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows ever more sympathetic to Sen and the rest of vanished humanity. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very convincing alien with motives and perspectives that are profoundly nonhuman, and yet, the compassion and love are unmistakable.

Of After World's two protagonists, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc might be the more relatable. It takes an alien point of view to truly see humanity's flawed glory, irredeemable and irreplaceable. If you reveled in the nonhuman umwelts on display in Laura Jean McKay's 2020 debut The Animals In That Country, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc will stretch your brain and imagination in similar ways:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/27/im-a-backdoor-man/#doolittle

After World is a book that goes hard. Pitiless, merciless and relentless, it takes you to the darkest depths of climate despair and reveals the indestructible beauty at our species' core.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/18/storyworker-ad39-393a-7fbc/#digital-human-archive-project

[pocketseizure]

It’s been more than twenty years since rumors about a cursed videotape began to spread. The stories were true, and Japan is in ruins. Can those who survived the collapse of human civilization escape Sadako’s curse? Or do they seek her out instead?

"The Girl in the Screen at the End of the World" is a series of four vignettes about the last humans making their peace with the end of the world as Sadako bids a gentle goodbye to modern civilization.

1,815 words . on AO3 here . illustration by @jothroxas

[herrorgrafico]

Megafactory, a personal piece I did a while ago.

[ahmetatilakar]

Barricada /// Mama! Estoy Bien! /// https://www.artstation.com/artwork/vDrNdE

[lepospondyl]

list of things that the locked tomb series and etrian odyssey untold both have

blondes in cryogenic stasis

nerds from Library World

haughty weirdgirls who can summon Creatures, are tasked with safeguarding something mankind tried to forget, and are generally pathetic wet cats

impossibly old people with questionable morals

exploring the ruins that are a monument to humanity's sins

unstoppable giant monsters that were born as a result of making the world habitable again

a really random and small assortment of things from the modern day that are still around

[weareatomicshenanigans]

| THAT THING : THE CITY |

Welcome to our first audio-drama, "That Thing : The City" where you will discover in what kind of universe this mystery writer was living in...

Enjoy the jump in this new world!

|

A video voiced and subbed will come along each time with the simple page. Posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!

Stay tuned! 🖤

[helmort]

🔴 (FRIDAY TALE) 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑭𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒕 𝒂 𝑭𝒂𝒄𝒆

Long ago, in a forsaken countryside, there dwelled a lizard who, with each passing day, would implore the sun, "Pray tell, why does the moon prance alone amidst the myriad stars, whilst you, in contrast, fail to waltz with the clouds and winds of the earth?"

In that same distant countryside, there resided a small black dog who, with every dawn, would beseech his tail, "Why dost thou sway when I am merry, yet flee when fear grips my soul?"

And long ago, within the confines of a solitary radio station nestled deep in the heart of Wyoming, there lingered a lone man whose daily broadcast fell upon deaf ears, for the cataclysm of the last nuclear war had laid waste to all inhabitants of the world. He, the sole remaining mortal amidst a vast expanse of scarlet sands, would grasp a handful of grains each day, relinquishing them to the radioactive winds, pondering, "Why do they not heed my words?" But lo, one day, a tuatara, an ancient desert lizard, offered a whisper of wisdom, "Have you ever truly listened to their silence?" Thus, the man descended into despair, his knife carving his flesh until his form dissolved into sinew and bone. The blazing sun of the desert bore witness as his body, consumed by flames, metamorphosed into a pallid orb of skeletal remains. After seven days, the orb cracked open like an egg, giving birth not to the man he once was, but to a new being, a butterfly fashioned from dreams, desires, and the unspoken yearnings of those who love in silence. As an asteroid obliterated the corpulent effigy of a matronly figure, the newfound creature radiated with renewed vigor, soaring above the scorched earth not in search of listeners, but in pursuit of the simple joys of existence.

Long ago, a lizard perished in a lonesome countryside.

Long ago, a dog met its end in a solitary countryside.

[mutantlord]

Survival Pistol

While it’s magazine only takes ten rounds, this widely issued concealed carry sidearm was very popular among civilians in the pre-collapse era, and even more popular after things went to hell. It has a built in flashlight, compass, fire starter, knife and other items, and does accept standard 20 round mags.

Pencil art from page 200 of Excavator Monthly Compendium. https://www.mutantepoch.com

[technicallyclassyperfection]

[alchemisland]

Novena after the nuclear exchange

Using her last breath on a fickle rosary Fasting to the last Want for God’s love surpassing Even the harshest reality We look on with enmity, disguising jealousy  Red beads, readings, pleadings, to the mercy of the lady of roses Kneeling by a roadside ditch, scrying the scarred sky for divine signs If she lives through night, she sings matins, then orisons and vespers She confides to no…

[threeravenspublishing]

Need a great read for a rainy weekend? Marathon of Madness is here!

Need a great read for a rainy weekend? Marathon of Madness is here!

Written by Christopher Woods, this fast-paced action novel is packed full of action, mayhem, and destruction and is the third book in the Dead Man’s Run storyline. Jake Turner worked the road crews of the lawless lands…That was until he became the sole survivor of three separate raider attacks and was blacklisted by his employer, the Tennessee Titan Authority. When the company’s probability…

[wqebelle]

Metrofloat New York by William Quincy Belle

Amazon: Kindle and paperback

[driftlessarearev]

Motorcycle Mayhem Week: Part 2

The Man with No Name, but on a motorcycle … after the nuclear apocalypse.

Via Play MSTie for Me: Warrior of the Lost World Stats Warrior of the Lost World David Worth 1983 Riffers: Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Kevin Murphy Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Season 5, Episode 1) Premise / Genre The Man with No Name, but on a motorcycle … after the nuclear apocalypse. Also Mad Max, The Dirty Dozen, and, like, five other movies. Not so much a Spaghetti Western as a…

[lisboeta1]

The Promised Neverland - Review

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 1 by Kaiu Shirai My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was such a great surprise for me. It was recommended to me by a coworker who warned me it was a dark story. When I saw the cover I thought she was joking. But she was right. Delightfully dark and twisted, the contrast of the plot with the cuteness of the characters really works to give it an extra layer of creepiness. Just…