Post-Apocalypse Fiction in A Time of Apocalyptic Non-Fiction

Posted On April 10, 2020

Is now really the best time to write a post-apocalyptic novel?

It is if you know what you are doing.

And as a writer, let me assure you – I know what I’m doing.

The sad fact is that we already live in a post-apocalyptic world.  Several of them, to be precise.  Our civilization is built upon the bones of Egyptian and Babylonian and Greek and Roman and French and British Empires.  These United States of America are also built directly on the bones of at least one, if not two or three empires.  The mound builders.  The teeming hordes of natives wiped out by pre-Columbian arrival plagues.  It happens all the time.  Sooner than expected, we’ll be tasked with finding a path out of the relative doom that follows the American Empire.

And fiction can help us do that.

If it is the right kind of fiction.

I’ve already written one PA novel.  You may have read it.  If so, you would know that it isn’t about the miseries of life after a golden age, but about the struggle to build a new golden age.  It’s the story of boys becoming men, and their culture rising from infancy to youth. Like all of my novels, it is an adventure that plumbs deeper questions along the journey from one thrill to the next.  Like my next novel, it is more about the recovery than the disease.

That is the kind of story the world needs these days.  A reminder that we live in a world of cycles, and that as the sun sets on one civilization, it rises on another.

Have a little faith in God and your fellow man.

We’re going to be okay.

And if you trust me, I can show you how.