Years before the covid pandemic began, author Naomi Kritzer wrote the charming, emotionally genuine short story "So Much Cooking," which was a pandemic log through the eyes of a cooking blog. The premise is that the author is a home cooking blogger raising her kids, and then a pandemic hits--and bit by bit she's feeding not only her own, but her sister's kids, some neighbors' kids, and so on, in a situation of pandemic lockdown and food shortages.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

I recommend both stories. They're uplifting in a way that a lot of what I see lately isn't. They're a bit of a panacea for constant fearmongering about intracommunity violence and grinding hatefulness. We can be good to each other, if we try.

Concept: TV show where the initial viewpoint character is a cyborg mutant from a dystopian post-apocalyptic future who’s come back in time to prevent said apocalypse, except they succeed in like the second episode and the rest of the show is just a fish-out-of-water comedy about them adapting to early 21st Century society.

… or so it appears, until about episode five, where another time-travelling weirdo from a different dystopian post-apocalyptic future arrives, and after much confusion, ends up teaming up with the first character to prevent that apocalypse, too.

The show continues in this vein for several iterations, eventually accumulating an ensemble cast of temporally displaced whatsits from futures that no longer exist. None of the saving-the-future bits ever occupy more than a single episode, with the rest of the show being taken up with shit like an entire episode about an eight-foot-tall transhuman cyborg spending all day stuck in line at a bank.

There needs to be some kind of Terminator-esque antagonist who shows up with the intentions of ensuring that some dystopian apocalypse happens. While initially it seems like the show’s taking a More Serious Turn,™ they degenerate over the next few episodes (or just one episode) into being the sitcom kind of arch-nemesis where nothing escalates beyond incessant barbed insults.

Essential roles:

There was something bothering me about zombie/post-apocalyptic stuff that I couldn’t explain until this and last year

That borderline (if not blatant) social darwinism of you have to be incredibly fit and ruthless to survive

When really a lot of it is communicative teamwork, resourcefulness, and not succumbing to fear/paranoia. Fitness obviously helps, but it being the most important thing glances over so many others needed for human survival.

I feel like we need to see a lot more fiction exploring this. Because I think when people just hear it, it doesn’t fit with the image that fiction’s been building in their heads. “How are you gonna work together when supplies are short and everyone wants to kill you?” “How do you work together when you don’t know who might be turning into a zombie?”

But show how it works, show people working together to survive, and it feels intuitively right. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Each of my neighbors has different supplies and tools and knowledge, so if we work together we will survive better.

I recommend Cory Doctorow’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (yes, title deliberately borrowed from Poe) as a great example of the opposite of this. Rich yuppies think they’re going to ride out the apocalypse in a bunker. They refuse to share supplies with anyone else or cooperate with anyone outside. The end result is simultaneously depressing and satisfying. Like… you saw it coming but you kinda hoped the characters would get their heads out of their asses in time.

So there’s a reason that popular zombie franchises like the walking dead tend to peter out (in both the games and tv) and that’s that the writers just will not let communities grow. They’re so committed to the post-apocalyptic dystopia vibe they shoot themselves in the foot by forcing society to remain impausibly splintered and nonadaptive.

Which I think is really sad, because it means there are whole genres of zombie lit that never get explored. If you live long enough, zombies are an inherently manageable problem, but they’re gonna change how you run a society, and that’s interesting. And the collapse and regrowth of society is also gonna change a lot of stuff and *that’s even MORE interesting.*

Like, hey, instead of a 6 years in everything is exactly the same, what about scattered, fortified communities that cooperate and exchange resources. You can still do suspenseful zombie action based around them having to run supplies through zombie-infested territory, and what happens if the armored trucks break down midway and the urgent medical delivery still needs made. Now you’ve got Balto, but zombies.

(Wait, I wasn’t implying you’d capture and harness a bunch of dangerous zombies to pull your sled of medical supplies, but NOW I am.)

Or, hey– what would a serial killer murder mystery story look like in a world where also zombies happen. The bodies would get up and walk away! And maybe also kill people! Your crime scene would be a MESS. How are you going to detective that, hm?

you guys want Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series, which deals with the way society rebuilt itself around the enormous ongoing trauma of a fullscale zombie uprising and an ongoing situation of, people and any large mammal still do turn into zombies. safety checks, constant blood scans, paranoiac cleanliness and airlocks and no windows on the ground floor and daredevil livestreamers who go out into unsecured territory and poke the zombies with a stick on camera for fun.

it’s a very good series, if you like thoughtful horror and are sick to (un)death of manly man macho boy zombie stories that are all about the fighting and nothing to do with rebuilding.

Another point to make: Romero’s original movies were all, basically, gesturing at this point. While all of them end in failure, it’s egotism and reckless violence that CAUSES those failures, and the people who survive aren’t the “strongest” or “fittest” or “most ruthless” like in more modern stuff, but rather the ones who work together, plan, and work for the best of the group(save those who are killed by the assholes to make a point about the fucked up values of our racist violence-worshiping society, like Ben in Night of the Living Dead).

why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?

something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.

if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.

i am not a scientist or an engineer, i’m just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.

radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustion’s trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years you’re going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.

what i’m saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing ‘little house on the prairie’ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because that’s going to be a lot of people’s main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.

nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what i’m saying. let’s stop writing the No Tech World scenario.

the thing *I* get mad about is no one goes and fixes up any of the hundreds of thousands of airplanes lying around, or even puts together any new ones. like the big fucking stumbling block for all those thousands of years for humans seemed to just be no one managed to combine the idea for a propeller with an engine that would spin it fast enough. but now the genie is thoroughly out of the bottle: drawings of planes have the propeller on it. we will remember that the secret to airplanes is smallish airfoil wings and a very very fast propellor (or three) for a thousand years, until all the books and drawings and planes themselves have decayed away. 

like yeah you couldn’t make commercial jetliners in your garage, but if you camped out in an old airfield, you could probably bang together some kind of working franken-cessna. 

I have an uncle who got bored and built a flyable franken-cessna in his garage a few years ago based upon his knowledge as an automotive worker so you really don’t need to be a specialized aeronautics expert to build a plane. You just gotta be able to stop your dog’s weird anti-aircraft vendetta long enough to put it together.

but yeah, the electricity thing bugs me so much. Solar panels are everywhere these days. It isn’t super hard to set up small wind turbines. But! the thing that bugs me the most is the assumption that the whole power grid of a continent would just fall apart all at once and never get back up and running (assuming your apocalypse doesn’t explicitly state why that happened).

like look at the 2003 Northeast Blackout in North America. Cascading failures sent about 250 power plants offline. But even in areas hit by the blackout there were pockets that were fine. Either they had local power generation or they caught on to what was happening and separated from the grid before it hit them. Or they got back up and running the same night. And it didn’t expand beyond the northeast area because the whole of north america isn’t connected to each other. You could have something hit the east coast and the west coast but Quebec and Texas would be there happily flipping everyone off as they basked in their separate grids.

And! different types of power generation are going to have different levels of protection. A solar farm probably has a fence that will keep out the local hooligans. A wind farm is just fuck off tall and leaves it to sheer height to stop people from fucking with it. Hydroelectric dams depends on how big it is, could be dedicated armed security, could be the two dudes on duty to run the turbine that day who’re just annoyed they’re missing lunch. Nuclear has an entire department who’s sole purpose is to fuck you up and they are very bored and would like to have a reason to use the armoured truck. So yeah, you can’t just walk into most of these places with the intent to “destroy the grid” or if you can walk into them people are going to be like, why is that random dude out there literally tilting at windmills maybe someone should stop him.

Also, I am always disappointed when north american authors forget that ARES (amateur radio emergency services) exists. It’s a bunch of local volunteers who are super into radio but also they will drop everything and head into disaster zones to run emergency communications. Your cell phone might not work, your internet might never come back on, but buddy down the road has access to a  radio and a can do attitude.

some fantastic additions here!

and to everyone who was like “you can’t use your devices directly off a turbine” oh my god i knooooow, did you think my post was a tutorial? you can do the farming part of the postapocalypse. please leave electricity to people who know there are reference materials.

I collected a bunch of “haha I don’t have 2020 vision” “oh God not like that” posts

I wouldn’t mind a sequel to this post 🤣

I have kept coming back to this post to see the reblogs, so I can give you the ones other people collected all in one place:

This one I actually found myself!

And I don’t think that this counts, but it still has the beautiful “Ah, fuck” vibes the rest of the post does:

And let’s not forget the cursed “Supernatural GIF Perfectly Describes 2020″ one:

@ferrousferrule:  You said you were looking for more and going through the reblogs, right? In which case this isn’t going to be of much use to you, but still. Just in case it is. :)

I just knew having a tag for these would come in handy

Concept: an apocalyptic or post apocalyptic tv show centred on a group of disabled protagonists

Must include:

-enough details about how they survive that no one can call it “unrealistic”

-mental and physical disabilities 

-a character who isn’t necessarily contributing to the survival of the group, but is not abandoned or looked down upon

-at least one character whose disability is actually less of a problem for them now that the world is ending/ended (example: autistic character who used to be constantly overstimulated but no longer is)

Optional features:

-abled person says “the only disability in life is a bad attitude” and gets told where to stuff it

-creatively weaponized mobility aids/assistive devices

-character who abled people think isn’t worth helping because of their disability, but actually has at least one skill essential to the survival of the group

-every time an abled person says something ignorant, all present disabled people look into the camera like they’re on the office 

- character who only survived the initial apocalyptic event because they had an assistive device  which just so happened in that one circumstance to give them an advantage over everyone else

-the abled camp wearing rags and eating meat on sticks cooked over a crude fire. pans over to our heroes and they have perfect clothes, a variety of food and also music.

“what? how did you do that?” “well, jane’s special interest is the medieval production of cloth and, like 8 of us can sew. Turns out those of us who can’t go out much develop a LOT of hobbies.”

A character who scares everyone when a zombie bites them but literally every one of their limbs are amputated.

“They…. they bit Gina.”

*Gina pulls of prosthetic arm* “It’s ok guys! They just got my decoy.”

(vibrates at the speed of sound) 

I love this a normal amount

Defying Doomsday is an anthology of apocalypse fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists, proving it’s not always the “fittest” who survive – it’s the most tenacious, stubborn, enduring and innovative characters who have the best chance of adapting when everything is lost. In stories of fear, hope and survival, this anthology gives new perspectives on the end of the world, from authors Corinne Duyvis, Janet Edwards, Seanan McGuire, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Stephanie Gunn, Elinor Caiman Sands, Rivqa Rafael, Bogi Takács, John Chu, Maree Kimberley, Octavia Cade, Lauren E Mitchell, Thoraiya Dyer, Samantha Rich, and K L Evangelista.

*reblogs this version again in case you haven’t seen it*

Obscure Modern Monsters - The Lobsterpocalypse

It is nigh.

https://abookofcreatures.com/2018/02/15/obscure-modern-monsters-the-lobsterpocalypse/

there was a company at the tea festival selling mushroom “wellness” tea.

I took a small sip of one blend.

i read the ingredients on the box.

> shitake > blah > blah whatever > cordyceps

me: can you please dump this cup out now thank you

the lady was like oh no it’s totally ok!!! it’s VEGAN cordyceps!! we grow it without the caterpillars!

THAT IS NOT THE OBJECTION I HAVE TO THIS INGREDIENT.

omg this is the perfect wtf start to a zombie apocalypse novel.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The figure in the video leans forward, idly propping their chin on one hand and gesturing expansively through the air with the other. The movement encompasses the warehouse around them. The cracked and oil stained cement floor, the weak sunlight filtering down on purposefully moving groups of people from high windows. The doors barricaded with two cargo vans, upon which stand several sentries armed with rifles.

“D. Quintero here, location… Eh, fuck if I know. Somewhere in Nevada. Edge of the desert. The creepy crawlies don’t like temperature extremes much, so we’re as safe here as we can be, probably. Home sweet home for now. It’s not much, but it’s defensible, and we have roof access to set up the solar panels, and we scored big time, food wise. Entire crates of canned soup. I haven’t had Campbell soup in years. By choice, before all of this.”

There is a flurry of movement and raised voices, too far away to be comprehensible, and the figure turns for a moment, then snorts and faces the camera again.

“Just Leigh and Courtney being assholes again. Anyway, since we’ve got the power, and I’ve been carting around this Go Pro like a fool for the past year, I thought, why not set up a kind of video diary thing, for posterity. So if humanity actually survives this fucking mess, there’s a record of from someone who knows at least part of the beginning. I’ll write it down too, but I always liked the video blogging.”

The person pauses for a moment, a pensive look scrunching their face a little, before they smile sardonically.

“I think we all expected it to be the government that kicked it off. I mean, that’s mostly the way all the fictional ones started. Apocalypses, I mean.” They pause to take a long drink of some kind of brothy soup in a giant mug shaped like a cat head. After a moment they continue, gesturing again, this time with the half full mug.

“The governments are the ones with the suuuuper sekrit lab and stuff, right? And America at least had that surreal pentagon planned and approved zombie apocalypse scenario they published.”

The person runs a hand through their short, slightly grubby looking hair and shoots the most deadpan, dead inside, nothing-will-ever-shock-me-again look to grace a human face directly at the camera.

“But no, I shit you not, it was the vegans.”