The latest "Robot Hugs" is so damned on-point.

[capri0mni]

I just have to share:

Apocalyptic (content warning for rape, violence and misogyny tropes common in fiction)

Comments

[alatefeline]

Yyyyeah.

[capri0mni]

Seriously? The genre I want?

The post-Post-Apocalypse: One, maybe two, hundred years after the grittily grim-dark, to show the results of a fully functioning society that's been intentionally rebuilt by the survivors.

[siliconshaman]

You know, I'm tempted to write that. Just as a f**k you to all the other god-awful hacks out there writing shitty sci-fi apocalyptic soft-porn

[alatefeline]

Yes! I would enjoy that as well. I enjoy the hints of it I sometimes see in 'marooned in time' fiction and such, but nowhere have I read it flowering as fully as I want it to. Le Guin comes close on worldbuilding, but she's doing utopia/dystopia and fully-built other worlds, not post-apocalypse per se. And some of Octavia Butler's stuff might fit, if it weren't for the alien/superhuman element, but that's pretty prominent. It does seem like, genre wise, there's a gap between 'survivors in the ashes' and 'in our world, we only distantly recall the era of...' that needs filling. Although actually...I think 'Dreamsnake' (Vonda McIntyre) qualifies; those characters are still building up from their apocalypse, but their societies are well-realized and have taken a plausible group of paths diverging from now-plus-nuking, with some elements of intentional societal structuring (both good and not) visible. Which maybe says something about why it's perennially held up as fresh and groundbreaking, over forty years on.

Hmmmmm....

[capri0mni]

Please do!

I came close, some 9 years ago, or so, for NaNoWriMo. My protag was a "mortal vampire" -- a person who needed raw blood to survive, but who was thoroughly non-supernatural -- who lived surrounded by a community of people who believe in the literal reality of immortal, demonic, vampires.

I therefore needed a society that was simultaneously scientifically advanced enough to help a very fragile child survive to adulthood, and had enough (sane) people to form an entire social order around a detailed belief in angels and demons.

So I placed an apocalypse in my deep backstory, in order to wipe our current scientific/spiritual schema off the slate, and had the two groups grow out of different social responses to the historical events.

Then, I placed my story far enough past the collapse of the old society to have the two cultures living in uneasy proximity with each other in a city.

(My protagonist was not an immortal demon, but he played one on the streets ;-)).

But I was going through grief/depression at the time, and my protagonist barely managed to get outside 'his' obsessive/depressive thoughts (out of 50,000 words, Chapter One took something like 40,000...)

[capri0mni]

Thanks for the recommendation!

[alatefeline]

Thank you for reminding me to check Robot Hugs! (Although I do that almost daily in spite of knowing the comic won't have updated that often...but still.)

[capri0mni]

You're welcome!