Post Apocalyptic novel

[ADAM500]

Hello everyone,
I've wanted to write a post apocalyptic story for a long while, I wanted to avoid nuclear war as the reason because of the amount of time until it would be safe and how would people survive until then etc... and I want the story to include people dealing with it while it was happening so I've decided I'm going to go with the plague method. An infection or virus epidemic starts to whittle down the world population, some people seem to be immune and no one can figure out why. Are they actually immune? or are they just harder to infect and they're on borrowed time? I think this would be one of the things keeping the reader interested, will they find out if they are immune or not, will a cure be produced. The story will follow characters from the beginning, dealing with losing loved ones, the panic and the break down of society. I'm toying with the idea of flashing forward part the way through to eerie, empty cities, only home to scattered survivors, people doing everything they can to survive, protecting themselves from other survivors now that there are no laws, just survival of the fittest.

I would love to hear some ideas from people, helps look at it from other points of view, helps with ideas that i wouldn't of thought of.

What infection/virus would you choose? Would it be a new unknown infection/virus?

I appreciate any replies this post gets

Thanks

 

[David Evil Overlord]

You would probably need a long incubation period (the time between infection and symptoms showing) so air travel can spread it globally before quarantine is put in place.

Or, something that comes back again. One of the childhood diseases (measles? chicken pox?) results in shingles decades later - the virus has lain dormant in the body all that time. Try quarantining that.

Or you need a flu carried by migrating birds, a flu that can jump species to humans. Again, hard to make migrating birds go through passport control and quarantine.

 

[ADAM500]

You would probably need a long incubation period (the time between infection and symptoms showing) so air travel can spread it globally before quarantine is put in place.

Or, something that comes back again. One of the childhood diseases (measles? chicken pox?) results in shingles decades later - the virus has lain dormant in the body all that time. Try quarantining that.

Or you need a flu carried by migrating birds, a flu that can jump species to humans. Again, hard to make migrating birds go through passport control and quarantine.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah air travel seems like the best option. I like the bird idea, a lot harder to control and stop it. Thanks

 

[Kerrybuchanan]

Just a thought here. I find if I discuss too many of my plot ideas with others before I write them I gradually lose the drive to actually write. It's like all the excitement of first thinking up new stuff gets sucked away.

It might just be me, but I'd feel bad if I didn't say it.

 

[ralphkern]

Kerry, agreed. I find to a certain extent I can start to suffer Paralysis by Analysis. Sometimes I spend so long working through an idea, by the time it comes to actually writing it... I'm bored of it.

But saying that, sometimes it's good to bounce of people, especially when it's a subject that's at the edge of your own knowledge base.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Hi Adam,

For a longer time period piece, there could be a disease that causes permanent sterility - what would happen to society if (we knew) there was no hope? Such an idea was explored in P.D. James' The Children of Men however I don't know if it was a disease that caused humans to stop reproducing in the book.

Another book you may want to have a look at, for a different disease dynamic, there is Frank Herbert's (Yes, he of Dune fame) The White Plague which is essentially about a molecular biologist who after a traumatic event, loses his mind, and cooks up an engineered disease that only kills females. So the male population in this case become the unwitting carriers.

I know these are two ideas that are in others books, but I think it is always interesting when developing your plot to see how others have riffed on the general idea.



@kerry - yes I'm the same. My unwritten rule is in fact not to talk about it with anyone till the first draft is done! Means I can irritate friends and family, but there are some good reasons for keeping stumm as you point out.

@ralphkern - oddly I get the opposite, researching seems to 'charge the batteries' for me. I think it is because I am researching via the characters and plots, rather than the setting and the 'ideas'. e.g. to take a recent example on the forum about future money, I could have asked what sort of money my WiP's society uses...but in fact the plot barely touches on money, or any character using it (I think I have one scene where a character is sent out to buy something from a market, but the scene is nothing at all to do with shopping!). So actually, I've just left it alone. Saves on a lot of research

But I will go far in research when I think its necessary, say into trying to understanding the dynamics of quark interactions in atomic nuclei, what colour should the sky of this alien world really be or what are the interesting implications of the social order I've come up with... but it is very likely to 'loop round' and generate all sorts of scene ideas and narrative moments - and this generally always fires up to get to write. (It also means that I know when to stop researching - it's when I have the plot all looking as if it's complete and set up!)

 

[Nick B]

Just a thought here. I find if I discuss too many of my plot ideas with others before I write them I gradually lose the drive to actually write. It's like all the excitement of first thinking up new stuff gets sucked away.

It might just be me, but I'd feel bad if I didn't say it.

I agree Kerry, too much talk before I start and I end up not starting. Nothing wrong with people asking if it helps them work, but for me it's a motivation killer.

 

[Dennis E. Taylor]

I just published a post-apocalyptic novel. I used Yellowstone instead of plague, but hey, as long as society collapses, it's all good.

My only advice would be to make sure that you have some big-picture stuff in there. Too many disaster stories end up concentrating only on a small group of people dealing with the fallout. Done that way, the method of disaster becomes interchangeable.

 

[Deep Space Nina]

Probably you should read "The Fifth Wave" by Rick Yancey to get inspired. It is a very modern book on such a scenario. Mankind has to survive one desaster after the next (everyone is called "a wave"), one of them is a deasease spread by birds.

 

[ShotokanXL]

The Passage by Justin Cronin.

Be hard to do a different approach to the disease apocalypse.
Watch 12 Monkeys too.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

One of the things about the dystopian novel I'm currently working on that I like so much, is the way the society breaks down. In my case hundreds of millions of angels arrive (not the second coming) and they're nasty and sort of fleshy rather than divine. Think Italian sixteenth century society with the Medicis and the other families, (the Borgias of course) suddenly arriving en mass. Wings and swords against guns etc. What follows of course are wars (civil) and anarchy, lawlessness, infrastructure failure, starvation and all the rest. And I love just working out why each system fails, how it fails, and what people replace it with. Also what systems they must absolutely save at all costs.

Cheers, Greg.