With a whimper....

If you have been reading the FLU SEASON Saga these past four years, you likely already know how the world ends. It's with a whimper, not a bang. As poet T. S. Eliot ends his poem "The Hollow Men":

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

I studied the poem in college, took inspiration from its bleak outlook (albeit dark inspiration, but I digress). As a fledgling science fiction aficionado in the 1970s, I believed in the nuclear holocaust version of the end. That's what we were taught throughout the 1960s, after all. And yet, in the late 1970s, with oil shortages, long gas lines, cars being switched from large domestic models to small foreign vehicles, I could easily see how this would be how the world ended: in shortages that became...well, nothing. A whimper of industry slowly fading away.

Things got better and we forgot what we'd feared. Not me. I continued to walk the talk of doom and gloom. I saw the oil crisis of the late 1970s extending until there was no petrol for anybody and we were thrown back into a pre-industrial age. Worried at the real possibility, I sought to improve my swordfighting skills and relearned how to ride a horse. But we had time. How far? I counted back to the Middle Ages (roughly 500 to 1400 A.D.) and considered how society then compared to society today. Then I flipped the years around and projected into the future by the same interval. My thesis was: If society had developed this much in a thousand years, then how much would it regress after a thousand years of decay?

Bingo! I had a story. Or at least a premise. Suppose something happened that shut down our entire industrial society? After 1000 years we would be similar to how society was 1000 years ago. Think: no petroleum refining, no electricity generation, none of the products relying on gas and electricity. Think: farming - back to ox and plow (but you'd eat that ox eventually and pull the plow yourself). It takes a year to grow tonight's dinner, I've read in doomsday and 'prepper' resources. Yet all is good and well.

Good and well if you are a writer coming up with a story. The worst things are, the better for writers. The only flaw in the proposal is that books may not be published in that dire situation. Until then, I can write about the fall of civilization. And that is exactly what I did with my FLU SEASON series, a family saga starting with the real Covid pandemic we experienced 2020-22, then taking it further - much further; several generations into the future. So far, in fact, that I can almost connect it to my once-planned and narrowly composed "fantasy" epic that is set 1000 years into the future when society does indeed resemble a medieval civilization.

Interestingly, I attempted to continue my Stefan Szekely Vampire Trilogy (Book 1 is 2014-15; Book 2 is 2027-28, and Book 3 is 2099 to 2106). I employed the next generation as the main characters, setting them further into the future. It was a technologically dense society, cyberpunk-esque, which seemed the right way to go with the story. However, I quickly became overwhelmed trying to describe such a society. I realized I was not tech savvy enough to pull it off in plausible fashion. So I abandoned the project. I'm much more comfortable with a society that simplifies rather than complicates. Without an electric grid or nuclear energy - wind and solar power is not, as of this blog, sufficient to provide most of our energy needs - there isn't much to hold society together. One need only look at a city-wide power outage to see how people react. What if it were an everyday situation? Or an entire country goes dark (e.g., Spain this month) to understand how only a few weeks of that depredation could affect a society. People would go mad, get vicious. Forget the scramble for toilet paper. And three months of being on your own? A year of it? Forever...?

So here we are: a world familiar yet falling down, becoming less and less. In my FLU SEASON Saga, THE BOOK OF MOM (1) opens the series six years into a pandemic when  Mom and her son no longer believe things will get better and flee their city for the hope of safety in the countryside. In THE WAY OF THE SON (2), everything does get worse: society has collapsed and it's every person for themselves. By DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS (3) a new society has developed, split between survivalists in the woods and those who start to rebuild cities, get a functioning electric grid up, reforming government, but through tyrannical means. 

THE BOOK OF DAD (4) takes us through the new Ideal Society that emerges on the ruins of the old nation. Our family manages to escape, settles in the western territory and gains some freedom in THE GRANDDAUGHTER (5), where the title character uses music to try to make a kinder, gentler life. By then everything is broken, the nation divided between desperate cities on the east coast and the struggling residents of the western territory, a reversion to outlaws, farmers, and tribal bands. In my forthcoming book THE GRANDSONS (6), we experience what remains of a forgotten nation as characters explore further west.

As you can see, I have a distinct philosophy regarding the future. I'm a downer. One might say I'm a Debbie Downer. I believe in degradation, in regression, in collapse. Not in amazing tech that saves us, saturating our world with all sorts of conveniences - with or without oppression, no privacy or private ownership, and other aspects suggested by Huxley and Orwell, and their imitators. No, for me it's all about entropy.

It is also easier for me to write about a 'lesser' setting, which I can handle well, than a technological overwhelming new world. In fact, I still have not upgraded my computer or its apps for years now and those corporations have threatened to cut me off.

I've started a new trilogy (Book 7), one which is set even further into the future - with even further degradation, returning ever-steadily back (ahead?) to a medieval future which will culminate in the War of the Five Princes in 3030 A.D. an important event eulogized by characters in my EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS (set in 8000 A.D.). They think of it as nearly forgotten history. It's a full-circle circle and a perfect way to end my writing career, circa 2030.

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