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 The only flaw in the proposal is that books may not be published in that dire situation.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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(C) Copyright 2010-2025 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

It can now be revealed! (The Long Game Plot)

When I was thirteen, I imagined a grand epic with a medieval setting. (I had been an avid reader of Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles around that time, full disclosure.) The story I came up with involved twin brothers, princes of the realm, who grow apart and then are forced to battle each other, winner take all. I dabbled with starting the story as a novel (when I had barely written short stories by typewriter or by hand). I quickly realized it was too big a project for me to write at that time. Sadly, I set it aside with the intention of working on it when I retired and had lots of time. (Now retirement has come....)

One major feature of my medieval epic was that the setting was in the future, around the year 3000 AD, as I determined. And the place of the story was in a collection of city-states or kingdoms formerly known as the good ol' USA. So we have the Kingdom of Chicago at war with the Kingdom of Cincinnati as the main focus, with other kingdoms coming into play, as well. From the 1970s and 80s - when I got the idea and planned it out, through my effort to get the story down in some complete form by writing it as a screenplay - I believed that after some disastrous event it would take about a thousand years for civilization to devolve to something akin to a medieval society. (I would take no responsibility for said disaster....)

[This will have been well-documented soon after my demise, I shall presume.] 

Here is the revelation part of this blog post: I've been sneaky.

In 2015-2017, when I was dared by fellow authors to write an epic fantasy, which would have to include dragons, titled EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS, I conceived of a future world - again set in what characters called "the Americus", a collection of small realms. I set my epic fantasy tale there, basically a quest where an exiled dragonslayer seeks the dragons' nesting grounds so he can wipe them out all at once and win his return home. Along the way, as fantasies tend to go, he has various encounters and meets different people. However, it comes out in pieces what occurred in the era prior to his own. Reference is made by the characters of a great war between five brothers and how the result of that war shaped the era he now found himself in. Ah hah!

Yes, folks! That same story I invented in my youth reappears as a backstory in my epic fantasy novel. The five princes consist of the twin brothers who are at odds, their two younger brothers, and an older-&-wiser cousin who may be their illegitimate brother. I borrowed my original story and put it into my 2017 novel. Scandalous, I know. Apologies!

But guess what happened next. We experience a pandemic in real life, and we know what that did to society. Yet it ended fairly soon. After initial hesitancy, I started a new novel in which I imagined an extended pandemic which would bring a lot more trouble to society. What would that be like? The characters suffer through much worse situations than most of us did, to a desperate degree, enough to make them finally flee the chaotic city. (Main character kept thinking it was about to end only to find it continuing....)

And so the FLU SEASON trilogy was born, beginning with what was expected to be a single, stand-alone, one-off novel titled The Book of Mom. In what became Book 1 of the series, a teenage autistic boy narrates what he and his never-married mother, a tuba player and music professor, do in escaping a ravaged city for the hope of survival in the countryside. Plan A doesn't work out, of course, nor does Plan B, so they have to head to a coastal island where the family has a vacation home. They will wait out the pandemic there....

So far, so good, as disaster stories go. The first book birthed a second book, forcing me to plan a trilogy. I knew by the run up to the conclusion of Book 1 that a second novel would be necessary; I wanted to know what happens next. I knew what would happen in Book 2: The Way of the Son. The autistic son is on his own in the pandemic-stricken world, fighting for survival, on a harsh journey to sanctuary. As I closed in on the conclusion of that book, I knew what Book 3: Dawn of the Daughters would be about: the next generation's story. It became a tome in itself - my second longest novel after Epic Fantasy *With Dragons - covering the end of the pandemic, the decades of lawlessness, a civil war, and the rebuilding of society, plus the reinvention of "modern" gadgets and utilities. I felt it was a bit like Gone With the Wind but set in post-apocalyptic times.

However, that reconstruction period allowed those who were in position to grab power to build a new society in the mold of an authoritarian regime that worked to repress its citizens, forcing people to believe that the pandemic never happened, like a perverted mirror of Orwell's 1984 novel. In Book 4: The Book of Dad [coming June 2024], the youngest son of the Book 3 heroine tells how the next generation of their family struggles to endure the repressive city. But, as is the case each time, another story springs forth....

Book 5, which I'm calling The Granddaughter's Tale (with a wink at Chaucer), follows the daughter of Book 4's tragic hero as she attempts to start a children's band in a small western town called Skinner Canyon, set on the edge of the wilderness. As it nears completion, I'm pleased that I've managed to keep it significantly lighter than previous novels in the series. I've borrowed a plotline from the old musical The Music Man but flipped it on its side. Later in the story, when our heroine travels east, she learns of the advancement of armies from Quebec down across Ontario and over Michigan to claim the city of Chicago and rename it Chicageaux. What? Mon Dieu! Quelle folie! You see, in that story of the twin princes, the Quebecois have indeed conquered the northern tier in the future, requiring the combined armies of the Americus to push them back in the 2900s; however, the city of Chicageaux retains its by then centuries-old name.

Over the course of the whole FLU SEASON series, we have lived through more than 130 years since the pandemic started.

And now you know the rest of the story! I have tied in once again the vast timeline of the long-planned medieval epic of my youth. This is how that timeline begins. 

Back as a teenager, amidst the on-going oil crisis, I had imagined a lack of oil destroying civilization. The idea still works: the collapse of society because of the long pandemic shuts down all industries, including drilling and refining. There is no more fuel for vehicles, as we experience in FLU SEASON Books 1 & 2. In Book 3 everyone is using what horses remain yet uneaten. In Book 4, we have reinvented electricity but its use is limited to the major cities. In Book 5, moving out west, we have even more restriction on electricity - almost as though we had returned to the 1890s.

This is how my grand timeline begins. Although I avoid stating years in the FLU SEASON series, I measure the pandemic (real and in the series) as beginning from 2020 - and six years into the pandemic, it would be 2026 when Book 1 starts. Several generations tell their stories. It is therefore around 2150 when Book 5 ends. More happens, thus preventing civilization from truly returning to what it was before the pandemic, and by the years approaching 3000 we find the land divided into city-states that battle each other over resources. My vision is thus rewarded, rekindled, and fulfilled. Now (already into my retirement), I still have the opportunity to write that youth-created novel - if I am not seen as copying G.R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, a worry which has put me off from digging into my epic. 

However, I will need something to work on in the final years lest the final years hasten to their end before I am ready.

There could be a Book 6. I have ideas - two, in fact. I might even merge them. That would take us further into the future, say another 50 years, to about 2200. That should be far enough ahead in time that I won't be tripped up by real events happening or not happening within the publication window of the book.

Anyway, happy reading and, for me, happy trail writing!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2024 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.