How To Make an Apocalypse

[Graviator]

This thread is a discussion of building fictional apocalypses in general rather than an attempt to construct a specific timeline.

In the beginning of the genre, there was a flood that swept away civilization and left only a few survivors and their livestock to repopulate the land. Then came the great wars between good and evil (or evil and other-evil) that would overturn all the kingdoms of the Earth. Afterwards came the environmental disasters threatening the very existence of humanity, nuclear war destroying the cities, and esoteric failures bringing the machinery of the industrial economy to a halt. Recently popular have been the zombie plagues that turn people into swarms of murderous monsters, and the current fad is the litRPG apocalypse that not only comes with a murderous alien invasion but renders all of humanity's technological achievements irrelevant in the face of individuals with huge quantities of numerical litRPG power.

Suppose you want to add a new doom for civilization in your next story. Are there new fates left to add to the list? Certainly. Is there anything to be gained by doing so? It depends on what the purpose of your story is. Maybe you're only interested in the aftermath, the post-apocalypse, and the nature of the disaster is irrelevant. So first you must figure out...

Why have an Apocalypse?
Apocalypses have that great literary property of displacing their protagonists from a familiar setting to an unfamiliar one, and forcing them to deal with it. Removing the society from a character is a great way to explore who they are as a person, showing their character separately from what their society forces them to be. The shock and the inappropriate behavior while adjusting are also good comedy fodder. But there are a lot of ways to do that, from a portal fantasy to foreign travel to a broken masquerade to a simple invitation. Clearly, you don't need an entire apocalypse to displace your protagonist.

Or perhaps you want to push your protagonist to the edge of survival, tearing away all of civilization's comforts and safety nets, but want to preserve his relationships. This treats the apocalypse as a character foundry, building up the protagonist through successive hardships. But, again, the disaster is just the first such hardship, and there's no need for a whole apocalypse. You could instead use a conventional, slow-built dystopia that suddenly withdraws its support. Or you could write a western, where that comfort is a train ride away but the protagonist has good reasons not to take that train. Or have a war, accomplishing both.

If you need an apocalypse and no substitute will do, it's not for what it does the characters. Rather, a necessary apocalypse is about the society that used to be, as seen after it's gone. An apocalypse takes an in-setting lie about humanity or civilization, and sweeps it aside by showing a truth. We even get the word "apocalypse" from the Greek word for "uncover", rendering the word itself as "the great uncovering". The places in the flood stories shouldn't have angered a god in their ignorance, and the survivors now know better. In the war apocalypses, including the nuclear variant, the power-for-safety bargain underlying royal/national authority is false, often with the foolish rulers bringing about the very thing they were supposed to prevent.

The pattern holds with more modern patterns, too. A zombie apocalypse changes human nature with the spontaneous formation of a parallel and very dangerous society of people-turned-zombie, and tends to test empathy in particular. A systemic collapse has prosperity or economic growth as the lie, with all of economics at fault, and exposes the benefactors of this false prosperity to true poverty. And the magical apocalypses pull the rug out from under science, falsifying its basic assumptions on how to determine truth and in the process causing various scientifically derived necessities to stop working.

Picking Your Apocalypse
Making a new apocalypse therefore starts with identifying an assumption that society makes. It doesn't need to be false in the real world, since fiction writers have the luxury of ignoring real world truth. It merely needs to be questionable, and your world-building work consists of properly questioning it. Start with the assumption at one end, the collapse event at the other, and try to fill in a chain of plausible facts to lead one to the other. Then figure out how the survivors can adjust to the newly revealed truth without the benefit of everything that followed from the lie.

Which assumption should you choose? Picking randomly works, but depending on your purpose you can do better. If you actually think society is wrong, you can weave a cautionary tale into your apocalypse. Pick a more dangerous version of your own assumption, dump it all over society to ruinous effect, but follow the survivors as a silver lining that shows life is still possible if the truth is accepted. If you want drama and are flexible on how it reflects on the real world, you have two basic options - the protagonist can either be mostly right, or mostly wrong. Either way, build your protagonist first, then pick one of your protagonist's strongly held assumptions. If you picked an assumption that's typical of the protagonist's society, she is mostly right. She hits the ground running and brings a knot of disbelieving close acquaintances with her, and that friction is your starting dose of drama fodder. If you picked an assumption the protagonist shares with society, he is mostly wrong. He has a character growth arc where a core piece of his worldview is ripped out and he must repair it under pressure, eventually coming to accept the new truth or else propping it up with a new delusion.

Or perhaps you purely want speculative fiction. Society assumes a certain thing is impossible, you invent a device that does it, and your story shows that actually doing that thing is a really, really bad idea.

Conclusion
Apocalyptic fiction is a popular genre, spawning at least a half dozen subgenres that each center on a specific kind of apocalypse. Post-apocalyptic fiction is another popular genre that deals with the same kind of events but relegates them to setting details. As a result, in both genres the apocalypse often gets treated generically, echoing previous works to make a Frankenstein's monster of composite worldbuilding. Some of the impact of the apocalypse is thereby lost. To counter that, authors should understand not just what the features of their chosen apocalypse are but why and how they're linked. And if you decide to make your own apocalypse, it's a lot easier to fill in the worldbuilding with verisimilitude if your apocalypse is grounded in a broken assumption.

 

[Arkalest]

Aight, so to start you need to find a buncha folks with a poor grasp of ethics. You don't want fully blown sociopaths or psychopaths, no. What you want is sheltered people who have trouble with foresight. Not stupid, no, but rather, I'd say..Not self aware. Then you're going to need an in with a state-run orphanage, a museum, and a pharmacy. Money isn't necessary at the beginning/to begin with, but if you can hook some middle-class gnorri to foot the bill? Go for it.

Now, the next part involves Jonestown and the Middle-East, so...Wait. oh.

not that kind of thread. My bad.