Young Writers Society

with all of the movies coming out, what is your opinion on books set in the world after the fall of civilization/man?

I think it's fascinating. I haven't really seen any of the movies, but I read Cormack McCarthy's The Road and I loved it, and since then I've been sort of longing to write one myself. But it's rapidly becoming a cliche, and the more people see/read of it the more the realize how impossible it is. I think the next trend in this vein will be war stories, or stories about people living in a war zone.

I've actually read the road, and I saw the movie last night, and I really enjoyed both. Most of the post apocalyptic stories I've read tend to cover up all the inhumane things that would be happening everywhere, but the Road reveled in it, and I thought it was an interesting change of pace.

I do agree that it would be easy to make a cliche, as the themes will always be the same, but the thing about the apocalypse is you never know what comes after, so you can easily create a very interesting world, and it provides ample opportunity to show the real side of people, both good and bad.

Im actually writing a story(or about to write) about a post apocalyptic world where the war that destroyed it is still going on, so I have to agree with your last statement.

I'd like to see someone try giving us a post apocalyptic world that turns out better than the pre apocalyptic world. I've never seen it done (but my familiarity with this type of story isn't very great, I admit) and I think it would be interesting. But that's just me.

Some of my favorite stories are set in a post-apocalyptic world. A Canticle for Saint Lebowitz might be my all-time favorite (about a group of monks preserving knowledge after a nuclear war), but The Road is simply brilliant. There's also movies like Mad Max and (to an extent) On The Beach (both set in Australia by the way) that use the setting of a post-apocalyptic world to great effect.

But most of the time, I think it's a cheap way to make a story seem cool. There's a hundred Mad Max clones out there, and each is terrible. And then there are movies like the Postman and Waterworld which are painful to watch. Books tend to do better, though.

So overall, I like the setting, but you still need to have a good story.

Most settings can be used as cheap ways to make stories seem more cool, I don't think it's limited to the post-apocalyptic. Having said that, it's obvious P-A stories are trendy right now. I think that reflects the darker, grim, cynical society of today -- it's coming across in every genre of fiction, in every medium, and pop culture as a whole. That has to do with the climate of fear, spite, hatred and war that has pervaded the mass media and society since 9/11 -- which isn't to say that event was the cause of, but rather the product of something that had lain beneath the surface for some time. Of course, it's been heightened since then.

Add to that climate change and our general increasing fears about the progress of our civilisation, our continual questioning of who we are and where we are heading, if anything we do has meaning, etc -- well, it's no wonder post-apocalyptic fiction has come to the fore. No matter how grim it is, we are comforted most of all by that single word 'post' -- it gives us a change, right? No matter what the apocalypse is. Unless of course, it's the biblical kind, in which case we're all screwed, haha.

In any case, I despite the use of cliche. There really is no such thing. There's good writing and bad writing. Feel free to label bad writing as cliche, it generally is, but ideas in and of themselves aren't bad -- it's all in the execution.