New Testingstan

Losonti Tokash wrote:lol this guy with a whole bunch of super powers from a spider is fine but him shooting webs is immersion breaking, glad they went with a teenager inventing something stronger than any material ever built

why not give peter parker 8 arms while we're going crazy with extra stuff

Personally my initial thoughts ran toward a small-scale personal story taking place some decades after the war, dealing with the social fallout. Maybe it would be about a cop hunting down one of the guys who was in the room when they pressed the nuclear button and is now wanted, and a theme would be where societal guilt ends and personal guilt begins, is this guy actually bad or was he just doing what was pretty much the only thing possible in that situation and is just now being used as a scapegoat because the people want somebody to blame all the misery and death that was inflicted, which is really ultimately the fault of culture and systems not individuals?

The odyssey idea is good too though.

artemas wrote:all the while wondering if his fantastical experiences are the result of delirium, radiation poisoning or just the face of the terrible new world he finds himself in

That'd be the Lotus Eater episode

Where he awaken in a world where the War didn't happen, and he's living a happy life with his family.

And he must find the will to break the illusion and return to a dying world, to be really reunited with his Family, once and for all.

And then the harder he fights to get out of the dream, the more things start get bad-trippy. Culminating with him having the impression of having awoken, finally returning home, only to find his world totally destroyed and his family dead.

Maybe make it food poisoning/fever, something like that...

What's fun with post-apocalyptic settings, is that the destruction of Civilization as we know it gives authors a lot of leeway as far as inventing weird shit and portraying weird "social experiments" goes. That's what I like with the genre, my favorite bits of the Fallout games being to see the weird shit in the Wasteland, and the societies evolving in it, alien to what we know.

It's a good way to insert some bits of "fantasy land" into what would be otherwise a really gritty hardcore realistic portrayal of mass genocide.

So, if the family dies, he should find out about it early on, and the story will then focus on his journey from tragedy to triumph.

And if you think it's edgy or clever to just make the protagonist suffer from the beginning of a story to its close, you're a fucking idiot.

The Ancient Greeks think otherwise


I mean, if we go with some sort of Greek Tragedy theme.

Though these stories' morale is "you can't fight destiny", and this is not what is being told here ; the story told being that "as long as you have Will, you can advance, survive, and maybe thrive".

So, yeah... I don't know. I just saw it as fitting that in the end, they would be reunited, if only long enough for them to perish together, in one final moment of... togetherness ? I don't know how to properly enunciate the idea...

Jung wrote:Personally my initial thoughts ran toward a small-scale personal story taking place some decades after the war, dealing with the social fallout. Maybe it would be about a cop hunting down one of the guys who was in the room when they pressed the nuclear button and is now wanted, and a theme would be where societal guilt ends and personal guilt begins, is this guy actually bad or was he just doing what was pretty much the only thing possible in that situation and is just now being used as a scapegoat because the people want somebody to blame all the misery and death that was inflicted, which is really ultimately the fault of culture and systems not individuals?

The odyssey idea is good too though.

That'd be much less depressing than my idea, and the distance from the war would allow for some interesting discussions. Maybe the MAD-tinged realpolitik 'utilitarianism' would be replaced by a sort of... I don't know. Virtue ethics, I guess? Some moral absolutism, anyway. This is assuming that society doesn't collapse outright (cause then you'd get warlords and canticle for leibowitz kung-fu-warrior-monk-professor-mathematician-farmer-teachers and whatnot).

What I find intriguing (edit: about a post-apocalyptic setting) is the opportunity to examine the failure state of a culture

I mean what sort of mind actually presses the red button? What's the thought process that goes into thinking that looks like a good idea?

It seems like a really good opportunity to examine the flaws of utopian thinking, because that's exactly the kind of mindset I can really easily imagine pressing the button. If you think you're the side of good and the others guys are the side of evil, and everything would be much better if only those evil people who oppose you were taken out of the equation ... well, from that perspective killing billions to bring about a better world starts to look disturbingly like a good bargain from a utilitarian viewpoint. Especially if the alternative is losing to the side of "evil". Untold generations of better-off humans > one generation of gigadeaths and terrible suffering, right?

I have an idea for a world in my sci fi that had a huge nuclear war, but I haven't really settled on what I want to do with the idea.

I'm thinking a decent part of the story would focus on the guy's family, much moreso than the odyssey does. A little bit Cold Mountain, except everyone dies at the end.

Oxymoron wrote:The Ancient Greeks think otherwise

If they're so great
how come they're dead

I am defeated

seriously though, I think a story about a hot nuclear war that ends on a happy note is probably missing the point
unless it was about some guys out in the middle of nowhere, then they could just about survive I guess (could even be a comedy )
but generally, the most optimistic thing would be 'facing death with dignity'.

Pretty much, yeah.


Reminds me of that two-parter telefilm about the crew of an American nuclear sub who refused to launch their nukes when the US and China nuked each other over Taïwan ; goes to Australia which hasn't been targeted ; has difficulties integrating with the locals because they are seen as those who destroyed the world ; then goes on a wild goose hunt after a signal that says "the whales have survived", to finally discover that they were misled and no, the whales haven't survived ; go back to San Francisco on the return trip to Australia, where a crew member just say fuck it and take a boat to spend his last few days in his City (strangely well preserved because apparently used a neutron bomb or something), which is the occasion to show a really relaxed view of someone who abandoned all hope and just want to rest ; return to Australia where the situation has worsened and people are starting to get sick ; to finally lose all hope when the meteological survey effort they where participating in during their trips show that the Fallouts are not going to stay segregated to the North Hemisphere, and that Australia is going to get hit by the fallouts in a few month.

It ends by the sub's Captain and her Australian lover having a drink on the beach, taking together a suicide-pill that has been mass produced by the Australian governement.

On The Beach (2000)


I remember it was very chilling, both times I saw it.

I recommend it.

even The Road ended on an optimistic note though, so its def possible

but yeah, survival is usually considered 'optimistic' in these stories

evilsoup wrote:but generally, the most optimistic thing would be 'facing death with dignity'.

If you wanted to get some optimism out of it one way of looking at it might be it would be to militarism and related ideology what the Holocaust was to anti-semitism - an event that, while horrible in itself, perhaps arguably had a silver lining in that it made a certain odious sort of thought no longer as socially acceptable by association with a great horror.

That's sort of the angle I'm thinking of going for in that post-apocalyptic world in my sci fi I mentioned; there's a general consensus of "never again!" wrt nuclear holocaust, a loose world government has been formed etc..

never again, they said


then they did it again

War.

War never Changes.

Oxymoron wrote:War.

War never Changes.

The game the same. Just got more fierce.

[/obligatory pretentious reference from The Wire]

I know it could be considered as "nerds dissecting things too much for their own good", and in direct contradiction with with the post that motivated this exchange in the first place, but I must ask :

if your world has had a "huge nuclear war" (kind of a tautology), how exactly did any kind of meaningful form of civilization survived ? I mean, enough civilization to form even the vaguest form of a world government, allowing for people to hunt other people across continental or even worldwide distances (which your idea of the policman going after the war criminal would suggest) ?

Some areas would get left out purely for political reasons; e.g., there's basically no reason for anyone to nuke anything in south america, so people would probably be able to retain some civilisation in areas there.

Oxymoron wrote:I know it could be considered as "nerds dissecting things too much for their own good", and in direct contradiction with with the post that motivated this exchange in the first place, but I must ask :

if your world has had a "huge nuclear war" (kind of a tautology), how exactly did any kind of meaningful form of civilization survived ? I mean, enough civilization to form even the vaguest form of a world government, allowing for people to hunt other people across continental or even worldwide distances (which your idea of the policman going after the war criminal would suggest) ?

I don't know, I'm kind of skeptical about nuclear war = complete collapse of civilization myself.

Admittedly, this is based less on any sort of research (though I have read a paper on the subject), and more on the feeling that civilization is tougher than the ultra-pessimistic "world ruled by nothing but petty warlords in hockey masks" scenario gives it credit for. That scenario seems to assume that 1) there will be no neutral nations or the combatants will thoroughly nuke them anyway because "fuck you too" 2) there will be no settlements with industry too insignificant to blow up 3) all industrial centers will be destroyed to the point of the equipment being mostly/entirely unsalvageable or there is no successful salvage program, 4) all political control over a territory will break down as soon as physical control breaks down i.e. the local groups in control (likely to be police, military units etc.) will not feel loyalty to the government, 5) governments will not be able to reassert control in the aftermath (I will note here that even with very primitive technology states have historically controlled large areas). I don't know how plausible I find all those assumptions.

Though really the key thing is I find the Mad Max version been there done that and a post-nuke world that didn't see a complete collapse is more interesting to me.

What I'm envisioning some decades down the road is a sort of Third World agrarian hellhole society, with islands of relatively high technology surrounded by more-or-less preindustrial countryside, and the world government being prolly something that exists more on paper than anything else ("uncooperative warlords outlaws and rebels don't count").

Come to think of it that sounds rather reminiscent of the Wild West (TM).

Overstretched gun-toting marshalls trying to restore some measure of civilized order to an unruly countryside full of gangs and warlords.

"Any society is three square meals away from anarchy."

So imagine how much society could degrade if you ruined our food sources thanks to irradiated fallout and wasted supply line infrastructure meant that widespread famine was inevitable.

BTW i hate how statist propaganda has had so much success in equating anarchy as chaos

sometimes even i do it

Keep in mind I'm talking about a situation a generation or so after the war, when there's been time for recovery and reconsolidation. I'm envisioning things being a lot more chaotic in the immediate aftermath.