Tag Archives: Old Man and the Wasteland

Voyager US |

How I Destroyed the World, Nick Cole

Out now, our digital updated edition of Nick Cole’s fabulous post-apocalyptic novel THE OLD MAN AND THE WASTELAND.

To celebrate, Nick tells the story before the story and how his doomsday unfolded.

How I Destroyed the World:

Every book has got to begin somewhere.  Often the circumstances, though seemingly fantastic, say as found in a Space Opera, are still pastoral.  Setting is the way life is, and the characters within have only ever known it that way.  But in the world of Post-Apocalyptic fiction, or PA fiction, the change from pastoral to doomsday is part of the tale.

And that’s where readers of PA find the sweet spot…

They want the world turned upside down, shaken not stirred and served into a cracked martini glass at a roadside fortress gas station where everyone wears leather, drives souped-up Dodge Chargers and carries a shotgun.  Maybe.  Or at least some of them do.

But first we’ve got to depart the regular gas station, and that 44 oz. Big Gulp we can have any time we want.  Or, life as we currently know it.  To do that, the PA writer needs to set the stage.  The opening act is the final act.  Or simply put, the world’s got to go.

So for those who read this blog, I’ll outline how I blew up the world.  I don’t do this in the book, The Old Man and the Wasteland.  So, here’s how it all went down…

We start with a new 9/11.

A terrorist cell manages to poison most of lower Manhattan with a dirty bomb and then a Mumbai-style ambush against first responders.  After a week, the last of the terrorists have been killed and the casualties are enormous and mounting, due to radiation sickness.  Manhattan is finished and a global capital is effectively terminated.

An American President, politically moderate before the attack, shifts wildly to the militant-right as the nation calls for a bloodletting. American forces airstrike three middle-eastern capitals: Damascus, Tripoli, and Tehran.  An American expeditionary force lands in North Africa with the intent of a Sherman’s March to the Sea-style invasion in an effort to devastate the Muslim world.

Mid-invasion, a charter airliner flashing the correct Homeland Security transponder codes, explodes at high altitude over the Northern Hemisphere of the Unites States.  The powerful EMP disables most everything from cell phones to toasters to early warning radar detection systems (Unless they happened to be switched off at the time of the pulse.)  Within hours the city of Dallas experiences a high yield, low altitude nuclear explosion delivered by terrorist cells operating out of Mexico and piloting drone aircraft.

The next day, it’s Seattle.

Miami.

Pittsburgh.

For the next two weeks, a city a day is destroyed by drone-piloted, nuclear weapon carrying aircraft.

Emergency services are strained and collapse.

American citizens abandon their cities en masse.

A coalition of Muslim countries announce that the drone strikes, funded and powered by Chinese technology stolen from U.S. developers, will continue until the American Army, currently driving toward Saudi Arabia, surrenders completely.

The President of the United States authorizes a full scale nuclear strike by bomber aircraft against all the major capitals of the Middle East.  Bombers receive their codes and commence their attack.

A Chinese fleet preemptively strikes the Northwestern United States.  The President authorizes the use of T-LAN nuclear ordinance to repel the invasion.

China launches her entire nuclear arsenal in response to the loss of her fleet.

America retaliates with all her silo-based nuclear weapons.

Russia invades Central and Western Europe.  Nuclear weapons are exchanged by France, England, and Germany against targets on their own soil and in Russia.

Pakistan and India exchange nuclear weapons.

The world is beset by raging wildfires, disease, and starvation at heretofore unimagined levels.  Within months, darkness due to the ash cloud that surrounds the earth, a mini ice age descends across much of the planet.  A nuclear winter ensues.

Pictured from space by the few remaining Satellites that still circle the planet, the Earth is much the same, but gone are the lights of cities and civilization that once burned in the night.  Only the occasional large-acreage forest fire, burning out of control, can be seen in the night.

Thirty-eight years later a survivor departs his village at dawn.  He will either find something of use to his village or never return.  His only companions are the words and wisdom of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.  Thus begins The Old Man and the Wasteland…

 

 

 

 

 

Voyager US |

No Zombies Allowed!, Nick Cole

Out now is our digital edition of Nick Cole’s fabulous post-apocalyptic novel, THE OLD MAN AND THE WASTELAND.

To celebrate, here is the second of three blogs from the author about dystopia and post-apocalyptia:

No Zombies Allowed!

No disrespect intended.  World War Z, fine novel.  Day by Day Armageddon, fun read.  Even original recipe Night of the Living Dead on the local cable access station at midnight still grabs me.  But when it comes to Post-Apocalyptia of the nuclear variety, I prefer my crumbling city, bent and broken highway, and wasteland desert, free of Zekes.  Vampires too for that matter.  In fact, all the undead and lycanthropes to boot.  There’s just no room for them, what with all this global destruction and humanity gone nuts.

Having said that, I’ll add that there is a case to be made for the logical extension of each of these denizens to be justified in the post one-hundred megaton blast zone.  Radiation sickness, and the long term effects coupled with the resiliency we find in the human body and lifeforms of all kinds, lends itself to a plausible explanation for lycanthropes, even zombies.  A little nano-based bio modification and we’ve got vampires.  But once you start down this path, you’re departing from the essence of the Post-Apocalyptic novel.  The vintage ‘what happens after?’ uncorked and allowed to breathe, has just been jug-a-lugged with a Zima chaser by a college co-ed.  Bio Modified Vampires, Nano Infused Genetically Modified Werewolves, and Radiation Sick Zombies can occur now.  Your PA Novel has turned into something else.  This is just my opinion.  I enjoy my zombies, but there’s no reason not to infuse everything from cyberpunk to steampunk with such creations.  For me, writing about what happens in the forty years after a large scale exchange of nuclear weapons and an invasion of the North American Continent by external forces, I chose to leave out the zombies.  And werewolves and vampires.

 

Approaching the end of the world as a milieu, I found there was more than enough in humanity to provide the monsters I’d need to menace the protagonist, an old man who has only one book to read throughout the forty years he spends living in a salvager camp in the American Southwest.  Humans and a few animals make great antagonists for a man with the simple mission of trying to find something useful for his village in the hard years after the fall of the United States.  These worst of humanity’s antagonists, armed with their parking meter clubs and large heavy rocks, are the Post-Apocalyptic Fiction versions of what it takes to make it through the end of the world as present day sees it, and into the wasteland of the other side.  No longer are the survivors concerned with how to make the next million or cheat on their taxes.  Now they have to survive in a day-to-day existence that starts with a two year nuclear winter.  And all they’ve got are their lack of morals and whatever they can steal, rob or raid from others is the in this Broken New World.  In short, what we find in the way of villainy in The Old Man and the Wasteland, is the distilled essence of the worst.  The worst that managed to survive.  The worst of the worst that survived the bombs, and the winter.

Life after a nuclear war would be pretty hard.  The laws we knew, the systems, the largesse would all be gone.  Some might find it a paradise, unrestricted in the fulfillment of their every desire.  These people, at the end of the forty years and the beginning of the novel, are the distilled essence of the worst.

So, remember that angry redneck with the obscene tattoo and trouble in his eyes when you stopped at that late-night gas station to ask for directions, and when you got back in your car and drove away, you realized how dangerous that had been?  Good.  In Post-Apocalyptia, he’s got nothing to stop him from doing whatever he wants, now that the world as we knew it has gone up in flames.  Zombies, werewolves, vampires.  They wouldn’t make it in the Wasteland.  Not against that guy.  They’re too delicate.