Collecting Apocalypses

 

It seems pretty clear things are going to come apart, but how fast and in what shape is still somewhat up in the air. People love writing apocalypses, but most of them are quite boring. The reason most of them are boring boils down to a failure to understand humans. Now I’m not claiming special expertise here, but if your apocalypse does any of these things, it’s not very compelling, to be honest:

• The bad guys are overwhelmingly powerful for a long time. Most of the times of the height of the most overwhelming control in historical empires seems to be right before their fall—probably because that level of control isn’t useful unless the empire in question is collapsing.

• Things devolve into warlordism forever. Warlordism is a very unstable status quo, and people love to organize better systems than that. When we see longstanding warlord territories in the modern world, they’re almost always due to the effects of capital from the “civilized” world.

• Technology continues to progress in the collapsed world. Our technological infrastructure is extremely fragile, and truly cannot continue as it is under Collapse.

• Technology completely disappears. People are smart and technology, even electronics, is useful in the Collapse world. 

• Direct collapse from the modern mode of societies into some other stable mode. The beginning of Collapse is the beginning of a long, long period of change. We aren’t going to see one thing turn into another overnight, then stay that way.

Anyhow, if anyone has good apocalypses that avoids these silly things, lmk.