Story idea I had to start writing on before I forgot it...

[captain_slinky]

I've read a lot of speculative fiction from The Good Old Days about the end of the world. Some folks were very prepared and expecting all sorts of disasters - Nuclear war, zombies, Rapture, meteors crashing in to the planet and so on and so forth - and all sorts of consequences involving shortages of things we all take for granted such as food, fuel, electricity and the likes. To be perfectly honest and up-front with you, yeah, that all happened... but thanks to all those stories and movies we had written? We were pretty much ready for it all when it happened. When the older folks who still remember it all happening talk about it, they're amazed at where the real catastrophic shortages came from.

First, all the "Real Christians" ascended to heaven, which was a real shocker even to those who were doing the ascending. Lots of happy good-byes, lots of confused looks as one person would start rising and their mate/best friend/son and daughter/mom and dad stayed firmly planted on the ground. Luckily for us there was no time for finger-pointing or debate over what this event did or didn't prove because that's about when the giant meteor hit earth, which was somehow interpreted by NORAD as a nuclear strike. Missiles were launched, people died fiery deaths, sure... but it wasn't as bad as we had all thought it would be. Then came the Zombie Plague; again, NOT THAT BAD. Everybody knew to shoot for the head and decapitate the recently deceased... the whole thing blew over within two months.

After all was said and done, things got better. I almost said "Back To Normal", but there was no such thing as "Normal" any more. First of all, the entire ordeal had eliminated about two-thirds of the population (we're guessing here). Pretty much all of the petroleum-based fuel burned up during the massive radioactive fires, which also poisoned most of the food and water. There were still occasional zombie outbreaks, easily containable if you had the stomach for it. And then there was THE BIG PROBLEM.

The Digital Revolution was gone.

All the data that we had spent so long digitizing... all the eBooks, all the .avi files, all the DVD, Blu-Ray, hard drive, video tape, audio casette, CD... EVERYTHING had been wiped-out. The electro-magnetic pulses from all the nukes had acted as a giant magnet, erasing it all. And those back-ups that everyone thought were fool-proof protected couldn't stand up to a few months of no electricity. It was all GONE.

In the name of saving space and resources, the world had started to digitize EVERYTHING, leaving a small but dedicated community of "Hard Copy" collectors to worship their out-dated media format. "Why devote an entire building to printed words when I can hold every book in this library right here on the SD Card?" was the question that had killed off the last of the tax-payer funding for public libraries, and soon it became all the rage for people to recycle their old, useless books in to mulch or pulp for Ikea to make them some decorative pieces of affordably decorative furniture.

With no reference books to repair the computers, and no computers to access the repair books with, it wasn't too long before those crazy old Hard Copy collectors to become

Comments

[aurora77]

Interesting!

*hugs her paper books*

[yshaloo]

Sometimes I wish LJ had a "like" button. I don't have a thing to offer other than a "nice start, keep going!"

<3

[sasjhwa.livejournal.com]

The loss of our digital capability has been a real world concern. A lot of history is recorded in diaries but in the last couple of decades a lot of paper journaling has given way to blogging. Newspapers are increasingly going under and the Internet is where a lot of news is stored. Future historians will have a very hard time piecing our history together if that giant EMP takes out the digital age.

Another interesting story would be if ALL those disasters happened but on different parts of the planet. Meteors strick Europe, the Rapture happens in the Middle East, zombies overwhelm Australia, Asia is destroyed by nuclear weapons and giant monsters, for example.

The survivors of each then think their apocalypse is the true one which leads to rivalries and war as the Middle Easterners feel superior because of the Rapture but the Australians have learned to control the zombie hordes into an army, etc.

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

I like it, but it's not the direction I'm going with this :)

The real world digital capability concerns are the focus here... it's going to be very Mad Max-ish, not quite as harsh though. My protagonist finds an old Book Mobile full of books, which allows him to roam the wastelands looking for more books which are like currency now... it's all based off my thing I posted on Facebook about how old book stores feel like pirate ships to me.

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

You may feel free to use the "Four Corners Of The World" idea for your own story without worrying that I'd think you "stole it"... that's all you and it's kind of brilliant :)