The Droughtlands and the Post Apocalyptic Genre: How an archaic far-future is the ultimate post-apocalyptic setting.

(This post originally appeared as a discussion on the r/postapocalyptic subreddit on reddit.com, and has been shared here as a re-introduction to The Droughtlands for those who’ve only just found the blog.)

I’ll introduce you first to the world of The Droughtlands. As an Australian, I’m duty bound to create this world of sweeping red deserts and harsh rocky climates. The people who dwell on its surface use a mixture of limited, rune-based magic, and ad-hoc technology that’s more rust than metal to survive, knowing that the were not the first to walk this land.

This honour belongs to a people they call “those-of-glass,” a long-extinct civilisation that destroyed itself with a fusion of impossible magics and incomprehensible technologies. All that is left behind of their achievements are the sets of ruins that dot The Droughtlands, taking the form of massive towers of broken steel and shattered glass, stretching so much taller than anything the living know, but also buried much deeper than they could imagine.

Those who’ve braved the depths have found cavernous cities under the sands that are host to anomalous zones of magic they call “fractures,” from which perplexing items with strange properties can sometimes be retrieved, which they name “paralicts,” Of course, few survive these trips, and those who do often die shortly after. Nevertheless, these items draw a high price, and the schools of research into these places are a veritable meatgrinder for rooky scholars looking to make a name for themselves.

In this world, I wanted to explore some of the larger points that most draw me to works of post-apocalyptic fiction. I’ve never liked the aspects of PA fiction that revolve around the constant grind to fulfill basic survival needs. (I effectively “magicked” water out of this world to avoid this.) Nor did I like the wistful nostalgia for the before time that often waylays the plot and the action.

For this purpose, The Droughtlands exists as a work of science-fantasy in a world entirely separate from ours, with the apocalyptic event that wiped out those-of-glass having happened tens of thousands of years before the eras in which the stories are set.

Instead, I wanted to explore a few larger concepts, either through metaphorical representations or more direct lines of story.

The first of these is basic wasteland living. As I mentioned before, I removed the need for water (at least in the means to quench thirst) from the story, with the lore telling of an event that simply evaporated it all into the air, where it was only to be breathed. The intention of this was to limit the amounts of magic people would have access to. The rune-based magic I mentioned earlier is done through ink-based shapes scrawled on the skin, each one only good for one use. This changes the way water is seen in The Droughtlands. It’s suddenly more valuable than gold, even than some of the odd, reality-altering paralicts that can be found in the ruins of those-of-glass.

The unique problem I gave myself was how the rest of this world would exist without it. The only seas to sail across are flat plains of sand, so there are no naval trade routes to shift vast quantities of goods, therefore there is no impetus for settlements to be positioned along rivers. On the other hand, it means that larger distances can be travelled on foot and greater areas can be explored by lone scouts, because there is no need for them to stay close to water sources or carry it with them. Cement and concrete cannot be created, so building materials either come from piled scrap metal, pillaged form some of the safe ruins that people have found, or precisely cut stone. Even those ruins introduce another point of interest for the PA genre.

Have you ever wondered what our current world will leave behind in 3000 years? Because that’s how old the tomb of Ramesses II is, and the poem “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley actually has the ancient ruler as its subject:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

It’s inevitable that humanity will continue to destroy itself. Hell, it’s what this entire genre is about. But rarely do we get to see the effect of a long-term Post-Apocalyptic timeframe. In 3000 years, only a few of our current structures will be left standing, and even those, despite our efforts to store, catalogue and archive information on them, will have their meaning lost to time and the endless iteration of historians’ interpretations.

I approached the ruins left by those-of-glass in a similar way. When the people of The Droughtlands tread softly within the towers that make up their ruins, they do not understand the machines they encounter, they are not aware of what an office or a cubicle is. They can only ascribe their own interpretations of what they see to these places, which in turn changes the meaning of what they once were. All this, combined with the perplexing magics of these places, creates a past so alien to them that they can’t even fathom those-of-glass being their ancestors.

As all this meaning is lost to the all-consuming sands of time, I made sure that magic would remain. In The Droughtlands, it exists as a metaphor for our own markers of endless danger.

Radioactive material.

Depending on the types of atoms you’re splitting, you could end up with waste that has a half-life of 200,000 years or more. Effectively, they’re around forever. Far longer than we’ll be. When a mixture of scientists, nuclear engineers, and even fiction writers, were posed the question of how to best ward away future civilisations from unearthing this hazardous material, they encountered a pretty unique problem.

In about 10,000 years, none of the symbols, the language, anything that we use to currently warn people away, will mean anything. I wrote a much longer blog post about this, which you can see here:

But the gist is that there needed to be a system of ominous symbols that were universal, able to be interpreted, consciously or not, by those who’d eventually come across the place as somewhere that should be left well alone. They would need to send a message along the lines of what’s written here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages But I find the most pertinent lines to be the first three:

This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

One of the more popular ideas they came up with was a landscape of towering stone spikes, a model of which you can actually find in one of the nuclear waste disposal sites in Fallout 76. But I also realised that there was a similarity between that and the landscape of buried towers that I’d placed among The Droughtlands. Afterall, are skyscrapers not also towering, ominous spikes? Especially to a people whose population has long been devastated past the point of needing to build so vertically. To them, these can only be ominous warnings that hide a great and invisible danger.

When things are brought up from these places, more apocalypses ensue. One of my series, The Flux Catastrophe, charts the final years of a disaster by that very name, after a substance called “molten flux” was unearthed from one particular ruin left by those-of-glass. It’s an ever expanding liquid metal filled with AI-driven nanobots, but the people of The Droughtlands cannot comprehend that. They only know that when you put the stuff into a fresh corpse, it enhances the machine-based magic some have access to, leading to an industrial revolution of lone men controlling vast factories of endless production lines. However this leads to a greater problem. The molten flux can only sustain these corpses, commonly known as autominds, for so long. When they expire, a dangerous question is asked.

“What do you do when you run out of corpses?”

The answer is a grim one, but the flux traders who have monopolised the sickening practice will run their factories at any cost.

This usage of unearthed technology in the Post-Apocalyptic genre is honestly one of my favourites. It often feels as though the characters have obtained the power of the gods, that they’ve unlocked a means to change the world seemingly from another dimension entirely. It’s like if the knights of the holy crusades suddenly got their hands on nuclear bombs.

This type of scenario can only really exist in a long-term post-apocalyptic scenario, and the more fantastical it is, the better it can be executed. With this, I’m going to get into the dirty business of self-promotion. I may’ve written this all from the goodness of my heart, but a guy’s still got to eat, right? I’ve left it all in the comments, but feel free to shoot me a message or leave your own comment if you’ve got any thoughts on this!