Before I ever wrote my three books about the end of the world (The Man Who Watched The World End, A Different Alchemy, and The Hauntings of Playing God), I knew they had to take place in a world full of imagination and possibility—the type of stories I enjoy reading myself—but I also wanted them to be realistic, something I could envision actually happening. I wanted to write about the end of the world, but I didn’t want to create your typical apocalyptic books, which always seem to be filled with marauding gangs, children with special powers, and so on. Instead, I wanted to focus on simple things such as looking back on life and regretting how time was spent, about the importance of family, and about the everyday things we take for granted. In short, I wanted to write about the magic and mayhem of the apocalypse, only without any magic or mayhem!
To do this, I focused not on the fantastic and supernatural elements of mankind’s impending extinction, but of the human elements—people growing older each year, the human population slowly fading away. Instead of zombies terrorizing everyone or battles for the few remaining resources, my Great De-evolution stories have people reminiscing about the final movies they watched, the final vacations they took.
In my books, there is no hope for a better tomorrow, but there is still the marvel of realizing which few things in life are truly important. And although there are no warlords or flesh-eating zombies, there is still the quite human havoc of rats and spiders taking over basements, of water dripping through ceilings, of people feeling overwhelmed with day-to-day life.
When you read The Man Who Watched The World End, A Different Alchemy, or The Hauntings of Playing God, you won’t be given gift-wrapped happy endings in which the teenage hero has rallied against some grand villain. You won’t have the immediate satisfaction of an invasion being prevented. After all, my books are science fiction without the magic. They are the apocalypse without the mayhem. But in place of a feel-good story or a climactic battle, my hope is that you’ll find stories about real people and real concerns, and because of that, the stories will remain with you long after you’ve read them.
Originally published at the Magic&Mayhem blog site.