Building a world

I’m not a god, nor the God. If I was… God help us all…

God in His infinite wisdom did not bless me with the ability to create physical reality. Good call on His part. But, I have been getting a peek behind the current, so to speak, by creating the world of the Here-After.

Granted I am not starting with a blank slate. I built the Here-After on what came before, the There-Before. Get it!!? Huh? Yeah, you get it, you’re smart.

So, like many novelists before me, I locked myself in a sensory deprivation chamber and started thinking about what certain events would transpire to lead to the world I wanted to dabble in.

How long would it take to strip an entire city of resources? Would it be better to be alone or with others? How long before there are noticeable dialectic differences between isolated populaces…. populi… octopopulases?

It is very easy to fall back into a “Mad Max” style of post-apocalypse. Roving bands of dusty marauders wearing gas masks and old military uniforms from countries that don’t make locational sense, but look good on screen.

Yet, I wanted something different, a more hopeful future, something with a lot more of the color green. It seems like a natural progression anyway. Given enough time from any large-scale catastrophe, societies would rebuild, trade would commence, new developments would be built on the backs of the old and, if level-heads prevail, man would again flourish.

So I looked at the land in which I currently live, and worked my way out, destroying the world and rebuilding it. Put people and populations in a future place and worked back from there to see how those societies got to their state. I created creatures and technology that had to be both new, but old, steeped in reality. A fantastical reality, but one that theoretically could exist.

That is how I built and am still building the Here-After. And like any great work it will never be finished. I like this creation shtick.