Future Fiction, what is it?
Most of the people on the Internet who have listed my work have listed it in Science Fiction. That's not wholly inaccurate, but I consider my work to be a specific kind of Science Fiction which I call Future Fiction. The difference, I suppose, is that Science Fiction generally postulates some basic change in the world made possible by science and then portrays that changed world. Lets say you want to write a Sci-fi novel. You postulate that some scientist discovers antigravity, and from there you describe the changed world. A lot of other Sci-fi just moves far into the future where change is so complete that anything the author imagines is considered possible. Ray guns, teleportation, faster than light travel, etc.
So what's the difference? Future fiction envisions a world changed by some event or events. In the Ice trilogy, a volcanic eruption caused a climatic disaster that decimated the human population leaving very few survivors. There's nothing to take on faith in this like there is in antigravity. The catastrophe in the Ice trilogy is a documented natural occurrence that has happened repeatedly in the history of the Earth, and not all that far in the past.
So what? Well, I believe that fiction that's based on a scenario that's believable is more engaging than fiction that's based on a scenario that has no basis in reality. A world that might really come to be is more interesting and can even reveal things about the actual world we live in.
But, this is not enough. So we have this changed world. What now? Well the author can make it any way he or she wants. But if the author again deviates from reality, the whole thing loses it's punch. A very large majority of works in this class deviate from reality to their detriment. After the fall of civilization, people still drive cobbled together cars, but everyone is short of ammunition and some are using crossbows. In actual fact, there is so much ammunition lying around that until it exceeded it's shelf life, which is between fifty and a hundred years, a reduced population of survivors would never go short. On the other hand, gasoline has a shelf life of maybe half a year to a year. After that you're out of gas. Rubber has a shelf life of perhaps twenty years at the most. Without rubber, most machinery, and certainly automobiles are out of commission. And making rubber parts in your back yard is out of the question. One of the worst things I ever saw was a movie about the Middle Ages where everyone was using compound bows. They might as well have been riding motorcycles.
But even these considerations are not the real limiting factor. Education is what would bring the use of technology to an end the quickest.
Most of us take an enormous amount of what we know for granted. In our time, we go to school for at least thirteen years (some for twenty even). We can all read and write, and we have an enormous vocabulary by comparison with any other period of history. Back in the Middle Ages there was no word for light switch, or toaster, or microwave oven, or automobile, etc., etc. Obviously this was because there were no such things. After the fall of our civilization people would have a difficult time surviving. They'd have to hunt and maybe farm, but probably just scavenge and gather. But, they'd have our knowledge. However, the first generation that came after these survivors would be wholly different people.
Let's just think about this. If you were born after the fall of civilization you'd very likely not go to school at all. Your parents might teach you to read and write, but you'd be living a hunter gatherer existence. You'd need to know how to hunt, how to make fire, how to skin and butcher game, how to use firearms, how to ride a horse, how to make leather, and a host of things. But you wouldn't need to know how to do a much bigger host of other things, things we all know how to do. You wouldn't need to know how to flush a toilet, how to turn on electric lights, change a light bulb, drive a car, fill out your Federal 1040 (yippee), use a computer, buy and sell stocks, drive a forklift, or indeed operate any kind of machinery, work in an office, ride the subway, the list could fill a thousand pages. So if all these things had no relevance to your survival, you'd never waste your time learning how to do them.
So, your father and mother and their generation might be able to scavenge through the ruins and identify what they were seeing and maybe find ways to use old technology, but when they were gone, you'd have little idea what you were looking at. Ah, but what about all the books? Well, you maybe could read, but you'd be reading stuff where every second word was something you never heard of. Even the dictionary would be like this, as words are defined by other words.
The simple fact is, you'd never bother with any of this. You'd be hunting. In three generations the process would be complete. Literacy itself would die out completely unless your community took some specific measures to prevent this. In the Ice trilogy, The Tribe has done exactly that. Each fort had a scholar who devotes his first twenty years of life to acquiring something resembling the education that all of us have. This scholar acts as advisor to The Tribe on matters relating to the ruins of the Great Civilization and it's relics, both useful and hazardous.
But, it's not likely that people would fall all the way back to the Stone Age. There are basic crafts that would be within their means. These crafts are in fact the very crafts that our ancestors developed and used right up to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Metal casting is a very simple technology. You melt metal in a furnace which you can construct out of little more than clay and sand. You fire your furnace with charcoal, or coal if you can get it. You force air into it with either a mechanical blower driven by some power source such as water power or animal power, or you use a bellows constructed out of leather and wood. You make impressions in wet sand and pour the molten metal in. When it cools you have your casting. Blacksmithing would be your way of working steel, which you would prefer for most weapons and tools. Again you build a furnace and heat steel red hot and then you hammer it to shape. You make your own hammers, chisels, punches, swages, tongs, and all the tools you need, right in your own blacksmith shop. I have a friend who does exactly that.
As far as relics from our time, it would depend on what they were made of as to how long they'd last and still be useful. Paper and ink would deteriorate rather quickly, as would plastic and rubber. Virtually all organic materials would rot away in the short to medium run. Glass lasts virtually forever, as do ceramics. Metals last different amounts of time depending on how resistant to corrosion they are and what they're exposed to. Stainless steel cutlery and cookware would be just like new two hundred years later. The plastic handles on the cookware would be gone. You'd have all the diamonds you could use, and you'd probably use them for tools more than ornaments. You might make gold eating utensils. Gold is extremely resistant to corrosion. You could find plenty of it in the ruins.
To create a realistic world in a Future Fiction scenario takes a great deal of both thought and technical knowledge. That's why I have chosen this field. It's more or less a direct carry on from my life as a designer and inventor of machinery and technology. I love it!
Tommy Atkinson