Why author Tommy Atkinson writes this fiction.

The "Why?" of it all.

Why? Well of course there are a lot of reasons. But I think the most important of them is that I see our world as having a lot of problems. Not the least of these is our population. Here's what my World Almanac says.

Year 1 AD, 200,000,000 humans on the planet.

1650 AD, 500,000,000.

1850 AD, 1,000,000,000.

1930 AD, 2,000,000,000.

1975 AD, 4,000,000,000.

1999 AD, 6,000,000,000.

2001 AD, 6,200,000,000.

It took 1,649 years to go from 200 million to 500 million. It took another 200 years to double that. It took another 80 years to double it again. It took 26 more years to times and a half it. We now have six and two tenths billion people.

Oh yeah, we've all heard of that. The "Population Bomb", big deal.

Oh yeah? Well, it's not a big deal yet, it's just one of the many things that threaten us with disaster or extinction, but, look at the rate it's increasing at. It can't go on much longer. Less than a human lifetime, I'd say. So we may see it. But how will it stop? Well, I hate to say it, but our old friend the Grim Reaper is the most likely way.

So, believing that things are going to change, and most likely not in the direction of Star Trek(tm), I decided to see what a future after the fall of our civilization might look like. Now, the real fall of our civilization is likely to be extremely complicated and messy, and the world that's left is likely to be rather badly contaminated. I didn't think it would make a good novel. So, I chose one of the other things that threaten us with disaster. A volcanic eruption that disrupts the climate, bringing a two year winter. This is a perfectly real possibility, it happened in 1815. 1816 was a year with no summer. But take a look at what apparently happened in 535 AD.

Why did I choose this? Because, believe it or not, it would probably be the best thing we (as a species) could hope for. A natural event that happened suddenly and took effect immediately would prevent us from going berserk with our nuclear arsenals or releasing genetically engineered biological weapons on each other. And, it would set the population back to the year 1. Two years of winter, no crops, most of us starve. Of course you and all the people you care about would be among the survivors.

So two hundred years later we find ourselves back in the Good Old Times. We're all rich, the Earth's resources belong to only a couple of hundred million people or less. And, we have the ruins of the Old Civilization to scavenge in. We have the books of the Old Civilization to keep us from sinking back to true ignorance, and there's heaps of refined metal lying everywhere. There's game aplenty and we get to do it all over again. A second chance for mankind. Maybe we wouldn't make the same mistakes again.

Another thing I truly dislike is fiction that's predicated on something that's blatantly impossible or just plain too stupid to believe. Like an adventure story where the secret agent is really hip and puts a heavy steel reinforcement behind his front door so when the bad guys come it takes them fifteen minutes with sledge hammers to get through, and in that time he escapes. Of course they don't notice the two big picture windows on either side of the front door, right? I lose interest. And, I have spent my life figuring out how to do the difficult, so I can make a pretty good judgment of what will and won't work. With this in mind, I have tried to make the world I created real. There are a lot of things you couldn't do, just because you didn't have enough people. You wouldn't go to school until you were twenty-eight or thirty, there wouldn't be enough advantage to justify it. You'd be learning what you needed to survive, hunting and the like. Technology as we know it would be a thing of the past, even if you had the know-how from the old books. You'd be back to the Nineteenth Century or earlier. Blacksmithing and metal casting would be your main arts. You wouldn't have guns, you'd be using bows and arrows and swords and daggers. You wouldn't have spinning and weaving mills, you'd be wearing furs, etc.

Another thing about this scenario I liked was looking back at us through their eyes. They live in the ruins of our civilization and are confronted by them all the time.

Here's a sample. In this scene, the adventurers are exploring an ancient airport.

____The aluminum frame of the tunnel was still intact, however, and it made sort of a cage we could walk through. At the end of the tunnel was an oval doorway in the side of an airship. I walked down the ramp and bent low to pass through the door. Inside, the ship was about twenty feet wide and had row upon row of rotted seats all crammed in with a narrow walkway down the center. Each row of seats had a little oval window, some of which were open holes in the side of the ship and some of which were still closed by a yellow translucent material that was burnt brown on the outside and all cracked into a million tiny fragments. From above the seats, doors hung down and the inside lining of the cabin was hanging in tatters like the walls inside the buildings. Behind the lining all manner of wires and the like were slowly falling off the walls. I walked down the walkway and Kelsey and the men followed.
____"God," Kelsey shuddered. "This looks like a scene from hell."
____"I would imagine it was once very comfortable," I observed, "if a bit crowded."
____"A bit crowded?" Kelsey said in amazement. "You couldn't get me to set foot in here with that many people, you'd suffocate in five minutes."
____"It was all force ventilated," I countered. "Let's go the other way and look at where the pilots sat." The men turned and went back to the doorway, and I pulled open a small door in a wall at the front of the airship. The door came off its hinges in my hands and a cloud of dust fell from it. "Definitely not built to last," I observed, laying the door aside. Beyond was a small cabin with two seats and the same yellow cracked windows all around the front. Below and above the windows were a myriad of little levers and round and oval and square instrument windows. In front of each seat there was a column with a double handled wheel attached to it and foot pedals. Between the seats were several sets of large levers. I climbed over the control console between the seats and felt the inside of the windows. They felt loose and I pushed one and it fell out of its frame in a million fragments.
____"What are you doing, Raven?" Kelsey called as if correcting a mischievous little boy for the tenth time.
____"I'm knocking out the windows so we can see out the front," I said, pushing out the remaining panels. Then I sat in one of the pilot's seats and took the handles of the control wheel in my hands. Kelsey came forward to see what I was doing and the men followed.
____"God," was all she said.
____"OK," I said, "you ready to fly this thing?"
____"You're not going to get me a second time with that trick," she said.
____"Have a seat," I invited, indicating the other chair.
____"Why?" she said.
____"Just so you can say you did," I replied. She climbed over the controls and lowered herself into the disintegrating seat. "Now," I continued, "just imagine working these controls and making those giant engines roar to life and rolling this thing out to the end of one of those runways, and then putting them on full power and rolling down the runway faster and faster until this whole ship just left the ground and flew up into the sky." I looked at her. "Can't you feel the power of the thing?"
____"Sort of," she conceded.
____"And then imagine flying up and up and up until the ground shrunk down so that great rivers looked like silver ribbons and mountains looked like wrinkles in the dirt." I looked at her again.
____"And what happened if something went wrong?" she asked.
____"Well, then the whole thing usually came plummeting down and hit the ground like a meteor and they came and picked burned pieces of the passengers out of the trees for miles around," I replied grinning.
____"That's all I wanted to know," she said. "Let's get out of here." She didn't have to tell the men, as they turned around and left the airship immediately. Kelsey climbed out and I followed her until we were all back in the building at the top of the ramp. "I can't believe that people actually rode in that thing," Kelsey said as we stood looking back down the deteriorated ramp.

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