After the Apocalypse

It was a bumpy and uncomfortable ride. And the old man chittered on happily behind her like old people…or crazy people do.

Like when your Mom or Granma keeps an entire conversation going regardless if you are even listening. 

Those interminable phone calls Janet used to avoid and dread, droning on and on about the flotsam and jetsam of an old person’s life, only to surface from the lily pads every once in a while, to ask some prying or unanswerable...personal question. 

Janet felt a momentary pang of sadness. 

Maybe she should have taken the time to talk when she had the chance. 

Before everyone she knew was taken by the Apocalypse.

...

Hello and welcome back by survivor friends! So we have our two protagonists trapped on a roof in the apocalypse! Just like many of us feel most of the time!

Hope you all are enjoying it. We’ve gotten up to 8500 downloads. And believe it or not we’ve managed to knock out 17 episodes, which is about 42,500 words! 

My plan is to find a good stopping point in the next 2-3 episodes and end season 1. Don’t worry, I won’t go away, I might take a couple weeks off, but I’ll be back. I’m going to turn the existing words and audio into a book set. 

If you think about it, it makes sense. I’ve already got the content built so I might as well leverage it into a book, e-book and audio book. It’s pretty easy these days to self publish and I’ve done it before a couple times, both on Amazon and Audible.

Of course , you, yes you, can help. 

First, I’ve started a Facebook group called AfterTheApocalypse all one word. You can go there and chat with other survivors and give me some feedback. Second, while you there you can help me vet some cover ideas.  Third, I’m going to need a launch team when I release the book(s) so you can help with that. 

And finally, as always, you can help me survive by dropping a nickel in the slot of the Patreon page and telling a few science fiction geek friends about the podcast.

I have been watching and reading some interesting SciFi over the last couple weeks. 

First, I watched the new Netflix apocalypse movie “Army of the Dead”. I won’t spoil it for you but it was pretty disappointing. I really like Dave Bautista, especially his role as Drax the Destroyer in the Guardians of the galaxy movies, but he couldn’t save this one. 

Second, and on a much more positive note, the new season of Love, Death + Robots on Netflix was incredible. This is a series of animated shorts, but they are all incredibly robust, standalone stories each with a beginning, middle and end. The Drowned Giant, based on a story by J.G Ballard, is an amazing and thoughtful piece that speaks volumes without having to say much. 

Snow in the Desert, based on a story by Neal Asher was a really good apocalyptic treatment. I would pay real money and go see a movie treatment of those characters and that universe. It’s a shame there are only 8 episodes in this whole new season. 

Moving along down the short fiction video quality scale is a channel on YouTube called Dust. It’s a whole bunch of short  SciFi videos. Some better than other. Some seem almost like trailers for the move the artist wanted to tell but didn’t have the money for a full-length film. What they lack in quality they make up for in quantity. 

And, if you’re really brave or bored you can meander into the SciFi sorts on Vimeo. Some of these have promise but many look like high school computer graphics projects gone awry. 

I also finished reading David Brin’s Sundiver. This is the first novel in his Uplift series. The premise of his universe is cool. All intelligent life in the galaxy only exists because some previous, older races uplifted them. Mankind is treated mostly derisively by the rest of the intelligent life because they don’t know who their parent race was, or even worse, uplifted themselves by accident, which is unheard of.  Man in turn, once they have the knowledge of these other, more advanced, alien races uplifts dolphins and chimps. 

Brin is in real life an accomplished astrophysicist, and this makes hie prose and SciFi nice and tight. None of that magical-fantasy crap to make things work. All the future tech is well thought out. 

This was a drop-back read for me. I found his second book in this series at a book sale and liked it enough to go back and read the first. Good book, worth a read, but at close to 400 pages it took a fair amount of concentration from me to get though it.

That’s probably more a comment on my life and my attention span than Brin’s work!

Come on over and join the facebook page and say ‘hi’. Get ready for the end of season one, we’ll have a party!

But, above all else, my friends, Keep Surviving.