All The Small Things

scottishpunk said:

I'm working on a piece of low-tech futuristic science fiction, in the vein of 1984. The setting is approximately 300 years after World War III, the world has been decimated and society has rebuilt, somewhat from scratch. The society in which my story operates looks a lot like ours, technology and culture wise, but is somewhat less technologically advanced and overall alien to us.

I need some ideas for the little details that will work together to subconsciously make the world believable to the reader. So far I have ideas like all money being coins (a $5 coin, for example) and reading time according to military time (1400 hours, etc.) I thought it would be fun to get ideas from you guys here. What kind of little details would you add to this type of world?

Click to expand...

Obsessions with cleaning and painting things?

They could count time from WWIII, rather than BC/AD. So it would be the year 300. That way you don't have to predict what year WWIII will occur in order to tell what year it would be :>

If you have a person who basically "founded" the society three-hundred years ago, that person can become a slang term.

For instance, one might say, "Washington! I can't believe you said that!" Or, "Good Washington, that's a lot of five dollar coins!"

(kind of like the Ford thing from "Brave New World.")

bohica said:

They could count time from WWIII, rather than BC/AD. So it would be the year 300. That way you don't have to predict what year WWIII will occur in order to tell what year it would be :>

Click to expand...

Nice.

I could see maybe people trying to grow their own food because they don't trust the industry (people do that now...)

Organic would be like impossible because of all the junk war would put in the soil.

Which parts are you keeping and which parts are you tossing? If you have $5 coins, that would tend to indicate you've dumped a representative economy. The whole point of coins is that they are made of the standard. In a paper/paperless economy, the money isn't backed by anything but faith. If you are going that route, then you've also tossed a whole lot of the communication hierarchy. However, there would still be room for many of the medical advances in our society - only they would have to be centralized with the people that still had access to the knowledge. That's basically the source of the whole witch/wizard mythology that reigns in most societies.

So, to give you good details, we need to know what you want to keep and what you want to toss.

It would seem your communication structure would be very similar to Napoleonic Wars era, i.e. very slow and undependable. However, since you are dealing with fallout that results in zombie like creatures, you will probably have a pretty high level of medical research going on (how to protect yourself from zombie virus/bacteria, whatever). I would also imagine that the existence of zombies/mutants would create a surge of religious zeal amongst parts of your population.

Your weaponry would probably devolve to basic firearms, but not as far back as crossbows.

So you are thinking early twentieth century?

I suspect people would have a somewhat hypochondriac mindset, combined with a certain amount of intolerance. If there was enough radiation around to create zombie mutants, then at some point in the past a lot of people died of radiation poisoning, and then a bit later a lot more people died of cancer. Your society would be pretty paranoid about both. If there's some low-tech method of radiation detection, a lot of people would use it whether or not they had any chance of being exposed. (Can your society manufacture film?) And there might be a lot of misinformation around, about which places were irradiated or how you could "catch" it or whether it can be treated. A ripe area for con men, that last one.

Your society might be downright draconian toward people with birth defects. Presumably that's how the zombies started, after all. Sure, now it's just a harelip, but how do you know they won't crave human flesh when they grow up? Depending on how civilized you want them to be, they might go all-out Spartan (killing babies that don't meet standards), make people with birth defects live in separate communities (maybe along with people whose professions squick them, like gravediggers or wasteland wanderers) or maybe people with physical oddities would just get suspicious looks and muttered comments. Women who have such children might also come in for a bit of suspicion—maybe it happened because they went into a poisoned area, maybe they were sleeping around, who knows?

Healthy babies, on the other hand, would probably be important to the whole community. Depending on how bad things got, people might have thought the entire human race was due to die out. Motherhood and fatherhood—family in general, by extension—might be considered the most important things in life.

Izunya

I would expect stringent food regulations due to contamination. you mentioned a $5 coin..so you would be introducing a monetary system? at only 300 years young I would expect a lot of bartering and less commercialism, almost a socialist type society to keep order, especially with walled cities aand threats of zombies. there could be required genetic testing for couples considering marriage and child bearing. education might again take second seat to agriculture, and history may be somewhat propagandized.. I would expect fewer domesticated animals, assuming many had been wiped out and mutations may have occurred. because of all the defunct vehicles littering the cities, iron seepage and rust would create issues, but I'm not scientific enough to speculate on that. sanitary water could be an issue.

The latest youth fashion trent are leather shoulder-, elbow- or kneepats worn over the normal clothing, often asymetrical, while conservative people wear linen and leather clothing, preferably with at least some white.
(Long) skirts have finally a comback among the brave. For women, they are usually cut at the side or not at all, for men, the cut is often front middle, covered by another (long) loincloths.

Music used to be dominated by harmonic electronic music and (purely) synsetic voices (think mainstreamish trance music) for the last 3 years. Lately (heavyly electronically enhanced) human voices have found a revival in <province of setting>, evolving into two main streams:
Noise&Beat is addressing to "the street" and selling itself as "true and basic". The sound reminds of electronic guitars, various household stuff and city noises.
Flow (Itself again divided into various subkinds, that are usually named like Matix-Flow, Stone-Flow, Hard-Flow, ...) is more popular among middle- and upper-class youngsters. It claims to have roots in pre-apocalyptic music. In fact the base melody line often has some resemblence to classic music at double speed. The defining rule for this super-stream is "no silent note". Voices are more dominating then in N&B, but usually low-pitched compared to the music and electronically altered for anything but understandebility, which raises distrust in Censor-Departments and conservative parents, although actual "suble, insurgent messeges" are infact very rare.

scottishpunk said:

All of the colonies are surrounded by high walls and gates that close at night to protect the residents from the zombie-like creatures that live outside the city walls (the result of mutation brought on by chemical weapons during WWIII).

That's where my real story comes in. The society is mainly to be a backdrop in which I can tell a story about a scientist, her research on the mutants, and her interactions with the other people.

Click to expand...

So you're writing Fallout 3?

This is a sort of setting (a step back in technology, yet still sci-fi) that I've always wanted to try, I think because of the appeal of the setting of Atlas Shrugged to me. Retro-future, I guess you might call it.

What is the position of women in this society (always a fun can of worms to open)? And what about treatment of minorities, the disabled, or gays and lesbians? How advanced is this culture socially?

Anyway, I've always liked the thought of using radio rather than TV, and using boats and trains rather than airplanes to get around.

And are these $5 coins backed by gold?

scottishpunk said:

I've not played any of the Fallout games so I'm not entirely certain...

Click to expand...

Oh but you must. They're excellent.

So it's 1970's Union of Soviet Zombies' Republic?

If things have regressed as you state, I would suggest a lot of bartering for things as opposed to flat payment. And there would probably be a hot industry in "found" materials/equipment/chatchkies from the pre-war period. Even if a lot of the stuff was either radioactive or chemically/biologically tainted. Which could lead to new plagues or "dead" zones due to either source.