A shrinking setting?

I'm looking for sci-fi or fantasy methods by which a setting might continuously shrink over the course of the book. I want it to go from the size of a medium continent to only the size of a large city. I don't want to create the feeling that the characters in the setting are trapped or squished because the situation is actually improving; there may be less territory but it's becoming higher-quality as all the good elements get compressed into less space, and there are only about a dozen characters, so as a group they more comfortably fill the smaller space. But I need them to be able to tell that the setting is shrinking, and in needs to shrink this much in maybe a year. I was considering having some kind of barrier at the edge, but I don't want to give the impression that there is a world outside the barrier. And it's not that the people are getting bigger, because they aren't getting any taller relative to buildings, trees, etc.

So, ideas? Are there any existing stories like this?

skunkmelon said:

You could also consider what's the meaning of your story, the big idea, and then see what could be created from that.

Click to expand...

This is actually where I got the idea in the first place. I was thinking about the idea of the yo-yo universe - that in the beginning of time all matter was compressed into a single point and then the big bang happened and since then it's been expanding outward. Then supposedly at some point it stops expanding and starts contracting back to that single point. This is the end of that universe, but a new one is born immediately, and the way the new one forms may have been influenced by the previous one.

So I wanted to do a smaller scale version of that - a "good apocalypse". It's also like an annual flower - it dies but if it successfully made even one seed then that core starts a new life. The world's sort of ending, but it successfully completed its purpose and the new one will be even better because the characters are getting to help design it, including fixes for what they consider to be 'bugs' in the real world.

That's also why I don't think panic will be an insurmountable problem. The characters don't initially know any of this about the world ending or that they are participating in creating a new better one, at first they just know life is getting weird, including the shrinking setting. But by the midpoint of the story they are realizing that their real task is to help create the new world, and the built-in reward is that they will get to move into it. The bigger problem is the mess that will result if they are in strong disagreement with each other about what the new world should be like when zero-hour arrives. So they are mainly worried about each other causing problems, while the setting has become a known and predictable thing. It's a big clock counting slowly down, but not dangerous.