Tag: apocalypse

  • Half-penny thoughts — 21feb26

    As I write more prose, certain questions pop up in my head about the decision making process of other writers across multiple medias.

    One of the tropes that always has me scratching my head is that of most apocalyptic tropes — the limited food stores that people are going through, some of it 20-30 (or more years old). It’s as if no one survived who knew hunting/foraging techniques, or were willing to try to do either. They seem quite content on starving day to day or cracking open a dinged up, rusty can of dog food to chase away the hunger pangs. Yet, something as simple and prolific as dandelion greens seems to escape their notice. After a few months’ time, they wouldn’t even need to worry about herbicide residual on the greens (and yet, quite possibly worry about chemical residues in the dog food, curiously enough).

    And I know, most people don’t consider common plants found on lawns and in the wild when they are hungry, but it always seems like a strange omission to not consider forage as a food source. If the world is irradiated, it is one thing to eliminate forage, but a zombie plague? Why aren’t they eating the edible shrooms growing in the forest behind the zombie-infested general store instead of risking their lives for 20-yo dogfood out of a can?

    What do you think? Am I making too big of a deal about it and there are plenty of examples of sensible food consumption in the fictional apocalypse? If you were to be a survivor, what kinds of things you try to learn how to cultivate or forage to avoid cat food tins or dodgy baked beans in a can?

    Extra think to ponder: Did you know there are no commonplace true rhymes for “orange” or “month”? Prove me wrong in the comments, if you disagree.

  • On Forage

    This piece is based on the flash fiction prompt posted yesterday and follows my personal guidelines as described in this post.

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    Genre: Speculative fiction

    Subgenre: Biopunk / Post-Apocalyptic

    Seattle, South of Pioneer Square Station ruins; 73 years after The Fall

    Kit Keyes could just see the daylight at the end of the tunnel from where she stood on the rusted, flaking remains of light rail tracks. There was not much sun to set the the end of the tunnel alight, as the perpetual twilight of the monsoons filtered out most of it before it even had a chance to get to the ground. It was pervasive gloom that came with the winter months around November and sometimes lasted until as late as May. She half-disbelieved the elders when they said that it had not always been this way; she had known nothing but the winter monsoons for her twenty years of age.

    She watched for shadows in that twilight. Patrols regularly cleared out the tunnels of the dwindling population of raiders and ne’er-do-well types that tested the clan’s defenses on a perennial basis north of The Square, only to discover the defenses had only hardened since their last attempt. A few hundred meter south, on the other hand — that section had never been properly secured. Something about that open mouth bothered her this morning. She could not put her finger on what, something that bothered her more than the empty space itself.

    It just so happened that south of the Square was some of the best fungus forage on the Line.

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  • Half-penny Thoughts | 12aug25

    Photo by Daniel Jensen on Unsplash

    I’ll admit it: I’ve been binging The Walking Dead again.

    If I want to pretend to be an intellectual, I’d say it was research into human nature in the face of an apocalypse. I have not recently seen evidence in real life that suggests that people will act differently than their fictional counterparts if they were faced with a zombie (or any kind of, really) apocalypse. Zombies in TWD might be the overt threat, but the real monsters are other people. The Witcher games and books, fantasy tales about a “monster hunter” mutant named Geralt of Rivia play the same tune. Horrifying creatures are a real threat, but the true monsters are us.

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