Are you ok with vague, post-apocalyptic settings

I think I might also prefer it vague, at least at first. I also like it, though, when figuring out how the world got this way is part of the mystery at the heart of the plot. Maybe no one knows anymore, and they slowly figure out what happened.

As in so many things, it depends on the story.

If how the world went to Hell is integral to the plot, I obviously need to know about it. If it's more about the survivors struggling and rebuilding, I'm fine with not knowing.

Looking at our own history, information is very easy to lose - a few generations after a civilization falls, and facts become very difficult to come by. So I wouldn't think it odd if a post-apocalyptic people had no idea what went wrong aside from a few legends... nor would most of them care, having more pressing concerns. If the story takes place just after the Fall, or if the characters are scholars, I would expect more details.

I generally don't like post-apocalyptic stories to begin with, but if I'm going to like them I prefer the explanation for how the world got that way to be vague. At least at first. If I really need to know what happened because it's crucial to the storyline then that's fine, but in that case, I think it helps to add intrigue if it's revealed a little bit at a time.

I like reading vague, and I went for vague with my story. Of course, I know what happened, but I'm saving it for a prequel story which I may/may not write.

Be careful not to be too vague and miss out important details, the last book of the Wool trilogy did this. SPOILER ALERT: Book two is all about what actually happened to destroy the world (which is a great read) but at the end of book three, it seems the world is fine, it's just a small area that is destroyed and uninhabitable. It isn't explained as to why it happens like this though, as in book two it is said that the whole world is wiped out. Really frustrated me because it was sort of fundamental to the plot yet was just ignored.

rwm4768 said:

I think I might also prefer it vague, at least at first. I also like it, though, when figuring out how the world got this way is part of the mystery at the heart of the plot. Maybe no one knows anymore, and they slowly figure out what happened.

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This, I think. I don't especially care for the detailed prologue that explains all the blow by blow of what happened. Not only is it dull, but it can expose the author's ignorance about politics, and of course it can quickly become dated. Think of all those post-apocalyptic books that assumed the US and the USSR had a nuclear exchange as backstory. How much more timeless they'd be if there wasn't a specific explanation of why and how the nuclear exchange happened.

And it can be fun for the reasons behind the disaster, at a general level at least, are hinted at by the setting and circumstances of the story. I still remember Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake. There were areas in that world that were contaminated by radiation, and it was pretty clear it was from bombs. But it wasn't made clear when, why or how this had happened, except that it was long ago.

Now if the story takes place more immediately after the disaster, then it's more realistic for the pov character to have some knowledge. In the story A Gift Upon the Shore, the story started shortly before the war that destroyed civilization, and the pov character was a survivor. But even so, the exact reasons for the war were left somewhat vague, though an epidemic and a severe economic crisis were mentioned, and the time frame could have been anywhere in the late 20th to early 21st century.

I don't like infodumps. If I'm told a backstory there needs to be a reason that I'm hearing the backstory with the more detailed the backstory, the more detailed the reason I need to know.

It can be done well both ways. Depends on the story and its individual execution.

Vague is better than bad. Info dump is bad, plot irrelevant is bad.

I want plausible, even in sci fi / fantasy. So if your world is post-apocalyptic because there was a giant nuclear war, you don't have to be all that specific - it's not hard to visualize, we all know the cultural narrative, and we all know what kind of destruction to envision from it. If your world is post-apocalyptic because magical vampires suddenly appeared and changed all the children into werewolves, though, I'm going to want to know where the heck these vampires have been hiding the whole time (and why they came now and why children and why werewolves).

In general, I think it's best to err on the side of vague unless it directly impacts the plot / sets up parallels with the story / leads into some sort of direct conflict. If the story isn't really about the inciting event at all, vague is best.

Vagueness seemed to work for McCarthy's The Road.

I'm writing a vauge post-apocalypse story. How it happened doesn't matter to my world, just that whatever it is led to the situation all my characters are in.

Of course, I know. And maybe it'll be relevant for a later story. But currently, all my characters have is legends. They're much more concerned with the after-effects.

(though I am in a weird position where I decided that whatever happened made magic and fairytales exist, so...)

It depends on the story of course, but if it's being billed as a 'dystopia' then I expect a fair amount of world building - that's the point of utopia/dystopia in fiction - is how the individual functions within the larger society. IMO, it requires more explicit detail.

Too vague and you run the risk of being generic, especially in a market that's allegedly saturated.

ETA: When it comes to 'before' - Most dystopias I've read were vague in that regard.

I like to have some idea of what happened, and the rules of dystopian are a bit different, but for straight-up apocalyptic, vague if fine by me. Just make sure it's consistent.

You can also sprinkle little hints through. Roxxsmom mentioned how there were areas covered by radiation in Dreamsnake. That's a good touch that gives some idea of what happened. I think, on some level, you have to question whether the characters should understand what happened. If it's been some time and the MC just stumbled out of a bomb shelter, it would be a little weird if he suddenly figured out everything that happened.

I want to know what happened, but not at the expense of the story. I'd rather have vague than info dumps, etc. I'd prefer the reasons for the change to be drawn out through the story. If it can't happen that way for any reason, keep it vague. I'll live.

For example, in The Hunger Games, the story takes place well enough afterward that I suspect Katniss has no clue about, and since her day to day existence was about survival at the beginning of the series, there's no reason for her to speculate. I'm cool with being left in the dark about it.

Not a fan of vague. Seems like lazy world building to me. Probably explains why I don't read very much of that genre. I like to know how and why the world ended up that way.

I think the caveat to this is when a character motivation hinges on some great reveal about how things are different than they expected - in that case, you need to be pretty specific upfront. If your character discovers 2/3 of the way through your story that the government was behind the zombies, for instance, that presupposes there was an alternate explanation for zombies before. It's incredibly unsatisfying for a reader to be muddling through a bunch of hand-waving vague "90% of people are dead because reasons" and then be hit with a bolt of ". . . but here's an incredibly specific twist which explains everything!" If your character is going to be curious enough to care about the new explanation, they had to have an old explanation they believed (or mostly believed) in the first place.

My only problem with post-apocalyptic (and other dystopian) futures is that they've become trendy to the point of de rigeur, much the same way that abundantly cheerful technologically advanced optimistic tales of the future were the canonical SF future for so long before the dystopias became trendy.

It wouldn't make me toss the book aside though, not in and of itself.

Xanthe said:

I worried about it seeming lazy, too.
But, imo, isn't it even more lazy to just choose two powerful countries that may/may not be current enemies and revert to nuclear war? Idk, it's so hard to decide because I don't want it to sound like a generic 'plague' or 'war' situation.

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Lazy? Maybe, but a lot of us grew up under the constant threat of nuclear war and for many of us, it seemed inevitable, so using a generic nuclear holocaust as the catalyst is plausible.

But I should also have qualified my response with "whatever works best for the story." I just remembered I have the.beginnings of my own holocaust story where everyone is back in a stone age society and I've yet to figure out what caused it, but since the society is so retarded, none of them have any recollection of the world before or what happened. But I think one thought was simply a dinosaur-extincting type meteor had hit Earth.

Xanthe said:

I was reading a dystopian sci-fi book recently and started to dislike it a lot because of the ridiculous exposition about how the world ended up getting destroyed..the author actually spelled everything out like "The US went to war with China and nuclear fallout etc, etc, etc"

I love how some dystopian books say very little about what happened to the world (Hunger Games) and leave it up to the reader to fill in the blanks. Do you prefer vague post-apocalyptic background or explicitly explained ones?

Thanks for your help. I was thinking about writing a dystopian story.

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I think the only way to know is to write it as you want to write it, then see the reactions you get with test readers. If everyone keeps asking 'whys' then you know you didn't provide enough information.

There is a difference between leaving some things to the imagination and leaving so much out that readers cannot connect to the story or to the characters

JFitchett92 said:

Be careful not to be too vague and miss out important details, the last book of the Wool trilogy did this. SPOILER ALERT:

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At which point I'm like -- so then why does anyone go there?? or did they fence off the destroyed part so people there think it's the whole world?

I think your post-apoc should be as detailed or as vague as it is to the characters who inhabit it, and in context to what they'd reasonably know. The older generation might remember the war, but no one talks about it; the younger generation think the giant monkeybars (skeletons of buildings) were grown for their amusement.

The old people might have made a conscious decision not to talk about the 'Beforetimes' to their kids and grandkids - knowing full well that it would depress the youth. After all, what's so impressive you could do when a hundred years ago humans seemed to have magical abilities! (Like at the near-end of Day Of The Triffids).

It's a fine line alright; clear enough that the reader's got some idea what happened (though not the truth), but not so detailed that the story becomes dated six months after writing. The problem is that many dystopian books are not much more than author tracts and have the subtlety of an WWII bombing raid.

i don't mind vague at the start but if the book ends without an explanation then i feel cheated. It would take great writing for me to overlook it

Occurs to me that I actually do have a post-diaspora apocalypse behind my story... but it was 8000 years ago and all that remains is a ball of rock that used to be a viable planet, which is pretty much all anyone knows about it. So it's vague by definition.