Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Anyone know of post-apoc fiction that features storage units?
It feels like half the new construction in my town consists of these stupid, chunky self-storage buildings. Incredibly cheap materials. Similar but not identical layouts. They are fundamentally dead buildings, existing to facilitate brief visits and long periods of quiescence. Mausoleums for consumer goods.
This brought to mind the sci-fi tropes of “tech-mining,” delving the ruins of the past for lost and valuable resources. It’s a big part of certain genres of post-collapse sci-fi. Starsector (probably by way of Revelation Space), Hyperion Cantos, Battletech, arguably Foundation. I most recently saw a version in Iain Banks’ Matter, where an eroding waterfall progressively excavates the long-lost city buried beneath its cliff. The advanced alloys which withstood all that water are salvaged for building materials by a subsequent civilization. Evocative.
These tropes surely owe a lot to the post-apocalyptic genre. A Canticle for Liebowitz begins with a monk uncovering relics in a lost fallout shelter. Not anything useful, mind you, but cultural artifacts of immeasurable value. An apocalypse is perhaps the easiest explanation for how the ancients had something we can no longer get for ourselves.
There’s a game called Caves of Qud dotted with ruins from a long-dead civilization:
You can trudge through a futuristic jungle only to stumble upon these bones of the former world, populated by tribal robots and sentry turrets. Descend into the caves like a true arconaut, and you’ll find even greater treasure…
In our current reality, how much of that “treasure” is piled in storage units? Boring-ass grids of concrete with one, maybe two garage doors between the loot and the outside world. If the bombs dropped today, any future generations would face the most boring, practical version of tech-mining: cleaning out the attic. “Yeah, we cleared out the mutants from sector 35. Found another one of those metal crypts. Bring the boys over; we can probably find each of them a golf club.”
Star Citizen's 'end-game' revolves around a lot of this stuff, just with slightly different names:
(though the Oynx facilities and Lazarus facilities, as quasi-active research labs, don't quite fit.)
SC's in a fuzzy zone about whether it's post-apocalyptic. The post-Messr human empire is supposed to be in the middle of a Rome/Byzantium split, so it's kinda the aftermath of a collapse culturally? But there hasn't really been a decrease in technological development (and several major advances), so much as a lot of previously-restricted military, forbidden science, and alien tech is getting spilled into the player character's hands. The goods are valuable because they're rare to players, rather than being impossible to reproduce (yet).
That said, it's pretty rare for it to be purely consumer goods. Finding an abandoned freighter with a bunch of sound equipment (or, more often, drugs) is a win and a possibility, but it's tied to a rare and poorly documented gameplay loop.
No Man's Sky at least looks like it, but there's some spoiler-reasons that it doesn't actual real. And the alien outposts are weird enough and often-populated enough that they map poorly onto storage facilities.
Minecraft mods play with it a lot. DeceasedCraft's probably the most accessible version, where machines and equipment that would normally be the entry level into various tech mods are very hard to craft, and thus scavenging them from various buildings is a vital progression mechanism, with warehouses and storage facilities being an early-game target. Don't know of any modpacks where they're long-abandoned, though; DeceasedCraft is implied to be days or at most months after a zombie apocalypse.
For the real world, it's a funny story, but it gets complicated by the nature of those goods. Very few consumer electronics can survive a long period of anything less than ideal storage, and the buildings themselves are famously prone to various failure states. Same for anything made of paper or unfinished wood. Raw materials like plastic, titanium, aluminum, and high-grade steel may well last and be impractical to produce in a post-apocalyptic setting, but a lot of them wouldn't be plausible to manufacture into anything particularly useful.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link