>>1220521>>1220584I'm not doing this for an "unidentified event" or "cyberpunk" tech levels with no actual explanation. The hell you mean "Archaic, but cyberpunk-esque"?
># of survivorsY2K: everyone is alive, but all tech is dead and starvation is imminent.
Nuclear armageddon: small rural towns that endured a nuclear winter are alive, often in the hundreds.
SeveneveS: Earth's surface is scrubbed, and the dozens of survivors are in the hundreds, and either in space or deep underground.
Mad Max: World is comically ruined, survivors are in the dozens, rarely hundreds per site.
>How long they've had to buildMad Max: 10s of years
Fallout: 100s of years
Seveneves: 1000s of years.
"Post-apocalyptic" is not a setting, it's a theme. The theme is "if we fell down the staircase of progress and wound up a pile of broken bones at the bottom, could we get back up, and would we repeat the same mistakes?".
The setting is important because it establishes exactly what was wrong before and how far we have to climb back.
Mad Max is about greed and power. Lord Humongus, Immortan Joe and Master Blaster are willing to waste what's left of society to maintain their power. The implication is that men like them were responsible for the apocalypse. You don't have to explain why there's no water, why there are mega-storms, or what happened to the rest of the world. You just have to point at the cause.
I'm going overboard, since I forgot this was /n/ and this is all vaguely academic put-puttering, but it just gets my goat when someone acts like "post-apocalyptic" is something everyone should know.
Better question for the thread: What affect will Venezuela's imminent collapse have on urban planning in the country? I think people are going to be more interested in growing their own food when this is over, and people are going to flee to the suburbs.
