Quantum Storytelling

I’m working on a part of my story where I wanted a betrayal to take place. The betrayal is being committed by a secondary character. I didn’t like that the character was introduced in the very scene where the betrayal occurs. That makes it somewhat… arbitrary?

Betrayal seems like it would be a more powerful meme if it’s coming from a character you care about. Even if the character is not completely endeared to the reader, the character should at least one that you’re somewhat familiar with.

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With titles like The Road nabbing the Pulitzer, World War Z being a popular title, and remake of The Omega Man, myself and others have been noticing that interest in post-apoc seems to be growing, at least from a creative standpoint.

Why has there been a recent surge?

According to Wil Wheaton over on Suicide Girls:

“…a lot of the same fears and geopolitical conflicts that dominated the post-WWII era when apocalyptic fiction really got started are alive and well today. We don’t have the Cold War, but we have terrorism, global warming, and a government that does everything it can to keep us in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. When we feel like this, one way we cope is by creating worlds where the worst of our fear have been realized, worlds where we can walk away if it gets too scary, and maybe it prepares us to deal with that world, should we create it for real.”

Smart guy. I think he’s right. The themes of my post-apoc universe are synthesized out of many of my personal fears, and looking at issues of the day and thinking, “What’s the worst that could happen?” More importantly, “How would we deal with it?”

It’s the essential what-if of all good sci-fi, post-apoc, and dystopian stories.

Thanks to our buddies over at SF Signal for the heads up on that one.

When I began writing I swore that I would not infodump in an excessive manner. So how do you impart background world information? You inclue it;

“Incluing is a technique of world building, in which the reader is gradually exposed to background information about the world in which a story is set.”

OR:

“The process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information.”

As a gamer, I’ve always had a natural appreciation for incluing. There are a multitude of examples in my favorite games, such as Half-Life, Fallout, and Oblivion. Because games are an interactive medium, they naturally inclue information to the player by distributing it throughout the world.

Fiction writers don’t have it so easy. The world is not revealed in an interactive manner, and so it is harder to inclue items about the world in a subtle fashion.

I have an odd solution to this, given I’m creating a metaseries media franchise.

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