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This is the third in our weapons trilogy and it's about what happens AFTER the ultimate weapons have done their work: Apocalypse! The end of all things… This term comes from the bible, with the Book of Revelations which talks about what happens during the end of the world, but aside from the myth it's a pretty real concept- there are a LOT of ways the world can end and has indeed ended for various civilisations throughout history.
If you want to go riiiiight back there were the different mass extinction events that ended almost all life a few times on this planet. In the history of humanity we have the fall of Rome, an event that was felt for almost 1000 years in Western Europe! It ended technological development, scientific research, the progress of culture, communication, trade, and production were shut down. Development atrophied and technology reversed and reverted. Meanwhile in Northern Africa, the middle east, South America and China advanced empires flourished, but that didn't stem the rot in Europe because there was little contact, communication or trade. There are other examples of this but that's the main one that comes to mind.
Modern fiction is replete with a lot of different apocalypse and post apocalypse stories in many different forms (both natural, man made, and mythological). After the second world war the major influence was the idea of nuclear annihilation. A famous early example was On The Beach, a chilling film about American sailors on a submarine who survive the initial Apocalypse. They come to Australia in the Southern hemisphere and try and rally because life seems almost normal there, but when they travel back to the US to find survivors they learn everyone is dead that and the nuclear fallout will eventually even kill the people in the southern hemisphere down in Australia. The whole planet has an inescapable death sentence so all that's left is to choose how and when they will die.
20 years later 1979 famously gave us Mad Max! Which was a beginning of a whole genre of crazy low budget ultra violent deiselpunk post-apocalypse SciFi with muscle cars and torn leather. In this first movie it's pretty tame, we assume that society is slowly breaking down after an apocalypse but people are still keeping things going nevertheless. Max is a leather-clad highway policeman with a wife and child. Pretty soon though a road gang ends his little slice of normalcy and the Road Warrior is born. After that the world of the Mad Max films becomes more and more chaotic and alien, totally divorced from any connection to our present day society. This spawned many imitators, usually terrible but sometimes strangely amazing.
What are some of your fave stories in the genre? The cover of this Quackcast is inspired by the 1985 Canadian film Defcon 4 (an image originally created in 1976 by Angus McKie). A Canticle for Lebowitz is a seminal story in the genre, about the preservation of culture and technology after an Apocalypse and how that can help rebuild things and that humans will inevitably repeat the same mistakes… Hell comes to Frogtown is an amazing and fun take on the dieselpunk post-apocalypse genre and definitely a fave of mine. But I think my faves would have to be The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham. Often thought of as “cozy catastrophes” because even though the world as we know it ends and the characters have to re-adapt they do it in a very level-headed way and they find a new normal- that is actually one of the very few absolutely accurate and realistic takes on what happens during and after a real Apocalypse which is why I appreciate it so much: life goes on, it's not the same but you do what you can to make it that way.
What do you think? A fan of Waterworld, Fallout, Terminator 2, The Walking Dead, The End, Radioactive dreams, Don't look up, something more fun or more depressing?
This week Gunwallace has given us a theme inspired by The KAMics - Relaxed, the coolest of the cool. Kick back and let go to this breezy, slow track with a killer, bopping beat! You could listen to this forever, it’s so soothing and calming.
Topics and shownotes
Links
Featured comic:
Plague Rat - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/news/2024/nov/18/featured-comic-plague-rat/
Featured music:
The KAMics - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/The_KAMics/ - by Kam, rated T.
Special thanks to:
Gunwallace - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Gunwallace/
Ozoneocean - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/ozoneocean
Tantz Aerine - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Tantz_Aerine/
Banes - https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/user/Banes/
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Quackcast 715 - Apocalypse
Ozoneocean at 12:00AM, Nov. 26, 2024
Apocalypse,
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Featured comic,
featured music,
Gunwallace,
Ozoneocean,
Plague Rat,
Quackcast 715,
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The KAMics,
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7 likes!
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Ozoneocean at 4:14PM, Nov. 26, 2024
@Kam- Thanks man I will go through and change it all when I have time!
Ozoneocean at 4:14PM, Nov. 26, 2024
@Paul- I agree very much. Real falls are slow... But if we keep up communication and trade lines as well as technological development, learning, information storage and production then we will endure and prosper.
Ozoneocean at 4:12PM, Nov. 26, 2024
@bravo- Yup- Early civilisations had a LOT of fits and starts :( Humanity could have failed back then...
KAM at 4:07PM, Nov. 26, 2024
Oh, that link is for my cast page, the link for The KAMics is https://www.theduckwebcomics.com/The_KAMics/
KAM at 4:06PM, Nov. 26, 2024
Cool song! Thanks, Gunwallace! :-D
PaulEberhardt at 11:12AM, Nov. 26, 2024
As so often, lately, I very much hope I'm wrong.
PaulEberhardt at 11:08AM, Nov. 26, 2024
The Children of Men by P.D. James, On the Beach by Nevil Shute, and quite a number of others, some of which I had to make my students read and thus have felt too much like work ever since. The ones I named stand out as they portray the apocalypse as a slow, painful process of creeping decline, and that's what it'll probably be like - or already is like? Let's face it: ageing populations are a thing, ruthless leaders with their finger on certain red buttons are still (again) a thing, wilful collective dumbing down is a thing (now accelerated by AIs), impending ecological doom is a thing... The ancient Romans certainly didn't wake up one day only to find their empire had vanished over night, to then suddenly croak with a last shocked exclamation of "Eheu, excrementa ventilatorem percusserunt!"* It took centuries to crumble down, at least - and only if you don't count its legal successors. (*And there's certainly a reason why classical Latin is a regular school subject over here.)
bravo1102 at 5:06AM, Nov. 26, 2024
I did research and create a curriculum for Middle School Medieval Studies so I just might be familiar with the subject of early Middle Ages preservation of Classical learning and how it influenced the Carolingian Renaissance as well as the later foundation of Universities.
bravo1102 at 5:01AM, Nov. 26, 2024
Canticle for Liebowitz was in part based on how Monastic culture preserved the works of Classical Civilization after the fall of Rome during the Early Middle Ages. One famous work on this is How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill.
bravo1102 at 4:56AM, Nov. 26, 2024
About the Bronze Age Collapse one good work is 1177 BC :The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H.Cline. He just released a follow-up continuing the story in After 1177 BC. The Fall of Civilizations podcast did an episode on it with a lot of it based on Cline's book. I visited Santorini when I was in the Eastern Mediterranean a few years back. The Thera theory of Atlantis has been pretty well debunked as there was a much more recent submergance event for Plato to use as opposed to one dimly remembered from over five centuries before. World of Antiquity YouTube channel has a good recent video on it by historian David Miano. Collapse by Jared Diamond is a good general work on how societies unravel that Cline based some of his book on as well as debunks.
Ozoneocean at 4:29AM, Nov. 26, 2024
Yeah, we chatted somewhat about the fall of the bronze age in the cast, or at last the fall of the Minoan empire and how that gave rise to the Mycenaeans.
Ozoneocean at 4:28AM, Nov. 26, 2024
Ah, the fist of the North Star was a crazy anime 😅 very Mad Max haha!
marcorossi at 3:08AM, Nov. 26, 2024
In addition to the fall of the Roman empire, there was also a similar event in the broinze age, the Late Bronze Age Collapse ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse ). Some people believe that the legend of Atlantis is actually a distant memory of the explosion of the Thera volcano, an event that happened more or less in the same period and at least contributed to the collapse. In terms of Mad Max descendants, when I was a teen (early teens) Fist of the North Star was all the rage in Italy (well in my age bracket at least), and that show (wuxia + Mad Max, basically) was constantly re-run on low budget TV channels for ages. It also influenced a lot of later products, most evidently JoJo but also many citations in a whole generation of mangakas/anime authors. It was a very "macho" product.