Subject: I've never seen apocalyptic fiction done right.
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Posted on: 2015-06-26 17:56:00 UTC

Which saddens me, because I love dystopian stuff in general and I'm a Christian, so it would be right up my alley... But I've read plenty and I've never seen it done right.

You'd think it would be really easy. It's certainly tempting. Revelation has the plot right there for you--good guys, bad guys, monsters, natural disasters, and even a relatively happy ending. But that's also part of the problem. Depending on how literally you take it, now you have to try to tell a story that's already been written, in ancient poetic language, but tell it in the modern or future era in realistic writing.

The result seems to be a narrative completely overrun by plot holes as the authors assume that just because it fits into the Revelation narrative, they can declare that it happens in the modern world and they don't have to justify its causes or effects. Everything becomes one gigantic deus ex machina, and in the conversion God becomes so inconsistent, capricious, and downright insane that you could mistake him for a three-year-old stomping on a sand castle. People become statistics, the heroes become incorruptible and the villains irredeemable. It's generally a huge mess.

The best apocalyptic fiction I've seen haven't been sweeping whole-world narratives; they've been short stories, snapshots of what a world in such turmoil might look like, focused in on individual people just trying to survive and do the right thing in the middle of an apocalypse that's as much human-caused as anything else.

But those are few and far between. I've given up on it, mostly. People seem to think that just because something's religious, you don't have to write well.

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