: Re: Is a nuclear apocalypse cliche? My post-apocalyptic novel occurs in 2122. In canon events, around the year 2018, after many years of global war, a chain reaction caused the launching of all

@Jessie137

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is the whole "nuclear apocalypse" premise overdone? Will the mention/implication of this tire out a reader or seem lazy or boring?

It does not sound imaginative.

That is me being thoughtful about the word I choose. It does not "spark the imagination".

My thought is not "lazy", but it feels carbon dated. The "joke" of the Fallout video game franchise is that the world ended in nuclear apocalypse in the 1950s.

Maybe the part where it was "a chain reaction" is a little lazy. "We don't know what happened," is ok if you really don't want to bother coming up with a pretext for global war.

There are interesting branches of science going on currently: the search for sub-atomic particles at CERN, the creation of artificial viruses with CRISPR, the impending collapse of our ecosystem, or the overdue flipping of the Earth's magnetic polarity. A few months ago a large pancake-shaped asteroid whizzed past our sun from another solar system – meteor impacts have caused problems on Earth before.

I just gave 5 apocalyptic scenarios which are "no fault/no conflict", so they don't really need a backstory. You could get up to speed on some current science with a few video lectures. Some could be tweaked to include "exotic" side effects: sub-particles could damage chromosomes in strange ways. A viral medication could have mutated. An asteroid from another star might be created from, idk, negaverse star material.

See, the problem with nuclear fallout causing super powers is that we dropped a lot of nukes back in the 1950s-60s. That's when this trope began. It's now (checks watch) many generations later and we still don't have super powers. That possibility that we are all potential X-Men seems to be a bust. Chernobyl still exists, people go there and post pics online (also no super powers).

If I want to read an old-timey apocalypse, it should be a retro or satire story. A science-fiction setting begs for fresh ideas, pick something that hasn't expired – it's not as though it's crucial to your worldbuilding. Look through some science articles for inspiration. You don't need a science degree any more than you needed to understand nuclear physics.

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