The Waste is a strange place. Long gone is the old world with buildings taller than trees and massive cities home to millions. Now The Waste is a world of the barest survival where bullets are used as money and ownership of a single book is a sign of great wealth. But especially in the bleakest settings, a person must always be aware of death. This time, death is flowing over The Waste in unstoppable hoards of vicious killers on horseback… And only a single man and woman can stop it. But he doesn’t care. And she cares too much.
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Before you click “download”…
One autumn evening mid-2014 some friends and I started talking about what the world would be like 100 years after civilization-as-we-knew-it was destroyed. We weren’t interested the panic and terror of the day after the “bomb dropped”, but instead wanted to know what life would be like 100 years later, as mankind attempted to rebuild its lost world.
Some ideas were:
– People would have abandoned the cities and reverted to living in tribes, moving from one place to another looking for safety in numbers.
– No infrastructure, mass power-generation or worldwide economy meant people would forget how to manufacture things. Societies’ knowledge might revert to what it was in the 17th and 18th centuries.
– Some people, as they traveled in their mobile tribes over the landscape, would hold onto things like appliances as memories from the “old world” and power them using left over solar panels and batteries. But these remaining appliances (toasters, ovens, blenders, bread machines…) would be signs of wealth, not necessities. And since the people of this world wouldn’t have the ability to make new parts for broken appliances there would be fewer and fewer of them remaining in usable condition year after year.
– There would be guns since they don’t wear out or break easily, bullets too, though bullets would be scarce, and growing scarcer by the year as shell casings wore out and became useless. This unique combination of scarcity and utility would ensure bullets would likely function as some type of money or currency.
– And books! Books would contain memories of a past great world as well as knowledge, and as we all know, knowledge is power!
We spent hours that night discussing the ins and outs of this potential future world. Somewhere in those late hours I gave this world a name, a name that made perfect sense to me then, and still does today, it became “The Waste”.
What would motivate the people in the Waste? How would they survive? Would they hold on to those elements of civilized society or revert to the feral life of the wild?
Days after this conversation I still couldn’t get the idea of “The Waste” out of my head! I had so many questions, so many ideas on how it could have evolved and how it could be destroyed. In my mind’s eye I saw the heroes of The Waste and its villains, its strength’s and its follies.
Finally, I couldn’t postpone it anymore. With a thousand questions in my head, I sat down at my desk and typed those two fateful words, those two words that have begun so many personal journeys.
Those words were:
“Chapter One”
What followed over the months became RazorWire.
If this sounds like the sort of tale you would like I would love to share it with you. But if you read it, please remember:
RazorWire has guns in it. But it’s not a story about guns.
RazorWire has survival in it. But it’s not a story about base survival.
In-the-end, RazorWire is the story of people, the story of humans and the depths they are willing to go to for one another. It’s about loyalty and it’s about desperation. It’s about apathy and it’s about hope.
If this sounds like a story you would like then I hope you enjoy it. if it does
