That's what I was thinking too, HM: there's probably a variety of calenders in use at this time. I guessed that the setting is probably around 2072 in modern dates, but the protagonist and his family always used the drop off-calendar. The drop-off calendar is a lunar calendar that begins in the last year of the great war, right before humanity... fell apart. By this calendar the date is 42 PW, or 'post-war.' I don't know if this system uses traditional months so much as approximated 'seasons' which divide the year into fourths, but this is just a rough draft. It'll take some work to make a calendar that's both believable to readers and useful in-story.
There are still electronics that can effectively keep the date, but they're very few and far between. Using them as a standard has proven too much trouble, so the only ones that still follow them are the dedicated old nerds we discussed earlier, proudly keeping track of the Roman calendar for the last forty or so years.
A lot of sects in this world are using Christian and pseudo-Christian ideology. I wonder how they'd react to the sudden difficulty in knowing, say, which days are holy? To the extremely ritual-based groups, failing to acknowledge Christmas on the correct date could be considered blasphemy. I doubt the admittedly vague PW calendar would be satisfactory for them.
edited 26th Apr '11 8:38:56 AM by Takwin
I've returned from the depths to continue politely irritating the good people of Tv Tropes.(◕‿◕✿)Think about what is important to each individual group. If knowing when the Holy Days are is important to a group the will use a calendar conducive to those things and have scholars who calculate such things. Christmas is fairly easy as it is both a fixed date and 3 days after an equinox. I have no clue how they figure out when Easter is. There are and have been Christian and Christian based groups that don’t think Holy Days are particularly important. The Puritans banned Christmas (the scrooges).
True: not all sects celebrate Christmas, but most will at least acknowledge it. Didn't the Puritans attend a particularly lengthy sermon on that date? I'm afraid I'm not too well versed in the 17th century Puritanical doctrine.
Most sects in this part of the post-dropoff world are rooted in either the Church of Christ (think Southern US orthodox Christianity; no dancing, no drinking, etc,) or Catholicism. The ceremonies and ideals they observe are similar to these two religions, although more extreme variations are common as new preachers come around and start tweaking things to their own interpretations.
It's likely that these ritual-based organizations have calendars which revolve around holy days. Good Friday, Easter and Christmas are as set in stone to them as the solstice. Maybe they don't make an issue out of the ever-jumping date of Easter/Good Friday because they've based their calendar around those days, making them fixed seasonal markers.
The PW (post-war) calendar I described earlier might be the area's common language, used as a vague median between groups. Even if it fails to outline their holy days, most groups will accept it from travelers for the sake of communication. Anyone who can't at least comprehend the date in PW years would probably be considered uneducated or exceedingly isolated, though that's not to say it doesn't happen.
Another tough question: what about guns? Gun use is pretty prolific in my setting, but do you think that many (or any at all) firearms would survive this long? I'm sure that at least the well-made models which have been purposefully maintained would hold out, but what about fresh-from-the-factory plastic pistols that had never been fired? Would their delicate inner workings, if untouched and non-degradable, still be viable after all these years?
I've returned from the depths to continue politely irritating the good people of Tv Tropes.(◕‿◕✿)You're more likely to have a problem with the ammunition than the guns. While Black Powder can be made relatively simply, other forms of "gun powder" are slightly more complicated.
Guns themselves vary widely, some will be very finicky and need maintenance after every round of shooting, others will just work and work and work.
If you don't name names, or make up your own, you can go either way.
I've got an idea for the guns used by the main characters: A Glock 17 2nd generation, a Beretta M9 pistol, an M14 rifle and a sawed-off Mossberg 500 shotgun. It always feels more realistic when an author does the research, but I'm afraid of backing myself into a corner with the details.
I've returned from the depths to continue politely irritating the good people of Tv Tropes.(◕‿◕✿)
Well, I know Oliver Cromwell was infamous for supposedly doing this, but I'm not certain whether it's apocryphal and what the real historical context was.
What did this have to do with the topic again?
Haha, I love tangents and useless information. So the ancient Puritans didn't approve of Christmas... Well, the more you know.
Anyhow, I do actually have access to someone with a solid firsthand knowledge of guns, (my granddad,) so I could do a little more research. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to reference these models while drawing but never directly name them? For instance, I know that the generic term for a sawed-off shotgun is 'lupara', meaning 'for the wolf' in Italian. ...Makes sense, as no one's using a sawed-off gun for hunting deer, but the term came to be a euphemism for a particularly dangerous predator one might face in close quarters.
Also, thank you for the information on calendars, Knight. I need to jot that down somewhere; it could be really important later on.
edited 4th May '11 6:36:10 AM by Takwin
I've returned from the depths to continue politely irritating the good people of Tv Tropes.(◕‿◕✿)Sorry for the bump, but I just thought of a title for this story: "Meager Cure." It comes from the fact that the character's quest to unlock Farren's immunity is almost Quixotic in its unlikeliness, but still so potentially important that they continue searching anyway. It's a possibility so slim but so precious that people are willing to risk everything for it. A tiny chance at success, a paltry hope, a meager cure. What do you think?
edited 11th May '11 7:32:34 PM by Takwin
I've returned from the depths to continue politely irritating the good people of Tv Tropes.(◕‿◕✿)That would be nice, but I feel like it would be a little obvious. I named Farren before I knew exactly what her abilities were, and the name suits her. Besides, I just can't get "Meager Hope" to flow as well as "Meager Cure" in my head.
Question: how advanced do you think the environmental damage would be? I know that this world has a big problem with desertification, although the deserts seem to have stopped spreading in the last 20 years or so. (There's always a few isolated watchdogs who've been keeping track of these things.) A lot of US population centers have been converted to dustbowls, mostly due to chemical and radioactive pollution. What I wonder is how far I can carry this idea before it becomes implausible.
I've returned from the depths to continue politely irritating the good people of Tv Tropes.(◕‿◕✿)I think it could vary wildly from place to place. However after 40 years you would expect some environmental recovery.
There are plants and wildlife in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Not necessarily normal wildlife. I read a National Geographic article about this guy who made a career studying the mutant insects near Chernobyl.
It makes sence that there could be a lot of huge forbidding desserts but even there life would probably find a way. Probably spiky, poisonous, scary-ass life of some sort.
That's true. The Chernobyl incident is a great example of way life can regrow after a nuclear fallout. However, the idea I'm dealing with here is more about the expansion of deserts. When grasslands loose all their foliage and the soil's too poor (or too contaminated) to restore them, the area becomes a desert. It takes many years and a great number of factors to start a dustbowl recovery, and I just don't think that some locations in this world have gotten it yet. In order for life to return there needs to be something growing, and if the soil lacks nutrients or sufficient rain to wash away the poisons, it could be a long time before anything changes. Think of how many farmlands in the US are sustained by man made irrigation systems. Cut off that water and strip the land of all its soil quality and voila: instant desert. Basically, it's a recreation of what happened in the 20th century Oklahoma dustbowl, just on a much bigger scale. Only a few life forms can survive in this setting, most of them, as you said, are wholly spiky and unpleasant.
A lot of places that are still uninhabitable to humans are beginning to regrow, however. Again the Chernobyl incident provides an excellent example; aside from some odd color mutations and abnormal development in insects, the fauna of the fallout zone has showed surprisingly little damage. Animals that used to be expunged from the area by man are slowly returning, like endangered lynxes and bears. The site of one of our biggest environmental disasters has effectively turned into a nature preserve. What's more, nature seems to be actively repairing our mistakes on its own. Cracked.com sums it up well: http://www.cracked.com/article_19133_6-ways-nature-cleans-up-our-messes-better-than-we-do.html
So I imagine that a lot of cities and towns abandoned by humans have become feral and overgrown, while a lot of once verdant farmlands have gone barren. But as a general rule, people avoid former population centers unless they're wearing some kind of hazmat protection, while empty fields and scenic townships are considered safe.
@ Blueharp: Thanks for the tip. I was using the depression-era South as an example, but the more recent the better. There are also quite a few places like this in China, as I've heard, and the steady growth and expansion of the Mongolian Desert is a pressing concern over there.
@ Historymaker: Thank you. I confess to hopelessly shilling for that thing since it gets zero activity, but I'm glad someone finds it entertaining rather than annoying.
Now here's another ugly question that just hit me: the gas masks... How the hell do they still work? I know that most gas masks use filters, often replaceable, to purify air as the wearer inhales, but how did these filters survive into the post-apocalyptic world? I know that masks are a very valuable commodity in this world, and often a must-have for scavengers, (two of my protagonists wear them regularly,) but how does anyone keep them maintained? This could be a big problem that I might, worst case scenario, rely on Bellisario's Maxim to cover.
I've returned from the depths to continue politely irritating the good people of Tv Tropes.(◕‿◕✿)

Interesting question. It's been like 40 years since there was any federal government right? I think by then different groups may have different ideas about keeping track of time. Your group with the computers would know the exact time and date AD and pride themselves on that. Other groups may keep decent track of the date with a perpetual calendar or a reusable desk calendar. Some may consider it to be 2067 AD while other call it the year 43 AE(after the end). Some groups may kick it way old school and go with a lunar calendar that emphasizes equinoxes and solstices. Some charicters (like feril children) may have no clue of the date.