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Old 08-27-2016, 11:51 PM   #48
fchase8
 
Join Date: Dec 2015
Location: New York, NY
Default Re: Lucy's Choice: Let's make Lucifer Parallels!

The Kudzo world reminds me of The Genocides by Thomas Disch. It's giant, inedible trees whose seeds are sprayed all over the surface of the earth, to feed an alien race.


J.G. Ballard's first three novels, The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, and The Burning World, all had Hell scenarios: a powerful wind whipping across the world, rising sea levels turning the Earth into a sunken prehistoric swamp, and a film develops over the oceans to prevent evaporation & rain, respectively.


Incommunicado - A Chinese bioweapon unleashed during the China-Vietnam war in the late seventies gets loose, and renders everyone unable to speak, or to read. By 1984, the first world is only barely getting by with ramshackle piecemeal infrastructure & pidgin sign language, while cruel socialist warlordism controls the rest of the planet.

The initial I-Scouts got the condition, and while it hasn't spread to Homeline, no cure has been found. Now the infected I-Scouts are looking for anyone who might have even a partial immunity (secret speakers or secret readers).


Insomnia - In the twenties people become unable to sleep, and slowly start going crazy. By 1935, there are only the feral crazies, 'quiets' who keep the insanity at bay by living boring pastoral lives with as little stimulus as possible, and the 'louds', who get their demons out by brilliant/insane artistic creation and dissemination.

Not a biological virus, more psychic, psychological, kind of like a viral meme, it infected the first I-Scouts and the worldline was closed. But Infinity still has beacons that monitor radio waves, and somehow there are still radio stations transmitting maddening radio plays and the like from such places as Paris' Left Bank and New York's Greenwich Village.


Slumber - In 1975 a sleeping sickness takes over that causes people to sleep more & more, eventually about six days out of seven. While the third world fell apart, the first & second maintained a somnolent peace. Everything is very socialist, as it takes seven people on different sleep schedules to share a single job. But people also need less to eat and the like, even seem to be aging slower.

Twenty-five years later, the whole world is a sleepy echo of what life was like before "The Big Sleep" began. Culture is even stuck in pre-sleep world, with what little produced just mimicking pre-sleep life. Indeed, governments seem to be controlling research into The Big Sleep, and actively suppressing any original art that takes on The Big Sleep (as well as dream analysis).

Infinity hasn't sent any I-Scouts in yet, fearful of the infection, but monitors the airwaves.
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