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Joshua Gayou
Commune Book One
Commune Book One
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For dinosaurs, it was a big rock. For humans: Coronal Mass Ejection (CME).
When the Earth is hit by the greatest CME in recorded history (several times larger than the Carrington Event of 1859), the combined societies of the planet's most developed nations struggle to adapt to a life thrust back into the Dark Ages.
In the United States, the military scrambles to speed the nation's recovery on multiple fronts including putting down riots, establishing relief camps, delivering medical aid, and bringing communication and travel back on line.
Just as a real foothold is established in retaking the skies (utilizing existing commercial aircraft supplemented by military resources and ground control systems), a mysterious virus takes hold of the population, spreading globally over the very flight routes that the survivors fought so hard to rebuild. The communicability and mortality rates are devastating, leaving only small pockets of survivors scattered throughout the countryside.
Commune Book One is the story of one small group of survivors who must adapt to a primitive, hostile world or die. As they learn the rules of this new era, they must decide how far they're willing to go to continue living, continually asking themselves the same question daily: is survival worth the loss of humanity?
From the Author:
What I ended up writing was a zombie story without all the zombies. I'm a big fan of the post apocalypse survival genre and a lot of my favorite works in the arena involve zombies. That being said, I didn't want to write another zombie book. Even in those books that do involve the zombies (those that I enjoy, anyway), the zombies are only really a threat for so long before such encounters become routine. When zombies become normal, the real and more extreme danger always presents itself: other humans. To my mind, the most fascinating subject matter is explored when the story starts dealing with competition between surviving communities for limited resources and how they choose to behave in these situations. In my book, I just wanted to skip the zombie part altogether and dive right in to dealing with who I believe have the potential to be the scariest, most threatening monsters: us.
When I wrote this book, I was looking (in part) to create a story that veers away from a lot of the standard tropes that I've been seeing in the genre (everyone always turns into opportunistic savages, the military is evil, and so on).
There are definitely evil people in this story but I wanted to explore the idea that there is a world of difference between your basic, boring, mustache-twirling evil and a person who is basically decent but focused only on looking out for himself. One of the primary themes I work on is that it's very likely easier and safer in the short term to go "every man for himself", however you end up actively creating a world in which you wouldn't want to live. The characters in the story struggle with this concept, having to establish a balance between preservation of self and preservation of humanity.
Additionally, the story is delivered in the form of a first person narrative from people who may not necessarily want you to know every little thing about them. My intent is that, for some of the characters, you learn more about what makes them tick from what they don't say rather than what they do...
When the Earth is hit by the greatest CME in recorded history (several times larger than the Carrington Event of 1859), the combined societies of the planet's most developed nations struggle to adapt to a life thrust back into the Dark Ages.
In the United States, the military scrambles to speed the nation's recovery on multiple fronts including putting down riots, establishing relief camps, delivering medical aid, and bringing communication and travel back on line.
Just as a real foothold is established in retaking the skies (utilizing existing commercial aircraft supplemented by military resources and ground control systems), a mysterious virus takes hold of the population, spreading globally over the very flight routes that the survivors fought so hard to rebuild. The communicability and mortality rates are devastating, leaving only small pockets of survivors scattered throughout the countryside.
Commune Book One is the story of one small group of survivors who must adapt to a primitive, hostile world or die. As they learn the rules of this new era, they must decide how far they're willing to go to continue living, continually asking themselves the same question daily: is survival worth the loss of humanity?
From the Author:
What I ended up writing was a zombie story without all the zombies. I'm a big fan of the post apocalypse survival genre and a lot of my favorite works in the arena involve zombies. That being said, I didn't want to write another zombie book. Even in those books that do involve the zombies (those that I enjoy, anyway), the zombies are only really a threat for so long before such encounters become routine. When zombies become normal, the real and more extreme danger always presents itself: other humans. To my mind, the most fascinating subject matter is explored when the story starts dealing with competition between surviving communities for limited resources and how they choose to behave in these situations. In my book, I just wanted to skip the zombie part altogether and dive right in to dealing with who I believe have the potential to be the scariest, most threatening monsters: us.
When I wrote this book, I was looking (in part) to create a story that veers away from a lot of the standard tropes that I've been seeing in the genre (everyone always turns into opportunistic savages, the military is evil, and so on).
There are definitely evil people in this story but I wanted to explore the idea that there is a world of difference between your basic, boring, mustache-twirling evil and a person who is basically decent but focused only on looking out for himself. One of the primary themes I work on is that it's very likely easier and safer in the short term to go "every man for himself", however you end up actively creating a world in which you wouldn't want to live. The characters in the story struggle with this concept, having to establish a balance between preservation of self and preservation of humanity.
Additionally, the story is delivered in the form of a first person narrative from people who may not necessarily want you to know every little thing about them. My intent is that, for some of the characters, you learn more about what makes them tick from what they don't say rather than what they do...
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