Once upon a time—as the stories often start—there were some democratically minded people and some people who wanted to claim absolute power and rule over everyone. Maybe there was a space emperor, or maybe a kingdom with too many thrones. Many shenanigans ensued, possibly of the funny kind but more likely of the deadly sort; lives were ruined or changed, battles lost or won. In the end, someone triumphed. (Hopefully the democratically minded sort, but of course that isn’t always the case.) Cue the dramatic climax! And then it’s over.
Then what?
Who rebuilds the space stations or the roads or the castles? Who gets married, who leaves town, who runs off to restart their career as a smuggler? What happens when the democratically minded find another would-be dictator in their ranks? What does day-to-day life look like in the future brought about by all those battles and conflicts? Different, right? Hopefully better?
This is what I want to read about right now. And really, it’s what I’ve wanted to read about—and watch—for a very long time. I want to know what happened after humans got the ability to leave the Matrix. I want to know how all those freshly crowned rulers at the end of stories go about their ruling. I loved Tehanu the best of all the Earthsea books because while it isn’t about rebuilding, it is about the after—the quiet part of Ged’s life, when the story no longer belongs to him. The center moves around. It can’t hold still.
These stories feel hard to come by—and I feel greedy, sometimes, asking for them. It isn’t so much that I want a million sequels (I really don’t! I swear!) as that I want more stories that are about rebuilding, returning, reacting, and the change that comes after the transformative moment.
Do you ever find odd themes like this in the stories you love? I didn’t clock, at first, that this is a thing of mine, but then I was thinking about what I’ve been reading, and what I missed in that reading, and there it was: the aftermath. (It’s entirely possible I started reading Star Wars books again because Chuck Wendig’s post-Return of the Jedi novel was called, appropriately, Aftermath.) I didn’t clock that this is one of the things I adore about Rakesfall, that many of the stories take place after something else happened. Something caused the dead to walk in Luriat. Someone organized the regreening of the future Earth. But in the book, we’re not in those moments. We’re in what comes after.
What comes after is a different kind of narrative with a different kind of narrative tension—not, I think, about who wins, or who rises to the top, but about how we live in the midst of massive change. Maybe to some writers it can feel too instructive: After we save the world, we’ll fix it like this! But it doesn’t have to be in world-saving terms. Put another way: Forget the wedding. I want to know about the marriage. I want the long-term, the unplanned, the ordinary—which is never so ordinary after all.
There’s always another story. There’s Wicked, which borrows beats we think we know, and then there’s Son of a Witch, in which Elphaba’s son exists in the world after her. (Then there’s the whole Maracoor trilogy, which is an entirely different and beautiful kind of after.) There is, to switch to TV for a moment, the entirety of Battlestar Galactica, which is not about the robot disaster but about how a small number of people survive it and keep going. It has its own battles and dramatic arcs, because things don’t stop in the after. But it is, in a way, an oddity. The “before” story, in the form of Caprica, was never as compelling. What was important wasn’t how we got to that point, the Cylon destruction point; it was the story of how humanity kept living and changing that resonated so vividly. (The upcoming James S.A. Corey book has some things in common with that story, come to think of it.)
The Lord of the Rings, famously, includes quite a bit of the after—the scouring of the Shire, the impossibility of living a life long since left behind. (There is probably more after in the appendices, which I confess I never got through.) Another story might have ended with a coronation, but no: What it means to live in that world (or not), after that adventure, is a key part of the story.
There are, by now, quite a lot of post-climate-disaster books set in the slightly more distant future, once the new world order has been organized, but not so many that I can think of about the organizing of that new (and often terrible) world order. Station Eleven goes from the terrible thing happening to the new normal that comes years later—and I love it, but still, I want that middle time. Andrea Hairston’s wondrous Archangels of Funk feels like it sits in the late middle; the Water Wars have happened, but things haven’t all shaken out just yet. People are still organizing and sorting themselves out in fascinating and varied ways.
Are these stories out there? Am I just looking in the wrong places? I guess it’s a hard sell: You missed the big moment, but here’s what happened next! But there is always something else happening, some further piece of the story that’s just, maybe, not what you expected. Kristin Cashore, in the Graceling Realm books, has made a whole series of the way things keep happening. The reason Bitterblue is one of my most favorite books is because it is exactly the kind of thing I’m yearning for: A newly elevated ruler trying to understand what came before, and how to do better. It’s difficult, and there are so many terrible secrets, but she gets there eventually.
But what about when it’s not a ruler, a dynastic heir ascending a throne? What about when it’s people making a new system, a new structure, a new way to be? What if I just want to be reminded, fictionally speaking, that another world is possible, even in the wake of disaster and near-defeat? It’s not the battle I want to read about anymore. It’s how we survive—and change—in its wake.
F. Paul Wilson had a perhaps unintentionally amusing twist on the Coming Inevitable Libertarian Victory, in that while Peter LaNague was able to non-violently topple the old regime and strike off the shackles of Galactic Keynsianism, the federation that arose in the aftermath bore his name but comprehensively rejected his political views. In the end, glorious libertarianism was confined to one or two worlds, and the rest of the Federation pursued more conventional politics and economics.
Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree is kind of what happens after in that it follows the protagonist, an adventurer, after her last job when she changes careers to start a coffee shop using her savings from a life of action.
I remember wondering about this very idea while in a college creative writing class, what happens to all those chosen youths who spend their childhood training to defeat the dark one and now have no marketable skills? It turned into a short story assignment where the former chosen one tracks down the retired dark lord for another show down because he literally doesn’t know what else to do with his life.
Moon of the Crusted Snow follows an isolated community during the early days of an apparently apocalyptic event – the power goes down, communications are out and refugees eventually begin filtering in – but the focus is almost entirely on how they adapt to this new life rather than what caused it (so much so that I can’t remember what disaster sparked the events of the book).
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife series fits this idea to some extent. There was an apocalyptic disaster in the distant past, but now everyone is just living their lives with the aftermath. It’s anti-epic fantasy, in that the reward for successfully saving the world one day is the opportunity to go out and do the same thing the next.
I dote on George Stewart’s Earth Abides very much all about the after. The Day of the Triffids is another one.
I just listened to the BBC radio play of On the Beach, which as you know ends with all the characters dying from radioactive fallout and found myself wondering about the world that followed. Yes, we’re supposed to think the end of all life will soon follow but would it actually? There are some pretty hardy lifeforms out there. Even if all life did die, I bet the geological consequences would be interesting.
Sadly, Shute never wrote the obvious sequel about intelligent megatardigrades trying to make sense of the End Cenozoic Mass Extinction.
It’s not sci-fi/fantasy, but probably about half of Shute’s A Town Like Alice is after the main characters have gone through their Huge Life-Changing Events, and then… what then?
(their eventual answers to “what then” delighted me, tbh. I could have read way more about the processes.)
(note: the Huge Life-Changing Events are violent and traumatic and inhumane, so, uh, caution re: the book as a whole. But the “building” part of the book is 90% cozy?)
Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Ethshar books span a very large timeframe. The Misenchanted Sword starts during the war, but mostly concerns the aftermath life of it’s main character and the aforementioned sword.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Redemptions Blade, and the sequels by other authors are all set in the aftermath of the fall of the Dark Lord.
House of Rust: https://reactormag.com/khadija-abdalla-bajabers-the-house-of-rust-wins-inaugural-ursula-k-le-guin-prize-for-fiction/. The hero defeats the monster very early in the book – how does she go back to living in her African village?
If manga counts here–Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is a lovely example of this sort of thing.
Another Japanese take is the anime Violet Evergarden, about a (physically and mentally) crippled ex-child soldier trying to adapt to life after the war and find a new purpose.
A lot of Glory Road is concerned with this — the hero has defeated the Big Bad, married the Galactic Queen, and lives in absolute luxury — and complete uselessness. What do you do with a retired hero?
The Dispossessed asks, quietly, once the Glorious Revolution has triumphed, how do you maintain your principals generations later, especially once human nature reasserts itself?
A Canticle For Leibowitz. Two thousand years of After, and then it turns out to be circular…
My most frequent comment, at the end of a book, is “and then what?”. The Road goes ever on, no story is ever really over (at least until the black holes have all evaporated and all the particles decayed), and I want to know what happened next.
Jo Walton’s The King’s Peace is a favorite for just this reason. The Arthur-figure beats the bad guys and then does the work to make a peace. All this while riffing on the Matter of Arthur and examining the social results of a fundamental change in religion.
This is sort of what I was hoping the Star Wars sequel trilogy would cover. Luke, Leia, Han and the Rebel Alliance saved the galaxy from the Empire–but then what happens when the generation that comes after has to pick up the pieces and try to secure a fragile new peace?
It would have been great to see a conflict between people trying to go back to the system they had before the Empire without acknowledging the flaws that were already present before the Emperor took over, people who do recognize the flaws in the old system and want to build something better, and of course people looking to take advantage of the lingering chaos and uncertainty to seize power for themselves.
Instead we basically just got the Empire vs. the Rebels again. Sigh.
We get a bit of this in the Ahsoka series, with the background business of the Republic trying to completely demobilize its military.
The old Legends-era continuity also spent a lot of its early days focusing on the birth and growing pains of the New Republic (and the arrival of opportunists, infiltrators, and people who thrived under the Rebellion not being at all suited to working for a proper rank-and-file organization).
Limyaael has a really good “rant” or essay, about this same topic in her Fantasy Rants, originally posted on Live Journal. Most of her fantasy rants are great, both funny & thought provoking in creating more creative fantasy. Though she does tend to skew towards making fantasy too realistic, if that makes sense. For example; she really enjoys Game of Thrones, but probably doesn’t enjoy Patricia McKillip’s work so much.
Anyway, this is a great article about a fascinating topic that isn’t used much in fantasy. One of the reasons might be because, for example, it’s easy to complain and start a rebellion but harder to make the rebellion actually succeed, as explained by Hello Future Me over on YouTube. Rebuilding, either from a natural disaster or a war, is harder (maybe?) than creating or starting one for a story. It’s not as common; as this article explains.
But stories we need more of, for sure.
Maybe if we had more, the idea of “war is bad” will become even stronger.
I think one of my favorite was Margaret Weis’ Ghost Legion which was a sequel novel to her Star of the Guardians sci-fi/space opera trilogy. While the original trilogy is a standard Star Wars knock-off, the sequel novel’s conclusion had me seriously re-think everything I thought about the original story.
“Re-building” stories might be a bit unintuitive because the problems & antagonist aren’t as clear as on other stories. Instead of “this is the bad guy, we need to figure out how to defeat them” it’s “here’s all these problems & conflicts because our rebellion succeeded / the kingdom needs rebuilding, etc.”
More complex maybe, but just as dramatic & gripping if done well.
This messes a bit with your premise because this world didn’t get saved, it kinda broke suddenly. But it fits beautifully with “A newly elevated ruler trying to understand what came before, and how to do better. It’s difficult, and there are so many terrible secrets, but she gets there eventually.”
In the aftermath of Astandalas breaking, the people go on about their lives, more or less damaged, as best as they can. Cliopher Mdang, the personal secretary to the Last Emperor, works hard to make things better for everyone. As described by Victoria Goddard in The Hands of the Emperor.
The whole series is wonderful.
I’ve had her work recommended to me so many times for so many reasons, and often seen Hands of the Emperor recommended as a good one to read if you love The Goblin Emperor (which I do!). I clearly need to get around to that book!
Her Greenwing and Dart books also deal a lot with the aftermath of the Fall of Astandalas, on one of the worlds that didn’t have the Last Emperor or Sayo Mdang to hold things together.
Steven Brust’s Dragaera books have all the phases: The Phoenix Guards is a Three Musketeers pastiche in a magical empire. In the sequel, Five Hundred Years After, they almost succeed in preventing an incident that results in the fall of the Empire, the end of sorcery, and the utter destruction of the capital. The Viscount of Adrilankha trilogy is about the efforts to rebuild, and the Vlad Taltos novels (which were mostly written first) take place after the Interregnum in the world they rebuilt.
SM Stirling’s Emberverse books start with the apocalypse (electronics and combustion engines stop working suddenly and for no apparent reason) and follow the people who are trying to build new societies and/or become warlords, their successes and failures and a couple generations onwards.
I would classify the first few books as post-apocalyptic. The quest to save then-existing civilization (indeed, all of humanity) from a world-spanning threat kicks in a generation later.
To stretch the premise a little, Old Man’s War is about ‘what happens after you die’, and each book in the series is ‘what happens after the previous book’. But the real trend-breaker is Zoey’s Tale, a ‘what also happened while that other book happened’ story. Very well done.
CL Polk’s Kingston Cycle has things happen at the end of book one. Books two and three are sorting out what happens next.
I’m a huge fan of the lengthy, thoughtful dénouement and explorations of the aftermath.
Jo Walton’s Among Others is about its young protagonist trying to start over and build a new life after the Climactic Magical Showdown. It’s also the entire premise of Disney’s Elena of Avalor, which is one of its strengths.
Emma Donoghue’s Room isn’t genre – it’s a bit of a psychological thriller – but wisely puts the prototypical climax in the middle and gets just as much out of the realistic, unpredictable ‘after’ stage as the harrowing ‘before’.
Sevenses by Neil Stevenson is a tale about reconstruction after the moon is destroyed… I’m not sure I enjoyed this one much, but it’s almost all about the aftermath. Which isn’t pretty, but is definitely interesting.
The Syfy series Defiance takes place after the “apocalypse”, where 7 alien species show up expecting Earth to be suitable for terraforming, and things happen, leaving Earth with 8 humanoid species and new species and terrain caused by a terraforming accident. It ran for 3 seasons, showing the tensions and machinations of the various species trying to figure things out. It ended abruptly
abruptly & too soon imho.
The Stranding by Kate Sawyer takes the reader through the nuclear event and follows two isolated people through their lives after it.
Villains by Necessity by Eve Forward is about what happens when the world is saved by the Forces of Good, but that’s not supposed to happen and the lack of balance is just as much a threat. It’s about saving the world from the world-savers, on behalf of Evil.
I always thought this was explored semi-interestingly in A Song of Ice and Fire, when Daenerys frees a group of enslaved people, but faces some unexpected challenges in the aftermath. These people’s entire society has been uprooted, and people are going hungry as a result, and even though Daenerys knows she’s achieved a moral victory, she has to face that they used to have stability and now do not. It’s been awhile since I’ve read this, so I might have some of the finer details wrong.
Brandon Sanderson also explores this a bit in Mistborn – the idea that even under a tyrant’s rule, some people at least appreciated the stability. Kinda gives “at least the trains ran on time.”
Isn’t the whole of A Song of Ice and Fire the aftermath of Robert’s Rebellion? What happens after the supposed good guy defeats the evil king and ascends to the throne?
& has neither the ability nor desire to govern.
Mira Gran’ts Newflesh trilogy was the first thing that came to mind for me. Roughly 20 years after there’s a cure for both cancer and the common cold, we see how the world has adjusted to the resulting zombie virus that spread as a result. I love the thought that went into the new look at safety and how society shifted in their views of acceptable news sources.
I always thought I was the only one who wanted to know what happened next! “They lived happily ever after” – how? What does one do when one has saved the world, acquired a life partner (sometimes royal), maybe a magical or other sidekick? Do they just drop their pack beside the door and announce it’s time to plant the bean field? What if the royal cant cook and the sidekick needs a mattress-sized litter box and a fresh sheep to eat every day? What if one of them now has PTSD? Not to mention all the questions I have about the “saved”!
Forever unfulfilled, I guess.
@Tea: Your mention of PTSD reminded me of a piece of Lord of the Rings fanfiction that I once read, following the characters of Faramir and Eowyn after the the events of the trilogy. The main focus of the story consisted of Faramir dealing with the effects of PTSD, and Eowyn learning to understand what he was going through.
Nobody’s Son, by Sean Stewart, sort of fits in here.
Came here to post about this book! Thought of it immediately while reading this essay.
It’s a bit of a spoiler but this is the entire premise of Sanderson’s The Mistborn series, and what makes it so original and compelling.
How do you remake a world after defeating the dark lord, without becoming a dark lord yourself?
The Year of the Griffin by Diana Wynne Jones is a ‘what happens next’ following a major upheaval of the world returning to ruling themselves. How do you go about building knowledge and developing from a position of people just learning enough to get by and not questioning the status quo.
The Stand by Stephen King starts to cover this a little bit towards the end after the Evil Guy is toast (note that nobody from the West ever tries to leave to see Mother Abigail. What this says about the West Coast I leave as an exercise for the reader).
In the Harry Potter universe, Slytherin is still Teh Evil and Harry thoughtfully tells his son, ‘Slytherin is ok and here’s how to stay out of it”. (CURSED CHILD does not exist!).
I got annoyed two thirds of the way through the “director’s cut” version of The Stand, moreso in the last few pages. Nevertheless, the way King writes the first two thirds keeps me rereading. That makes the last bit even more annoying. King shows us people struggling with The End of the World As We Know It and learning, sometimes at very close quarters, that life in small groups is apt to be nasty, brutish, and short. And here’s Stu Redman, of all people, Stu who saw somebody die of appendicitis literally under his hands because there was no surgeon, deciding that the best thing to do is to take a tiny group all the way to (IIRC) Maine. No, Mr. King, that is not a happy ending. They’re all gonna live miserable, preventably shortened lives.
If I knew how to write such a fic I would have a new leader from the Society of Friends or what have you rise up and say, “I’m reserving judgment on whether that was actually God and Satan duking it out in the Nevada desert. We can spend a lifetime hashing out the theological implications. Meanwhile let’s work out how to create a community. I happen to be Christian so here are the non-vengeance, non-blood-and-thunder parts of Scripture I am working with. Let’s talk.” And the rest of the story would be about intentionally creating a functional community.
I’ve just started re-reading the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobbs. It picks up the ‘after’. Though, to be fair, it actually unveils the unfinished business that was merely seen out of the corner of the eye in the previous trilogy. But that makes the point that the grand adventure is always embedded in wider and deeper stories and interlocking stories. One character’s ‘after’ is another’s ‘before’.
James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand series covers the aftermath of societal collapse (pandemic, energy crisis, climate change—so, pretty real).
Firefly immediately jumped to mind as a story written about this type of “after”.
as I think about it, there are others and Game of Thrones is prominent among them for me. I am completely with Molly when it comes to that series. House of the Dragon as a prequel that seems quite pointless to me. I want to read (or watch) about Arya’s exploration of the Sunset Sea. I want to hear how Bran the Broken governs and whether he succeeds. I want to see if the society matures beyond the medieval power struggles we all read about in the Song of Ice and Fire.
H. G. Wells had a coda to “War of the Worlds”, where he described life in England months after the Martians invaded. It’s not an entire story, but there have been others that have latched onto a sequel (90’s TV Show to the 50s Movie).
War of the Worlds: The Series actually ran from 1988-90. Its first season was 35 years after the movie and 50 years after the Orson Welles broadcast, which they commemorated with a Halloween episode revealing that the Welles broadcast was a cover-up for the actual arrival of an alien scouting party 15 years ahead of the main invasion. I always thought that was clever, though I recognized that there were timing issues with the government and the Mercury Theater whipping up a cover-up broadcast on the same night as the actual attack.