I know it’s a bit self-indulgent to use publication anniversaries as an excuse to write about your own books, but there you go. I’ll use any excuse to post about my back catalogue. Today, because I somehow managed to miss the tenth anniversary last year, I thought I’d write something about AUTUMN: THE HUMAN CONDITION on it’s eleventh anniversary (or thereabouts) instead. This was an important book for me for a number of reasons – it changed the way I thought about writing, and it changed the way I thought about independent publishing.
A quick recap to set the scene… When AUTUMN began to gain popularity and I started to write the sequels, I found myself wanting to tell the backstories of incidental characters we meet along the way. Both AUTUMN: THE CITY and AUTUMN: PURIFICATION had far bigger casts of characters than the first book, so there was no shortage of folk to write about. It occurred to me that the end of the world would have been horrific for everyone left alive, and that they’d all have their own nightmarish tales to tell about the first hours and days after the infection struck. I wanted a way of telling those stories without slowing down the narrative, and so the first AUTUMN: ECHOES were posted online alongside the novels.
The AUTUMN version of the apocalypse is a unique one, I think, because it dramatically affects 99.9% of the population (ie, they’re immediately killed!), whilst leaving the remaining 0.1% physically untouched. If you apply some very rough maths, on the basis that there are around 70 million people here, that potentially leaves almost three quarters of a million survivors in the UK alone. That’s a lot of individual stories to tell. And the more I thought about it, the more shorts I came up with.
The original version of THE HUMAN CONDITION was released in 2005, and it’s long out of print. My original intention was to finish the series with PURIFICATION, but I’d had an idea for DISINTEGRATION. When GUILLERMO DEL TORO became involved with HATER and my world went a little crazy for a while, my publisher declined to take THE HUMAN CONDITION, and wanted another novel instead. I wrote AFTERMATH (possibly my favourite of the original series), but with even more characters and even more ECHOES written, I knew I’d have to do something with THE HUMAN CONDITION eventually.
I wrote more and more AUTUMN shorts, now shifting my focus away from the novels. Instead, I started to think ‘what if…?’, and I came up with a whole host of other unpleasant situations I wanted to explore: the last nurse caring for their sole remaining terminally ill patient, a guy who’s forced to spend the end of the world with the man who was responsible for the break-up of his marriage, a survivor who desperately clings onto their old daily routine instead of accepting that the world has ended, a local councillor who doesn’t want the responsibility of looking after his undead constituents… the list goes on.
I learnt a lot about writing short stories from working on THE HUMAN CONDITION. I also learnt how to deep-dive into the heads of my characters, and took the opportunity to focus on some seriously fucked-up folks (alongside a similar number of thoroughly decent survivors too). With the benefit of the experience of traditional publishing I’d had by that stage, putting the 2013 version of the book together also laid the groundwork for future INFECTED BOOKS releases.
So, again, apologies for the self-indulgence, but I remain very proud of THE HUMAN CONDITION and I wanted to post about it. You can find some of the short stories online at www.lastoftheliving.net. If you’ve not read the entire collection, it’s available as a low-priced eBook, and in paperback. Because I was very inexperienced and I massively over-ordered, I also have a number of limited edition hardcover copies still. You can pick these up over at www.infectedbooks.co.uk for a crazy low price, and feel free to use discount code ‘10%thanks‘ at checkout to get a further reduction.
