Framework and Back Story

And now, its time to discuss the time frame and back history of my Steampunk/Fantasy series. In the very first of the six novels that make up the “After: Earth” series, titled “Journey To The Black City”, we find that the history of this earth is not…quite the same as ours. On this earth, in this universe, it is the Pleistocene Ice Age—hence the series title. But it isn’t that simple. Two thousand years before my story begins, civilizations stretch across the temperate regions of the earth. Then there was a titanic war, and a subsequent influenza plague. As on our earth, this war, like our First World War, ends because of that type of plague; killing about one percent of the population. In my series, in one year it killed eighty percent of the population—civilization had ceased to exist. Cities stood abandoned, for who would live among the millions of corpses left unburied because those who would bury them were also dead. And so, time passes, and the people who were left ended up living in two different worlds—the massive city-states like Los Angeles, the Black City of the West, or they live in the vast, wild regions between the cities in the company of mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, and dire wolves as member of the ‘free tribes,’ therefore making humanity divided.