Synopsis for a cli-fi novel set in Australia in the year 2457 and titled, tentatively, "Birthday Party" - An End of the World Novel, Literary Fiction, Sci Fi, Cli Fi, Spec Fic, What If Fic....

Synopsis for a cli-fi novel set in Australia in the year 2457 and titled, tentatively, "Birthday Party" - An End of the World Novel, Literary Fiction, Sci Fi, Cli Fi, Spec Fic, What If Fic....

This is just a synopsis of a novel concept I have in mind for someone to wrote, not me. I am not a novelist. I cannot write it. I am looking for an Australian or anyone from any country to write it. SOMEDAY, in future. this is my vision of a cli fi sci fi novel like ON THE BEACH but updated to 2457.

SYNOPSIS:

 

 It's 2457 and in Australia a group of academics and their wives/husbands/children gather for a festive birthday party for one of the professors at the university there, Monash University still in operation in the 25th century. The characters in the novel are an ensemble cast of Australians connected to the university and awaiting the End of Human Civilization amidst unbearably hot summer days, wildfires, floods and coast sea level rises as the government issues a nationwide alert via radio and TV and internet services to prepare for the Final End Days in 2-3 months time and to start preparing to learn how to lie down and die with dignity and grace, after ingesting specially prepared morphine sleeping pills. There are group meetings and prayers, and those who refuse to take the pills will die of hunger and thirst as the food supply runs out and cannabalism occurs in some places and raids by marauders. At the birthday party, the professors and their families chat about what's coming. Pehaps the book is titled BIRTHDAY PARTY. In the last chapters, the cast of characters meet at Professor A's home in the hills for a final grief session and last hurrah as they prepare to lie down and die with grace and dignity as the govt has instructed them with video tutorials online and in a large airconditioned living room on the house they take the pills and pass out. The radio continues babbling but there is no one left to hear it in the living room. The End.

ADDED TO SYNOPSIS AFTER INPUT FROM OTHERS:

But wait. There's a new surprise element involved in the above synopsis.  As my teacher explained to me -- and yes I have a teacher --  "People don't usually like books in which there is no one left at the end. But if you did it as a Time Travel and the time traveller gets back to the present and does Something to prevent the X, that might work. Because
total hopelessness is not motivating!"

So now this sci fi cli fi novel is a Time Travel novel, as it needed to be. But I needed my teacher to point this out to me. I see the way more clearly now.  And am still looking for a writer to write this book.  Your byline. All royalties to you. Cast of characters created by you.  Title is yours to come up with,  as "Birthday Party" is merely tentative for the purposes of this synopsis- in- progress.

 

 

COMMENTS:

 

 

1.  From AUSTRALIA NOVELIST: I dunno, Dan... people don't usually like books in which there is no one left at the end. But if you did it as a Time Travel and the time traveller gets back to the present and does Something to prevent the X, that might work.  Total hopelessness is not motivating!  

2. From a writer from Colorado: ''What if… At this 'birthday party' there is a guy or woman who has created a time capsule of sorts that they are going to launch into space on a small rocket.  It's kind of like the voyager disc… A compilation of what life was like on earth before it warmed up to the point we couldn't survive anymore.  They don't want humanity or the earth to be lost to memory so they launch it into space in hopes that some aliens will get it.''

 He aded: ''....Perhaps the whole story is seen from the outside where aliens find the capsule and investigate this lost burned up planet ''.

 

3. Another writer said "I like it. Needs to be fleshed out. Seems much more like a good short story to me."

 

4. Another novelist told me: ''The novel I'm currently writing refers to ''ON THE BEACH.'' Neville Shute
is one of my favorite authors. But I disagree with you. Those who will
be ''on the beach'' when this world ends will not be in Australia; they
will be in Antarctica. At the Permian-Triassic (PT) extinction event
252 million years ago, the remaining life on the planet existed only
in Antarctica. I'm not sure if it was James Hansen or Andrew Guzman
who wrote that the last humans from the climate apocalypse will have
one final colony in Antarctica. But that is what will happen if we go
into the full Venus Effect.''

He added: "As I think I mentioned, when I get closer to finishing my novel, I
will create a new blog and one of my first posts will
describe this whole scenario.''

5.

 

This really does remind me of ''On the Beach,'' or perhaps the 

astonishing work ''Pincher Martin'' by William Golding.   I hope you find some

genuine writer to do this since it has the makings of a classic.   In ''Pincher

Martin,'' the bulk of the story is written with such hope that the ending is just

almost unbearable.  I don't know if someone could do this with this idea of a story, but it is desperately powerful stuff.   

Hear are reactions to your idea, they are only that, just reactions:

re the title of ''BIRTHDAY PARTY'' with the THE -- You make me think about the joy of birthdays and how to play on this theme. 

Little children, candles.   But there are bad birthdays too, not only of bad humans 

(Adolf Hitler) but also bad ideas and bad decisions, monstrously bad decisions like the 

non-decisions about climate change -- the non-decision to curb carbon has no birthday at all! 

 

I would play with that theme I think.  In Australia I would include the 50,000 yr old birthday of the 

Aborigines across land bridges and contrast this with the birth of colonization too. 

The word "party" brings up thoughts like "I was party to a discussion" and "conservative party"

and "political party" as well as celebrations, these are all seeds I think for an engrossing 

narrative.

In short, I love the title, it is brilliant.  I hope you get a brilliant writer to write it,

best wishes. PJ


NOTES: PINCHER MARTIN is one of Golding's best-known novels, and is noted for being uniquely existential and minimalistic in setting.

 

The plot of Pincher Martin surrounds the survival and psychophysical, spiritual and existential plight of one Christopher Hadley "Pincher" Martin, a temporary naval lieutenant who believes himself to be the sole survivor of a military torpedo destroyer which sinks in the North Atlantic Ocean. At the start of the novel Martin is in the water and desperately fighting for his life. He is apparently saved after being providentially washed ashore a rocky mid-Atlantic islet. He deduces that his naval crew is dead and begins his grim struggle for survival but, as time goes by, a series of strange and increasingly terrifying events, which he at first dismisses as hallucinations, slowly provokes in him an existential crisis.
Throughout the novel Golding juxtaposes themes of sanity and insanity, and reality and unreality. At first Martin is portrayed as a thinking individual, who uses his intelligence, education and training to source food, collect fresh water and alert any potential rescuers. It is in fact during this rational phase that Martin is at his most delusional. It his only when insanity takes hold that he begins to comprehend the reality of his predicament: 'There is a pattern emerging. I do not know what the pattern is but even my dim guess at it makes my reason falter'.^[2]

The novel's twist ending reveals that Martin actually drowned shortly after his ship was sunk; when his body is found, it is noted that "he didn't even have time to kick off his seaboots". This means that his struggle for survival on the island never actually happened, which changes the work into an allegory of purgatory and damnation.^[3] In the "Radio Times" of 21 March 1958, Golding explains that Martin driven by an selfish greed for life has continued to exist in another dimension: "His drowned body lies rolling in the Atlantic but the ravenous ego invents a rock for him to endure on".^[4]

 

The North Atlantic islet in question is described in the novel as very small, rocky, barren and remote, "only appearing on weather charts". It is due to these descriptions that a number of critics and reviewers^[who?] proposed that the setting provided is that of Rockall, which seems to fit the definitions given.