What is it all about?
That's a good question. Behind the Ruins is
about a belief – that good minimalist writing allows more reader involvement
and appreciation of characters and their emotions than thickly descriptive
genre-standard writing.
Hemingway was famous for advising writers to write true
things, simply. It’s an interesting mix to strive for that brightly-lit clarity
with characters that react as real people would in a patently unreal
environment. I mean, the world of Behind the Ruins has lost every piece of
electronics more complex than a vacuum tube or a dry cell thanks to wave after
wave of meteor strikes in the earth’s upper atmosphere. That series of strikes
would push our tech-savvy civilization straight into utter chaos – no phones,
no computers, no power, no vehicles, hospitals that had no working equipment.
In a matter of a few weeks or months of repeated strikes, the world would be
back at a technologic level very close to that of the Victorian era. Surviving
the initial spiral of famine, disease and disorder would be horrifying, but
what interested me more than the nuts and bolts of the wheels falling off the
world was the effect it would have on the survivors. What would they have done
to live through the first decade or so, and how would they survive their own
memories as the world began to heal again?
Big meteors and the destruction of the post-industrial world
are dramatic, but the real drama, to me at least, is to be found in the people
that continue on, and the choices they make.
The novel is about survival, warfare and conflict, but the real
meat lies in concepts like guilt, redemption and change.
Which should be true of any story.
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