Author’s Notes: The World of How the Human Race was Lost

This article features author’s notes for a series of novels I’m writing. It is a work in progress and has not been completed or published yet.

My main vision for How the Human Race was Lost is a post-apocalyptic world set in the 2050s. Sometime in the near future, perhaps the year 2024, a super-advanced alien race colonizes Earth. The aliens are not only much more technologically advanced than humans, but they are also much bigger in size, to the point where they can easily pick up and subdue any humans they come in contact with.

When the aliens invaded, they sent a dozen massively long ships onto the surface of Earth. The target locations were desolate salt flats. The salt flats near Salt Lake City was one location, and the location where my story begins. The ships landed in a way that they became black skyscrapers that extended a mile into the air. They were completely silent and odd magnetic anomalies caused havoc in Salt Lake City when one of them landed in the salt flats near the city.

Soon after the aliens landed, alien drones and robots came out of their landed motherships and attacked every place that emitted electricity, especially the power plants. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the attacks, and every nuclear power plant was destroyed, sending deadly radiation out into the surrounding areas. The aliens seem particularly sensitive to electricity. Any use of electricity seemed to provoke an attack.

Once the electricity generating capabilities of the world was destroyed, the aliens retreated back to their obsidian towers and pretty much ignored humans. The year that followed was difficult for the billions of humans who survived the initial attacks. The world was in chaos. Food and heat became scarce in some places in the winter. Things that modern humans had come to rely upon became scarce or nonexistent. Billions of people died in the first five years after the aliens invaded.

Human technology was basically driven back to medieval technologies, with influences from modern inventions and knowledge. Various factions of people banded together into communities to pool resources and for protection. Some of the communities became violent towards other communities.

While the humans fight for survival and squabble with each other, the aliens are still doing… something. New plants begin to appear. They are purple and glow in the dark. Entire communities of humans begin to vanish. The climate becomes more arid. Lakes dry up and the oceans recede. New groups of “domesticated” humans appear and do the bidding of the aliens.

The world is post-apocalyptic in a sense that most humans have been wiped out. However, this has also allowed nature to retake most of the Earth, so the world is in fact more naturally beautiful than the world we know today. The remaining humans persevere and continue to innovate, even without electricity. A feudal society emerges, but unlike medieval society, the new society is informed by modern knowledge.

The aliens have taken over, but the surviving humans learn to adapt, regroup, and a new generation of people make one last ditch effort to retake Earth and save humanity.