What is Post-Apocalyptic Biblical Fiction, Anyway?

  I write post-apocalyptic biblical fiction. What is that? Let me explain.
  You know the flood story from Genesis 6-9. Around four thousand years ago a world-wide flood destroyed everything "in whose nostrils was the breath of life," except those who were saved on the Ark. During the flood Pangaea was formed and then destroyed, and when the flood waters receded we were left with the continents we see today. It's a story you've been familiar with since childhood, but have you ever considered what those few short chapters in Genesis imply?

    Four thousand years ago there were no trees, no rivers or valleys, only a seething mass of brackish water thick with the debris of a ruined planet, under a dark sky poisoned with sulfurous ash. The earth's crust had split open in a hundred places, and the landmasses of the ancient world, and with them, an entire civilization, disappeared beneath layer after layer of sediment laid down by the raging water.

   It was an apocalypse greater than any that will ever appear on a Hollywood screen, and after the apocalypse, a dark age.

   Time passed, one hundred, two hundred years, and the descendants of the survivors began to multiply. They lived in a harsh world, shaken by the storms of the early Ice Age, and punctuated by volcanic eruptions that darkened the sky for weeks on end, But they were a strong people, a young people, still unaware that their lifespans had been shortened, and together they built the earth's first one-world government. Nothing was impossible for them, no ambition too high or dream too unattainable. Civilization rose from the wilderness, commerce and science flourished--for a little while. And then they too fell victims to pride, as their fathers' had, and ruin came upon them.

   Their budding civilization fell, and mankind scattered, leaderless, across the globe. Their children became savages, cave-men, living in holes in the rocks, eking out a miserable existence in the tightening grip of the Ice Age. Men watched as their grand-children and great-grandchildren withered and died of old age, while they lived on, untouched, as it seemed, by age.

   And time moved on. The Ice Age, fueled by the warm oceans of the post-apocalyptic world, ground to a halt as the oceans cooled, and the continental ice sheets melted, submersing coastal settlements. The weather became more moderate, volcanic eruptions intermittent, and civilization rose again.

   We are the descendants of the survivors, living on a post-apocalyptic planet. The world we live in is comparatively peaceful, wouldn't you agree? But I write about the hard days, the old days, the days of Nimrod when our ancestors dreamed they could conquer the earth, together. And that's what I call post-apocalyptic biblical fiction.