Original Fiction Ideas, Discussion & Recommendation Thread

[Zyobot]

Thanks to my revived interest in Classical Civilization lately, I’m contemplating writing an ASB TL to be titled Scattered Antiquity (or something like that). Drawing inspiration from Harry Turtledove’s works, the premise is that a smorgasbord of ancient Greeks and Romans from important points throughout Classical Antiquity--everywhere from the Greek Dark Ages to the fall of the Western Roman Empire--are sent thousands of years forwards in time. Multiple decades after 2020, in fact.

Depending on the exact time and place they’re all sent from, the downtimers will be situated on their own chunks of land that materialize across the world; Julius Caesar and his legions on a new island in the Ionian Sea, a swath of Hadrian’s empire showing up off the coast of North America, and so on and so forth. So pretty much every major nation will have their own set of confused Greeks and Romans to deal with, though given the tenuous geopolitical situation that’s been simmering for a while at this point, odds are they won’t be able to clean up the mess right away.

For obvious reasons, there will be various real-life Greeks and Romans who make appearances here--Plato, Augustus, and Constantine almost assuredly among them. However, I’ll also include plenty of original characters in the story as well. Fictional politicians and downtimers aside, the main cast of this story will be Dr. Jack Lancer--an easygoing, but cynically paranoid archeologist and history professor who once served in a time-traveling U.S. Army Ranger unit--and the other members of his household. He has an eighteen-year-old adopted daughter named Astrid, who was originally born in ninth-century Scandinavia and rescued by Jack as a baby. She’s been raised American since then, and her inventing and programming skills will lend themselves well to the fact she’s an incoming engineering major at a local university. He also has a nephew the same age named Ryan, an awkward child prodigy who graduated from college early with a chemistry degree and works as a lab technician for a local R&D company. Then there’s Domitia, a shy Roman girl from an aristocratic family who lived during Hadrian’s reign, and has since found herself in the Lancers’ care. I certainly have more characters in the works than just them (as was mentioned upstream), but it’s probably best I keep the specifics under wraps for now.

Setting-wise, this will again take place at least a few decades into the future (probably the mid-21st century, at the earliest). Technology will have had time to progress considerably by then, with big advancements in urban farming, robotics, nanotechology, holograms, virtual reality, and digital networks/interfaces; more military-centric versions of these will make appearances as well. I won’t divulge too much about global geopolitics, apart from a sense of baited precariousness and certain countries having recently emerged from big crises. However, you might see a few loose extrapolations based on recent trends that are baked into the future depicted here (but not enough to wander into current politics). As I’ve said before, though, conditions will be such that major nations with armies of Greeks and Romans in their backyard won’t be able to take care of the problem overnight; make of that what you will for now, insofar as what it shows about the troubles they've been facing lately.

Otherwise, that’s basically the meat and bones of what I wanted to summarize here; now I just need to get started on actual reading and research. And brushing up on my art skills and online presence too, since I also hope to publish artwork--drawings, comics, animatics, etc.--depicting the characters and setting at large.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

Soo, I had this idea for a short story: The tale begins with a boy in a jungle-based tribe (maybe the amazonian jungle) who is about to undergo a ritual of adulthood. However, circumstances make it so that rather than performing the usual ritual, he is tasked with traveling through the jungle to the very edge of the forest to see what has been making that noise.

Over the course of the journey, the boy notices flying birds made out of some strange stone, trails that look like something rolled across the path, and other oddities the protagonist can't explain.

Finally the boy reaches the edge of the jungle and witnesses a vast space covered in flat stone, from which dozens of metal cubes descend from and ascend towards the sky, with buildings further behind. The boy takes all that in, and goes home rather shocked at this relevation.

The punchline is essentially an isolated tribe learning of a sci-fi space-travel haven and being left baffled at how they managed to build this. The things described during his journey are drones and anti-gravity mobile devices, among other things. Eventually they decide the haven is harmless if left alone, and continue to live their lifes.

The idea behind the story is "But what about all these tribes that live in absolute isolation from the rest of the world?"

 

[IceWing_mk1]

Ok, I've been kicking around portal ideas for a while now in relation to original fiction, and I had a brainstorm last night as to how the protagonist stumbled onto the plans for a portal, although the targeting\tuning aspect will originally be circa early 1900s tech. He builds it to see What it does without understanding the How\Why.

But, for the sake of randomness, I'm looking for say, a half dozen worlds \ timeframes he can 'tune' into. I was already contemplating one potential setting to somewhen around 1920s \ Depression \ Prohibition era US (NYC or Chicago maybe), another idea was the old west, and another one is a write off world (was thinking one where the US and USSR decided it was time to rumble over Cuba, 60 years later, the rads are still high enough that he just has no desire to go there)

The portal will shut down and then reopen for a short period of time based on a timer once he's through. Reasoning for this is that initially (book one) he realizes that the portal is visible both ways, so, he doesn't want to leave it running due to the fact that anybody who comes by could say 'hey, what's that bright light in the middle of the night' or 'why is there a pitch black circle in the middle of the air at high noon' and then come through to his base of operations.

No magic worlds initially (they do exist in the multiverse he has access to, they're simply 'further' downrange than he's hitting right now with the device). The protagonist is going to be an American, likely in his mid to late 20s, he's got some resources available, nothing holding him here, he's bored and at first this seems like a great adventure. (I've got some notes already about his world basically going into Great Depression 2.0, with Covid-23 causing some significant societal death spiraling. ) His rev 1 portal device is going to have multidimensional targeting, it's going to be like trying to use a series of ship's wheels with gearing from 1 cm, 1m or 1km to navigate google maps from mouseview mode, and the moving of the portal, well, the portal aperture is basically a monomolecular subportal into the interdimensional quantum foam (aka Blind Eternities). Another set of gears represents 4 or 5 dimensional navigation across the multiverse.

I'm trying to distance a bit from the mechanics of sliders, and I think that both my implementation and what I've got planned beyond book one are kinda interesting and maybe uniqueish.

Thoughts\feedback are appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Ice

 

[Bassoe]

I've been contemplating writing a story called The Panarchist Network (or something like that). In line with a more obscure ideology known as 'panarchy' (or 'panarchism'), it’s centered on people choosing which of the various worlds/dimensions dominated by a certain form of political organization they favor—liberal democracy, fascism, anarchism, whatever—and being sent to their place of choice appropriately. Maybe as a caveat to prevent the denizens of certain realms from wanting to conquer others (i.e. a Nazified world planning to conduct lebensraum or a communist one plotting to export "the Revolution" beyond its bounds), people who choose to live within whatever system they've selected find themselves unable to forcibly interfere in the politics of the other worlds.

If they’re dissatisfied with the new governments they live under (or perhaps lack thereof), they’re presented with another opportunity to change their mind. I can see particularly capricious individuals changing which world they live under every so often, which is no doubt helped by the fact that everyone has unlimited opportunities to change which realm they inhabit. It may seem like too much of a ‘get out of jail free card’, yeah—and I’m willing to reconsider that element of this setting, or at least modify it so that people don’t get off the hook quite that easily—but I think it’d be rather cruel, for instance, to force some dumb, naive kid with wacky political beliefs to live under the potentially nightmarish state that’d form if they actually got their way (you can probably think of some more concrete examples of what I might be referring to here).

Of course, I also believe that writing this story as an overwhelmingly ‘everyone wins’ scenario and leaving it at that, at least in the long run, is ultimately too boring and free of the substance needed to tell an engaging story. As one possible way to ameliorate this, maybe conflict would arise over someone from Realm A accidentally winding up in Realm B. Some cases would turn out rather benign, namely someone from an American constitutionalist world winding up in one dominated by liberal-democratic monarchies modeled after the UK. Other cases, however—such as a military detachment from a global Greater Germanic Reich winding up in a world ruled by basically Ingsoc straight from 1984—would wind up far, far worse.

Another, less obvious peril could be that if the network somehow collapses and people with different ideological tastes can no longer live within their own bubbles, they won't be accustomed to mutual compromise and coexistence like we in the real world are (for the most part, that is). For that reason, a catastrophe that causes the barriers between realms to collapse and forces their diverse populations to live under one roof would cause far more fighting and disobedience of whatever authorities claw their way to the top, likely culminating in a multipolar bloodbath that makes even the World Wars look tame. Maybe you could get libertarians and Bourbon Democrats to be ideological BFFs, but getting fascists and communists to extend the olive branch—let alone to the various non-authoritarians who abhor their ideas—would likely end in a Cold War that teeters on the precipice of going hot, at best.

That's what I've thought of so far, anyway. Maybe I'll add more either here or elsewhere, depending on what else comes to mind and how set on actually writing it I feel.

Already been done. Maybe. Not entirely clear if Yggdrasill Seeds actually worked as described as a drug which allowed people to meddle with their own perception and corresponding quantum effects to travel the multiverse, if they were just hallucinogenics that made people think they could do so or if they were poisonous as a literal genie of the Dunner Warriors' claims that they allowed their imbibers to avoid consequences. A bunch of interdimensional druggie vikings or SCA reenactors who've used enough drugs to think they're interdimensional vikings aren't reliable narrators. Then again, that was less organized, the Dunner Warriors were looking for a world where their cultural paradigm was dominant but in an infinite multiverse, they hadn't found it yet and were going a-viking against worlds civilized enough to have lots of booty to plunder and to non-lethally arrest them if caught, which they could easily escape any prison by switching universes.

 

[Captain X]

It sounds kind of interesting, though it is a bit close in some ways to Sliders. I'd say run with it and see where it goes.

 

[Bassoe]

I can think of two explanations for why is nobody invading anyone else's world for lebensraum.

1. Branching timelines. Every time something goes one way, new parallel universes automatically bifurcate off where it went the other way. An extradimensional invasion qualifies, hence trying to change anything as major as conquering a timeline creates an ever-increasing number of parallels and drops the chances of any given timeline being the unlucky ones invaded to so low as to be essentially nonexistent. Also, I could see timelines using massive random number generators to deliberately create more branches as chaff to decrease the chances of anyone finding their specific timeline.
2. Infinite timelines where evolution took a different course and nothing intelligent and tool-using ever developed, meaning completely untapped natural resources and nobody shooting at you when you try to take them. Mind the crocodile-starfish though.

 

[Zyobot]

The Iron Cross Over Europe
Inspired by an idea I proposed elsewhere, this explores a world in which Britain sits World War I out, allowing Germany to win the resultant “Continental War” for the Central Powers and impose Versailles-like peace terms on France and Russia. A brief peacetime interlude ensues, followed by a true World War that draws the “Allied Powers” of Germany, Britain, and the US into conflict with a revanchist France and Russia, with the Allied victory and partitioning of Eurasia setting the stage for a Cold War between the enlarged German Empire and the Anglo-American Alliance.

On the one hand, Britain (and then, America) is the leading light of laissez-faire and limited government, drawing on a long tradition of English liberalism and free trade as it rallies the Anglosphere to oppose the new hegemon of Central Europe (with the US soon assuming control of the driver’s seat, as soon as it becomes clear Britain is waning and soon to be surpassed by America, anyway). On the other, Germany is a parliamentary monarchy with a social-market economy modeled off of Von Bismarck’s various pension and social-insurance programs, lying at the heart of a newly formed “Mitteleuropa” bloc that incorporates friendly Austria-Hungary and strong-armed Scandinavia into a common market backed by the Reichsbank.

All told, the resultant wartime and geopolitical butterflies make for a rather different twentieth century, where communism as a mainstream form of government is (more) successfully suppressed, but where various reforms we take for granted today—such as civil rights and female suffrage—are either delayed or emerge in other ways. In any case, empires remain more in-vogue for a while longer, though rising concerns over the rights and welfare of the colonized should make for some, shall we say, “interesting” issues well into the twenty-first century. Not to mention Eurocentrism receiving some serious challenges from the rise of Asia, which has grown tired of “presumptuous Europeans” romping about for so long and threatens to overtake the West, which is all too busy with its own structural problems and series of social revolutions finally bubbling to the surface.

Format-wise, I’m considering writing it as a series of excerpts from various chapters in an in-universe history book, written from the perspective of a historian who actually lives in the TL (rather than an AH enthusiast who clearly does not). Might be a good format for other AH fiction I come up with, too, now that I think about it (though separate threads for some vignettes that follow the lives of specific people—à la Back in the USSA—aren’t out of the question, either).

 

[Bassoe]

The idea of a hidden magical world is a fairly common cliché, and has motivated many authors and would-be authors to attempt to figure out explanations for why everyone involved in it, regardless of their other differences of opinion, would be so concerned from preventing the secret from leaking.

This is one I came up with, which ended up growing out of hand into an entirely unrelated thing.

Magic is finite. Yeah, I know it's been done before, but here, things work differently, rather than there being a set amount of magic in the world and once expended, no more magic, each area has a set amount of magic available at a time, which'll recover if nobody's using it. The more people there are in a specific area, the more of the magic in said area is diluted by being spread among them all. The problem is, everyone's using it, however slightly or unknowingly. Tiny flashes of insight, unusually accurate guesses, emotions, the capabilities for creativity and innovation in general, etc.

Works as follows:

1. Hunter-gatherers capable of sustaining all their basic needs through magic without needing to ever interact with other humans besides reproducing. Proto-humans evolved intelligence so they could use magic as opposed to so they could collaborate with each other and use technology. This adaptation worked from an evolutionary standpoint in that magic-using humans were able to reproduce exponentially, until they exceeded the limited background magic in the areas they inhabited. Society and tool use came later, a quick-in-evolutionary-terms re-purposing of the same intelligence required for magic use for building machines to take the place of magic.
2. Classic antiquity/the age of fantasy in which everyone can cast spells since there's enough magic to go around but on a more limited level than the hunter-gatherer wizard.
3. The modern world where very few people can cast spells and said spells are much weaker in cities than they would be in the countryside, international waters or arctic research bases/the ISS (plothook) since most of the background magic is tied up in the people everywhere. All wizards will do everything in their power to make sure magic remains secret since if everyone knew they could us it, they would and they’d be less powerful. At best. At worst, immediate fast forward to Four.
4. Not enough background magic left over for normal mental function. Eventually this becomes self-correcting once enough people die as civilization collapses due to people turning into mindless zombies.

A cycle of rising and falling magitech civilizations resulted.

1. Tiny number of wizards are mostly alone, therefore they can draw on more magical energy than if there were other people around them. They use their powers to build a civilization.
2. Due to conquest of other groups near their civilization/people willingly joining the civilization due to the higher standard allowed by magic, consequentially the wizards maintaining the civilization start losing power.
3. Overpopulation drains the background magic, all the wizards lose their powers, the civilization collapses.
4. With the civilization gone, the massive population it supported either leaves or starves to death/get killed in the resulting infighting. Without them around, background magic returns to normal, new wizards come along and the cycle repeats itself. Mu, Atlantis, Hy-Brasil, the Tartarian Empire, all the Ancient Supercivilization conspiracy theories, etc.

Our civilization is the first one to have a chance at breaking the cycle. The technology we use instead of magic can sustain a much higher population density than a magic-based civilization could. Enough overpopulation would still bring us down for unrelated reasons, but still we've got literally hundreds of times the default "any magic-based civilization that grows this big will collapse" population limit.

The magic-based civilizations were tiny and unable to grow larger without undergoing inevitable collapse. When they did fall, they didn't leave evidence since the magic in their ruins had already been expended, leaving strange but seemingly mundane objects.

All a modern archeologist poking through the cave dwellings of a magic-using civilization would see would be a few oddities, like an absence of unburned branch fragments in the fire-pit and the skeletons showing less signs of injury or malnutrition than expected. They'd have no way of realizing that this was due to the fire-pit having been heated by a spell rather than burning wood, or that healing spells and magically aided hunting were responsible for the comparative healthy appearance of the human remains.

The Bronze Age was when the first usage of technology against magic/in competition with magic began. Not as much via direct battles between wizards and Bronze Age warriors, but by agriculture allowing the muggles to support a much larger population than magically summoned food and hunter-gathering could and unintentionally draining the background magic from wherever they lived.

Same with magical creatures. When the background magic dropped too low, most of them either died, vanished back to wherever they came from, went into hibernation or were crippled as the magical components of their biologies ceased to function. Dragons can no longer fly, hypnotize people who look into their eyes or breath fire, they're just big scaly lizards now. They might remember being able to do those things however, the tragically amusing image of a dragon jumping off a cliff, then plunging to its death, uselessly small wings flapping madly the whole way down results. Probably the closest thing to an advantage of the background magic drain is that it forced most of the supernatural predators, elder gods, fair folk, etc into either extinction, harmlessness or hiding as far from humans as possible. Also, explains human-sacrificing lovecraftian cults. Decrease the total number of humans enough in a specific area, allow a powerful magical creature to reawaken.

 

[Bassoe]

An extradimensional invasion qualifies, hence trying to change anything as major as conquering a timeline creates an ever-increasing number of parallels and drops the chances of any given timeline being the unlucky ones invaded to so low as to be essentially nonexistent. Also, I could see timelines using massive random number generators to deliberately create more branches as chaff to decrease the chances of anyone finding their specific timeline.

Turns out, I wasn't actually the first one to have this idea.

 

[King Krávoka]

Everything in Nature does consist of these two.

The one is Nitre The other is Salt
The one is Acid The other is Alkaline
The one is Spirit The other is Body
This is the Father This is the Mother
This is the Male Sperm This is the Female Sperm
This is the Universal Agent This the Universal Patient

One times two.

Primordial Sulphur Primordial Mercury and Salt

One plus two.

Fire and Air The Magnet Probably meant "Water and Earth"

Two times two.

Chalybs Sendivogii The Magnet
The Hammer The Anvil

One times two.

Sulphur Naturae Mercury and Salt Naturae

Again, one plus two.

Okay medieval alchemists, how many genders really are there?

 

[King Krávoka]

The year is uncountable by human reckoning but geologists could determine that right now it's somewhere around 31,000,000 years into our future. Mass extinction passed at the hands of some cosmic rearrangement. In the final years of our species, the hardware of a genetic computer was built into our planetary microbiome, and its software was tasked with recreating the old world inside the uninhabitable landscape of the new one. The road to restarting the existence of advanced life is long, but it was already travelled by its designers. The secrets of sapient life were cracked in the past nine thousand years, yet the computer's prerogative was also the recreation of humanity, in a time when signs of its masters had faded into the rock. Then it found a shortcut, a plane where human souls were left unconscious through a flaw in the afterlife. It scooped these minds back into the living world, inside newly conceived bodies of the deformed mutants populating this world. Memories across all ages of the human world from all ages of the human body were used to speed the progression of this planet, it has now progressed into a technological advancement akin to recent centuries.

This is all here to explain why your character portraits are made by neuralblender.

 

[DarthOne]

The Iron Cross Over Europe
Inspired by an idea I proposed elsewhere, this explores a world in which Britain sits World War I out, allowing Germany to win the resultant “Continental War” for the Central Powers and impose Versailles-like peace terms on France and Russia. A brief peacetime interlude ensues, followed by a true World War that draws the “Allied Powers” of Germany, Britain, and the US into conflict with a revanchist France and Russia, with the Allied victory and partitioning of Eurasia setting the stage for a Cold War between the enlarged German Empire and the Anglo-American Alliance.

On the one hand, Britain (and then, America) is the leading light of laissez-faire and limited government, drawing on a long tradition of English liberalism and free trade as it rallies the Anglosphere to oppose the new hegemon of Central Europe (with the US soon assuming control of the driver’s seat, as soon as it becomes clear Britain is waning and soon to be surpassed by America, anyway). On the other, Germany is a parliamentary monarchy with a social-market economy modeled off of Von Bismarck’s various pension and social-insurance programs, lying at the heart of a newly formed “Mitteleuropa” bloc that incorporates friendly Austria-Hungary and strong-armed Scandinavia into a common market backed by the Reichsbank.

All told, the resultant wartime and geopolitical butterflies make for a rather different twentieth century, where communism as a mainstream form of government is (more) successfully suppressed, but where various reforms we take for granted today—such as civil rights and female suffrage—are either delayed or emerge in other ways. In any case, empires remain more in-vogue for a while longer, though rising concerns over the rights and welfare of the colonized should make for some, shall we say, “interesting” issues well into the twenty-first century. Not to mention Eurocentrism receiving some serious challenges from the rise of Asia, which has grown tired of “presumptuous Europeans” romping about for so long and threatens to overtake the West, which is all too busy with its own structural problems and series of social revolutions finally bubbling to the surface.

Format-wise, I’m considering writing it as a series of excerpts from various chapters in an in-universe history book, written from the perspective of a historian who actually lives in the TL (rather than an AH enthusiast who clearly does not). Might be a good format for other AH fiction I come up with, too, now that I think about it (though separate threads for some vignettes that follow the lives of specific people—à la Back in the USSA—aren’t out of the question, either).

I would read the HELL out of this.

Also it would really activate the almonds of some leftists so hearing them freak out would be a nice bonus.

Might I suggest that, if you want an nice PoD for why Britain doesn’t get drawn in? The Germans decide to send the majority their forces to defeat the Russians while holding off the French at the narrow border they both share- and since this is WW1 where defending forces have the advantage, the French are in trouble trying to push in, especially with their idiotic idea about elan (willpower/courage) being more important then actual tactics. (Reminds me of the Imperial Japanese and also certain anime’s).

Basically, no violation of Belgium’s neutrality giving the British militarists an easy way to rile up the general population, who weren’t that keen on getting dragged into a continental war.

After dealing with Russia quicker then our timeline (thanks having more forces and to the Germans running smack dab into the quicker-then-expected but poorer then usually armed Russian offensive forces that invaded East Prussia and prompted the battle of Tannenburg in our timeline, prompting a earlier defeat of those forces), the Germans then turn to the French.

Which, having seen the result of the French attacks being equivalent to running headfirst into a rock wall over and over again, and possibly seeing some earlier French designs, could easily prompt a new weapon from the Germans to help their offensive…

Sturmpanzerwagen Oberschlesien - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

(Yes that’s a real WW1 German design which would have been the first fast moving assault tank in history and could have had massive effects on the war had it been developed a bit earlier in our timeline)

I’m not so sure about the revanchist French and Russian parts. Having been recently humiliated in two recent wars (Franco-Prussian War for the French, the war with Japan with the Russians and this alternate WW1 for both), as long as the Central Powers don’t go too overboard in victory, I don’t think the French’s and Russians will push for another war. France also has a population problem which will have been exacerbated by even a quicker WW1, Russia has its social political problems and the need to industrialize.

Still, it is ultimately your timeline

 

[DarthOne]

Also, here’s an idea that I don’t think I’ve ever been really seen done before.*



Zombie apocalypse sometime around the 1860’s. At the very least I think it would be an interesting story telling just from the sheer differences in technology and culture at the time.

At the very least it would solve one of the biggest problems in more modern zombie stories. That technology massively weighs the fight in favor of the humans, unless you want to go with either something stupid (WWZ and it’s BOLT-ACTION RIFLE superiority) or blatantly weighing the outbreak in the favor of the zombies by having all the governments and so on act pants-on-head stupid.

* I know the a lot of fantasy setting have zombies and you don’t have some zombie stories set in antiquity or the Middle Ages, but nothing major during the 1860’s or there abouts.

 

[IceWing_mk1]

Also, here's an idea that I don't think I've ever been really seen done before.*



Zombie apocalypse sometime around the 1860's. At the very least I think it would be an interesting story telling just from the sheer differences in technology and culture at the time.

At the very least it would solve one of the biggest problems in more modern zombie stories. That technology massively weighs the fight in favor of the humans, unless you want to go with either something stupid (WWZ and it's BOLT-ACTION RIFLE superiority) or blatantly weighing the outbreak in the favor of the zombies by having all the governments and so on act pants-on-head stupid.

* I know the a lot of fantasy setting have zombies and you don't have some zombie stories set in antiquity or the Middle Ages, but nothing major during the 1860's or there abouts.

One thing to point out. A Zombie Apocalypse in the 1860s is going to actually have a major difference, and that's in the post outbreak period.

In the 1860s, the VAST majority of people in the US, and I believe globally, were farmers, on small homesteads\family farms.

There wasn't the MASSIVE urbanization we have today.

Most households had their own water supply, food supply and a fair amount of tools... Plus, frankly, most of the US was still frontier. Oh, and let's not forget horses and wagons on each farm. You know, the transportation method which can refuel itself by parking it in a field overnight.

Today, when the power goes off, the water stops flowing and the trucks stop. No more gas, no more diesel, no more refrigerated Supply Chain.

Your odds in 1860s are MUCH better long term, especially if you start in the countryside.

Oh, and the lack of modern transportation, especially aircraft, means that the spread is MUCH slower. If you factor in, say, 4 hours from being bitten to zombification, you can drive over two hundred miles, or fly halfway across a continent. 4 Hours in 1860 means, if you're on a train, you're maybe getting 100 miles, but if you're on horse, you're going to get about 30 miles.

WAY more time for society to react, and if you have telegraph lines, you can actually get word out faster than the infection wave can spread.

 

[DarthOne]

One thing to point out. A Zombie Apocalypse in the 1860s is going to actually have a major difference, and that's in the post outbreak period.

In the 1860s, the VAST majority of people in the US, and I believe globally, were farmers, on small homesteads\family farms.

There wasn't the MASSIVE urbanization we have today.

Most households had their own water supply, food supply and a fair amount of tools... Plus, frankly, most of the US was still frontier. Oh, and let's not forget horses and wagons on each farm. You know, the transportation method which can refuel itself by parking it in a field overnight.

Today, when the power goes off, the water stops flowing and the trucks stop. No more gas, no more diesel, no more refrigerated Supply Chain.

Your odds in 1860s are MUCH better long term, especially if you start in the countryside.

Oh, and the lack of modern transportation, especially aircraft, means that the spread is MUCH slower. If you factor in, say, 4 hours from being bitten to zombification, you can drive over two hundred miles, or fly halfway across a continent. 4 Hours in 1860 means, if you're on a train, you're maybe getting 100 miles, but if you're on horse, you're going to get about 30 miles.

WAY more time for society to react, and if you have telegraph lines, you can actually get word out faster than the infection wave can spread.

This is true. But a zombie horror doesn’t mean the whole world has to be infected. A small scale story with a hosted or town under siege is just as viable and worked just as well due to communications being what they were back then.

It also depends on how the zombie infection spreads. If it’s disease based, it could start off as something mild with a long incubation time before people go crazy (‘living zombies’).