AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'“Players, welcome to the apocalypse…”
'Kelly Lawrence is a grieving widow. Jack Minnow is a website designer. Reis Anderson is the son of a senator. Each of these players has their own reasons for signing up to The Apocalypse Games, a state of the art virtual game designed to entertain doomsday preppers, gamers, and cosplayers.
'Altogether, over 100 people enter NASA designed simulation pods and hook up to the mainframe computer with one goal: survive 24 hours of an apocalypse. Instead of game over at the end, they’re plugged straight into a new game. Then another. It’s clear the computer has malfunctioned. What’s not clear is why.
'With no communication to or from the outside operators, they can only fight endless battles and hope they’re rescued before it’s too late. While they can’t die inside the game, they can die if the pods break down while they’re still hooked up.
'This game of survival just got real.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Affiliation Notes
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Preppers and Survivalism in the AustLit Database
This work has been affiliated with the Preppers and Survivalism project due to its relationship to either prepping or prepper-inflected survivalism more generally, and contains one or more of the following:
1. A strong belief in some imminent threat
2. Taking active steps to prepare for that perceived threat- A range of activities not necessarily associated with ‘prepping’ take on new significance, when they are undertaken with the express purpose of preparing for and/or surviving perceived threats, e.g., gardening, abseiling.
- The plausibility of the threat, and the relative “reasonable-ness” of the response, don’t affect this definition. E.g., if someone is worried about climate change and climate disasters, and they respond by moving from a riverbank location in Cairns, or to a highland region of New Zealand, this makes them a prepper. If someone else is worried about brainwashing rays from outer space, and they respond by making a tinfoil hat, that makes them a prepper.
3. A character or characters (or text) who self-identify as a ‘prepper’, or some synonymous/modified term: ‘financial preppers’, ‘weekend preppers’, ‘fitness preppers’, etc.
As a tier one work, this particular text has been identified as adhering to all three of the prepper criteria as outlined in the project definition and thus is of particular importance as a prepper text in the AustLit database. This work is one of the few examples within an Australian context that we have identified as pertaining to prepping according to our robust definition. These texts contain at least one prepper character and are in direct conversation with prepping as a movement, subculture, ideology, and set of behaviours.
