piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here

The first question comes from lilfluff and is for the Planners ‘Verse

So it looks like they got started from family discussions after the panic of 1873. But how much was simply saying, “That worked well, we should keep doing that,” and how much was an actual organized effort to build something that could hold people together should civilization collapse.

When the Planners first began, their plans were very small-scale: they wanted to keep their family and their close associates safe through any collapse. They were intent on being the survivors, not necessarily in rebuilding a world.

What grew out of that was a combination of factors:

* A growth of target – they grew in number as they recruited new members, as their children grew up, married, and stayed close.

* A growth of technology – as technology improved, the “basics of survival” grew and grew – running water, modern medicine, transportation, and so on. In order to maintain that level of comfort, greater and greater infrastructure and education was needed.

* A growth of horror – the Cold War era led to the concept of “The End of the World as We Know It,” the belief in a global catastrophe. that left to a wider scope of planning as the focus could no longer be on the survival of the family; it had to be on the survival of the species if, in truth, the family was to survive.

All of this snowballed from “we’ll be comfortable through any small crisis” to “we are the supply and information depot for the post-apocalyptic world.”

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