Sunday's Seven Sentence Snippet

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I posted the following snippet from my book on Facebook today:

I turned on my tablet and tapped the history textbook icon. A table of contents popped up and I tapped the number 4. A picture of a large, barren landscape, dotted with ruins, topped the page, with the title, “Disaster Strikes”. The caption identified it as, “Denver in 2013, one year after a large meteor crashes to earth obliterating 75% percent of the world’s population.” I glanced up at Teacher 3. She had a map displayed at the front. It was extremely old and it looked strange with so much land on it.

Each Sunday between now and the release of my book (which I still don't have a firm date on), I'll post another to give you a peek at what you might find inside, along with a little background that didn't make it into the final cuts.

An important part of the premise in the X5 series (yes, there will be more) is that the world has changed a great deal due to the impact of a meteor in 2012. I had to look at quite a few sites to see what kinds of things might happen to the Earth if such a thing actually happened. Most of them agreed that so much debris would be thrown up into the atmosphere, that all light from the sun would be blocked out and most living things would die off. Just like the dinosaurs. Luckily, some people were able to build an underground habitat and preserve a variety of plant and animal species in anticipation of humanity's return to the surface. Most sources thought this period would last approximately 2-3 years.

The snippet talks about how the map of the Earth "looked strange with so much land on it." Another probable outcome of a giant meteor hitting Earth would be the almost immediate melting of all the polar ice caps, kind of like global warming in extreme fast forward. As a result of this, the sea level would rise dramatically. This was where I found a lot of disagreement over just which parts of the earth would be submerged. So for my purposes, I figured that survival would depend not just on having an underground habitat, but on having one that was still well above the new sea level. That's why I chose Colorado as my setting. The Rockies should be high enough to avoid the water. Any maps of the Earth that X5 and his classmates would have seen would certainly have a lot less land than the maps of our time. 

The final version of this classroom scene had a great deal cut out of it because it was boring exposition. However, I will be creating a page for deleted scenes, so you'll get to see some of the things that didn't survive the editing process. Stay tuned for next Sunday's Seven Sentence Snippet!