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I've recently been looking into post-apocalyptic settings for a possible novel. I like the feel of people trying to survive off of the land with nothing but the clothes on their back, or banding together for survival in makeshift shelters, but there's always one problem: given enough time and resources, people will inevitably start to return to the lifestyle they had before the apocalypse. Cities will eventually be rebuilt, power restored, and so forth.

In order to keep the post-apocalyptic feel, I want to prevent that. An obvious way to do that is to have something in place actively keeping people from advancing, like zombies or a deadly virus, but even those can be defeated by a good enough wall, cold temperatures, or a cure.

Also, and this is very important, I don't want to change the world by introducing undead or the killer flu. I want the world to be as natural as reasonably possible. What I mean by that is if you were to walk outside in this post-apocalyptic world, you would ideally have to worry about nothing you wouldn't have to worry about if you went for a walk in the woods today. This also includes visual differences, like new animals or a changed atmosphere.

So here is my challenge: I want a post-apocalyptic world, permanently, with as little change to the natural world as possible. What the apocalypse was doesn't matter, as long as the following is achieved on a permanent basis:

• Daily struggle for survival, simply because people aren't used to living off the land.


• People limited to solitary, family based, or <200 people in a group. No big cities.


• Inability to maintain power, save for more archaic methods, like water and wind power. No nuclear. Batteries and the like are fine, but should be limited.


• Technology halted. No technological development, as everyone is trying to stay alive.


• No governing body, other than what individual groups appoint over themselves.

Obviously something is going to need to change in the world. My goal is to keep it as 'unpresent' as possible. Ideally, there would be a big apocalypse which would happen and then leave, but have permanent effects, without changing the natural world. Assume the world is present day Earth.

If you limit population everything else follows; specialists, and the technology they create and maintain, require the support of high density populations. There are several things going for you already:

• a post-apocalypse population crash, and there will be one, will effectively end the oil industry, more or less permanently, this sharply limits the yield of an acre of farmland to something closer to 1900s levels or less.




• the post crash population is also likely to be scattered as small random bands that will struggle to survive let alone grow beyond one generation if they cannot link together into larger groups with broader genetics.




• there are a number of ways to cause long term damage to the fertility of land, we've already degraded much of the best farmland in the world one way and another; as long as farm yields stay low population growth is restricted.




• there are also a number of ways to permanently damage the fertility of a population so that their growth rate is severely restricted, some of these are cultural, involving active infanticide, while others are due to genetic damage from exposure to chemical or biological agents.




• given a human generation or two large land predators could potentially breed back to the point where mankind finds itself on the menu in a way not seen for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. This is partly because the post apocalypse population will lack certain skills and knowledge that were once common in humans, in particular how to hunt and survive outside of the village environment.

Any or a combination of the above could be used to realistically keep population flat across a wide area preventing a return to high density settlements and the technical advances that they make possible.

Do note that this can get a little hairy, the initial survivors have access to large reserves of pre-processed materials, refined metals, tools, bulk food reserves, synthetic cloth etc... that can carry them through beyond their actual population's ability to maintain and survive, when those resources run out they could be faced with a second lose of population as equipment that was "keeping their heads above water" breaks down.

They would be very hard pressed to advance if all the best resources were gone.

Maybe a lot of people evacuated the planet (or tried to) before the apocalypse, taking with them huge colony ships full of a lot of the best that the planet had to offer. All the gold in the vaults is gone. All the processed steel is either gone or what's left is all collected together in one spot that the survivors don't realize. They took with them as much food, medicine, and everything else that they could. Some people got left behind in the now-resource-less world.

Or maybe the planet is just not rich in good resources to begin with. No iron. Copper is even more rare than it is here. The planet has no areas of rich and abundant life; only enough to survive.

If they cannot make durable tools, they get no rest. Stone tools need to be replaced often. And if there are not a lot of trees, and if the land cannot support a lot of trees, then they need to be conservative in their wood usage as well. About the only thing they are likely to have a lot of are rocks. That would force a hard life.

What scarce little they could get which is better would be very highly prized. If someone did manage to make an iron tool, it would be a priceless heirloom, an artifact carefully guarded. Even just a nice steel knife or an ax would be worth fighting tribe-scale battles over just because of how much better it would make your life.

For a good example see S. M. Sterling's series that started with "Dies the Fire"

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emberverse_series In it electricity stops working, as well as anything using more than about 100 psi.

People are more efficient in larger groups. 200 is a bad size. Hunter gatherers are extended families -- 20-30 people maybe. As soon as you have any form of agriculture, towns of a thousand are quite possible. Examples are in the Iroquois Federation, the Cherokee, and the Mississippi mound builders in north America. The Aztec and Maya in central America, and the Inca and the raft of smaller nations they conquered in South America.

One way to keep the tech down is to not have agriculture. Make a climate that is more variable. (We may be doing this already) If agriculture fails, then famine takes out 90% of the people, and the remaining ones don't have the ability to restore the technology.

A maternalistic AI has taken over, and is convinced that technology and cities are bad for us

I know it's a bit farfetched, but if Skynet rained fiery death down from satellite weapons on any communities that were too large or advanced, that would maintain your desired conditions.

Textbooks and books in general are currently super common, and there's enough general technical knowledge diffused over most modern countries for a return to the dark ages to be as sustainable as humanity's previous forays in that direction, unless you have an active agent discouraging the success of would-be rebuilders. Sorry.

Maybe, given a few more generations, print books will be sufficiently rare, and electronics sufficiently complicated, that we couldn't just revert to nineteenth century tech and work back up, given some sort of collapse. I'm not persuaded that we're there yet.