I was thinking of writing a few stories inspired by the History Channel show "Life after People". The protagonist wakes up and gets out of the cryogenic tank he was trapped in only to find that the world he's in has changed. Every other human has disappeared and what's left behind is left decaying and neglected due to their absence.

I'm interested in how this story could work. It's not easy writing a story where there is no one for the protagonist to interact with. He could gain an animal friend, but the conversations would only be one way and the friend wouldn't talk back (or be intelligent enough to understand what's being said to him).

Of course he'd want to know how and why he surivived being in cryogenic stasis (he finds records that he died at some point before the humans disappeared and that he requested that he be preserved until one day when medical science could revive him). He could probably also look for ways to survive in his new world despite the knowledge that once he dies humanity will cease to exist, and that one person (let alone one male and female couple) is not enough to jumpstart humanity's existence.

Sounds cool, personally i think you should add some more humans to make the conflict interesting, romantic interest, depraved looney's, mole people, etc. If you story point is not being able to save the human race maybe make everyone that was in a cyrowhatsit's sterile because of it.

Hmm...but with extra people, you wouldn't get to explore the kind of loneliness that would come with being literally the last person left. That could drive someone insane.

Or you could do both, in a way...have him think for quite a while that he's the only person left, and then find someone. Ooh, I can see it being like the reader's never sure if the person he finds is real or just a figment of his imagination because the man's gone so whacko in those circumstances.

Many scientists have theorized that mankind may eventually evolve into an unintelligent species. Depending on just how long the man's been cryogenically frozen and how well the equipment that's kept him alive has been preserved, maybe he could come to discover that some strange species of animal he runs into is, in fact, a descended species from man (kind of like the morlocks from "The Time Machine," but maybe not intelligent).

Or perhaps for an overall story-arc, he could find evidence that there's a way to artificially bring back mankind (like a fully-automated genetics lab, somewhere on the planet).

Just some ideas to make it a little more fun. Regardless, sounds like it'd be really interesting.

Well, at the time my story takes place it's only been a short time... maybe 100 to a thousand years. The buildings are still there, just rotted out. Part of the mystery is how he survived; liquid nitrogen boils away after a while so he SHOULDN'T have survived at all. As for how humanity disappeared, that's what he's got to figure out as well. A few hundred years isn't enough time to naturally devolve a successful species, I think...

eh... maybe I should just do a webcomic about it. That should be interesting...

You could just write an interesting character living from day to day in an interesting world, pictured in an interesting way. No rules require a story to have a 'holy-shit-we-did-it-statue-of-liberty-means-harry-potter-is-voldemorts-right-hand-grafted-to-revolver-ocelot-mother-loving-crist-epic-battle-time' script.

At least you'd have one boring person who'd read your boring comic.

I would personally make it like this: he gets out, explore's loneliness, and then half way through, he finds that he is far from the last person alive. He is in fact not looking in the right places. There are thousands of people hidden away in forests, and underground in abandoned tunnel networks. hundreds of different communities hidden away in Earth's nooks and crannies.