We’ll be starting Fiction Unit in my Creative Writing course after Spring Break and I’m thinking about doing a sort of Post-Apocalyptic Steampunk story but with a bit of a twist. It will be set in the future after a huge population collapse and civilization has sort of wound backward.
This is a possible introduction I’ve been playing around with. Let me know what you think. 

By the end of the 21^st Century Earth had become a petri dish teeming with numerous unstable compounds -metaphoric and otherwise- all battling to see who could self-destruct first; a ticking time bomb of scientific advances, various techniques of life preservation, mass production of every imaginable substance, all the while the linear system of humanity’s energy levels wound down at an alarming rate.

At the dawning of the 22^nd Civilization as we knew it ceased to exist. The human population peeked and then abruptly plummeted as society failed to sustain itself. The war that broke out soon after was one of the likes no one had ever seen before. The lack of materials and rations did little to hinder the hostility and cruelty spurred by the desolate hopelessness and widespread terror. Hunger, hatred, and disease only served to fan the flames.