The Rules of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction?

I recall some years ago encountering a page on some web site that purported to offer advice to writers of post-apocalyptic fiction. The purveyor of said advice flatly told the reader that the characters in fiction of this type should have no time to think of anything but immediate physical survival among the ruins.

This piece of "advice" annoyed me greatly. Admittedly I am generally suspicious of one-size-fits-all advice broadcast to the world at large as, even when actually, technically, correct (as it is not much of the time), overwhelmingly likely to either be so obvious that no one really needs to be told that advice (like "Don't take a nap in the middle of a highway at rush hour"), or be completely unusable by the vast majority of people in their actual life (like "If you care to abide by the proper protocol, do not bow from the waist when you meet the Queen of England in person for the first time").

I am particularly suspicious of the sort of writing "instruction" which in an area that (in contrast with, for example, the forms of writing a business letter, or the conventions of academic papers) is supposed to be all about creativity and self-expression, barrages the students with "shoulds," and still worse, "musts." Certainly fiction tends to adhere to certain principles, with particular techniques achieving particular effects, and we can discuss them in rational ways in at least some degree, and it can certainly be useful to be familiar with them on that level. There is undeniably such a thing as craft knowledge that one will (probably) have to get one way or the other in order to produce something worthwhile. But even there one ought to be careful of "should" and "must," especially at such a basic narrative level as the aforementioned author discussed. This not least because of the fact that particular techniques achieve particular effects does not necessarily settle for us which effects we should go far, especially if we are not playing the usually self-defeating game of chasing after "What's hot now" (or the still worse game Oscar Wilde described of "degrad[ing] the classics into authorities," and using them "as a means for checking the progress of art"--of which cultural crime I only hesitate to accuse the dubious instructor precisely because they failed to show any knowledge of the classics, post-apocalyptic or otherwise, whatsoever).

Making matters worse the author here seemed to me demonstrably wrong, and in ways all too telling of a present-minded shallowness. After all, there is much more to post-apocalyptic fiction than reptile-minded survivalism. There is also the struggle to move past survivalism--to save what remains of civlization, or rebuild it, perhaps along new and better lines. And this has seemed to me the far more compelling kind of story, as I have recently been reminded when picking up once more Isaac Asimov's classic, Foundation, most assuredly a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction in its recounting the struggle to abbreviate the Dark Age following civilization's collapse and relapse into barbarism. It is, of course, hardly a fashionable work these days, but that is as much, or more, because of its considerable virtues (its scope, its interest in society, its rationalism) as any failings it may supposedly have--virtues which have me rethinking yet again my old appraisal of the book, such that I expect I will have more to say about it and the original trilogy of which it was a part in the coming days.