The Rise of Apocalyptic and Survival Fiction

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I don't think we should assume that most technology will die off. There are enough people out there with interest in maintaining technology, and their own mechanical skills and equipment (and generators), to keep all but the most complex tech going for a long time.

This includes communications equipment, which can be used to pass along information about maintenance and repair (or, at least, jury-rigging ideas) to others, and to organize sharing and swapping of hardware to keep each other going. At the very least, we can expect ebays and craigslists to continue well into the future.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I'm not sure that enough power for large-scale manufacturing is plausible; the industrial revolution was founded on easy access to fuels we've mostly used up. (Even with a horrific decimation of the populace... the easy coal is gone. The easiest oil is deep underground or underwater. Deforestation has a long recovery time.) However, small/local manufacturing, powered by humans, animals, wind or water, is very possible, and would allow us access to a lot of the information and technology that makes our lives so much more healthy and comfortable than most of our ancestors.

So a post-apocalyptic Earth would be something like Pern, but without thread or dragons?

[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

I don't think we should assume that most technology will die off. There are enough people out there with interest in maintaining technology, and their own mechanical skills and equipment (and generators), to keep all but the most complex tech going for a long time.

This includes communications equipment, which can be used to pass along information about maintenance and repair (or, at least, jury-rigging ideas) to others, and to organize sharing and swapping of hardware to keep each other going. At the very least, we can expect ebays and craigslists to continue well into the future.

I put a huge *maybe* on that. Given how dependent we are on technology these days, the shock of losing all or a sizable portion of it has the potential to kick us back a few hundred years in technology. Of course, at the same time, if enough people survive, a large portion of it could be maintained. (I should explore that in a novel sometime. lol) But without the supporting population base and applicable concentrations, it's unlikely to happen. Of course, that's all speculation. We'd need an actual disaster to know for certain.

Originally Posted by teh603

So a post-apocalyptic Earth would be something like Pern, but without thread or dragons?

Awe, but I wanted my dragons!

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by teh603

So a post-apocalyptic Earth would be something like Pern, but without thread or dragons?

Not quite; Pern is resource-poor, and the colony lost a lot of very basic info in the scrabble to get away from Thread. (Like the concept of what computers are, and a lot of basic medical science, and the periodic table of elements.)

We'd have plenty of resources that are hard to produce in low-tech settings--sheets of glass, spools of wire, and plastic tubing in all sizes will be around for centuries. We have encyclopedia that Pern lost with their computers; even though the majority of our info may now be digital, we have huge libraries to draw from.

We'd still be lacking dragons, though.

[gmw]

It also pays to remember just how recent most of what we call "technology" really is. You don't even have to go back 100 years to find a very different world. Sure there are people out there now that try to keep up some of the "old" skills, but what are the odds of those few surviving some apocalyptic event.

I find it slightly amusing reading the posts here that suggest that simply having access to the knowledge (even assuming you have the means to access it) will be enough. Anyone here care to reproduce the work of the Wright brothers from Wikipedia articles alone? Apprenticeships can be long and hard for some of the skills (as opposed to raw knowledge) to be acquired, and they will be longer and harder if there are no masters to learn from.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by gmw

I find it slightly amusing reading the posts here that suggest that simply having access to the knowledge (even assuming you have the means to access it) will be enough. Anyone here care to reproduce the work of the Wright brothers from Wikipedia articles alone? Apprenticeships can be long and hard for some of the skills (as opposed to raw knowledge) to be acquired, and they will be longer and harder if there are no masters to learn from.

My husband could rebuild the Wright brothers' plane, but he says (I'm quoting):

Why would you want to? It was a terrible design, almost unflyable. The engine was low-power and heavy; the chain drive system was worthless. Wing-warping as a method of roll-control is ridiculous. Much better to use the Curtis "barn door" aileron system; it gives better control of roll and gives a much more stable airframe. On top of that, the pitch and yaw axis (pitch is "elevator;" yaw is "rudder") is so short-coupled to make the machine incredibly unstable; it's a miracle they got the thing to fly at all.

Much better off to use the later Bleriot designs; if I were to build an airplane today, I'd be much better off using more modern materials and build along the line of a modern "ultralight" or "microlight" airplane. And, as a modeler, I could scratch one up from found materials in less than a month.

(I could directly copy the Wright brothers' airplane but it's such a terrible design only a fool would do it. The only thing impressive about it was that it was the first viable propeller design; we still use their theories for low-speed propellers.)

Any of his flying buddies would say the same.

I worked at a RenFaire for several years, and was peripherally involved with the SCA. I'm surrounded by people who know how to build the basic technologies of survival and transportation from scratch with limited materials.

There is no shortage--even in the nongeek communities--of people who are good at putting things together. There are plenty of "junkyard engineers" and other craftspeople who would love to have a whole city's worth of spare parts to build steam-powered cars, long-distance gliders, restart a phone system (the wires are already in place) or bypass that and make ham radio communications.

Husband says: "Give me a semi-urban setting, a group of a few hundred survivors, and in ten years, I could give you steampunk level technology for the whole community." And he's not unique in his skills & interests, nor at the top of any field of mechanics or engineering. (Although he is ridiculously talented with vehicles.)

[VydorScope]

Yeah, I think some here is underestimating the impact of all the information we have at our hands in the present age. We would not have to reinvent the wheel....

[gmw]

I'm not sure the wheel was ever actually invented (where's the patent? ). For the rest ... I don't doubt the skills that many people have, but there are assumptions being made that may or may not bear out, depending on the catastrophe. Just what percentage of the population have the knowledge to build such things as aircraft, even on found materials? What percentage of the population do we expect to survive the catastrophe? How does the maths pan out? Let's say that a few do survive. Fine. For the day, the week, the month, the year after the catastrophe it may indeed be possible to do many things based on found materials, but keeping going in the long term is a different proposition, especially with a limited population. Creating a manufacturing infrastructure required for the long term is not an insignificant detail. If you keep relying only on found materials then the story told in many books of a slow decline of civilisation begins to look realistic.

[kennyc]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_...281959_film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%28novel%29

The book also takes its name from the T. S. Eliot poem The Hollow Men, which includes the line "Gathered on this beach of the tumid river." Some editions of the novel, including the 1990 publication by Mandarin Paperbacks, include extracts from the poem, such as its concluding lines:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

[Steven Lake]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

There is no shortage--even in the nongeek communities--of people who are good at putting things together. There are plenty of "junkyard engineers" and other craftspeople who would love to have a whole city's worth of spare parts to build steam-powered cars, long-distance gliders, restart a phone system (the wires are already in place) or bypass that and make ham radio communications.

I think those kinds of people would indeed be useful. The trick is getting enough of them to Disaster Stage 2 (ref earlier post about disaster stages) alive, healthy and functional to recover things quickly. If you have the numbers, recovery is fast. If you don't, it's slow and arduous. The other side of things is that modern parts and equipment is designed with a limited lifetime in mind. So while you may start out with a huge supply of spare parts, over time you'd have to either recycle what's out there, or build more because the other stuff would break, wear down, rust away, rot, etc. Now that's not saying you couldn't rebuild society with what's left behind, but without an infusion of new materials within the first 20 years, society will continue to regress until it reaches a point where it can produce a reliable, sustainable, sufficient supply of new goods.

Husband says: "Give me a semi-urban setting, a group of a few hundred survivors, and in ten years, I could give you steampunk level technology for the whole community." And he's not unique in his skills & interests, nor at the top of any field of mechanics or engineering. (Although he is ridiculously talented with vehicles.)

HAHAHA! Dude, if the world did come to an end, he sounds like the kind of guy I'd want in my neighborhood.

Originally Posted by gmw

It also pays to remember just how recent most of what we call "technology" really is. You don't even have to go back 100 years to find a very different world. Sure there are people out there now that try to keep up some of the "old" skills, but what are the odds of those few surviving some apocalyptic event.

Interesting factoid, there were people (aside from the Amish) as late as the 1980's who hadn't gotten electricity yet (they still burned oil lamps), didn't have access to supermarket foods, or phones, no running water (it was all hand pumped water, melted snow, rivers, etc), lived in dugouts (a type of half in the ground house), and lived in much the same way as our ancestors did around the turn of the century. Heck, there's still lots of places in Alaska that have no roads to them, and a surprising number with no running water, no power, etc. No joke.

I find it slightly amusing reading the posts here that suggest that simply having access to the knowledge (even assuming you have the means to access it) will be enough. Anyone here care to reproduce the work of the Wright brothers from Wikipedia articles alone? Apprenticeships can be long and hard for some of the skills (as opposed to raw knowledge) to be acquired, and they will be longer and harder if there are no masters to learn from.

Agreed. A book can only teach so much. The rest must be done hands on. Take a look at any recognized "trade" or job and you'll see that it takes years to perfect the skills you need to do it well. In ancient times people quite often began learning a trade as young as 5 and apprenticed well up into their 30's before they were considered a "master" or even a "journeyman" in some cases.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by kennyc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_...281959_film%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%28novel%29

The book also takes its name from the T. S. Eliot poem The Hollow Men, which includes the line "Gathered on this beach of the tumid river." Some editions of the novel, including the 1990 publication by Mandarin Paperbacks, include extracts from the poem, such as its concluding lines:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

A better quote might be from the Black Sabbath song "Electric Funeral." IMO the only thing Eliot did that was notable or quotable was The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Everything else is Modernist tripe whose primary use is discouraging people from learning to enjoy reading.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Agreed. A book can only teach so much. The rest must be done hands on. Take a look at any recognized "trade" or job and you'll see that it takes years to perfect the skills you need to do it well. In ancient times people quite often began learning a trade as young as 5 and apprenticed well up into their 30's before they were considered a "master" or even a "journeyman" in some cases.

In a lot of those cases, they were working without literacy, and without any kind of education theory to support them. Apprentices were stuck trying to figure out which parts of what they learned was relevant to the trade, and which parts were the master's personal style, and which parts were just random idiosyncrasies. ("We always use water from THIS stream to cool the horseshoes"... is that because that stream is closest, or "is especially pure"--has ions that help the process, or because it was his master's "lucky stream?" Do we not use well water because it's got minerals that are bad for the smithing, or because it's just such a pain to draw up enough of it, and then there wouldn't be enough to drink?)

One of the things that'd make the recovery go quicker is the science of education--we now know how to learn. We know how to sort skills into "learn these first; learn those later," and how to arrange a mix of practice and theory to make them part of long-term memory, and how to test to find gaps in knowledge. We have books that let us know what an expert should be able to do; practice is a lot easier if you know what you're working toward.

Admittedly, there are big problems in how these are done in a lot of modern schools--but education 300 years ago often didn't have that kind of formal structure, and it could take a decade to learn what a modern class can teach in a semester. (With, of course, interested students.)

[Penforhire]

gmw, my thought comes from working with many talented engineers over the years. Put three or four really good engineers on a task with severely limited resources and you'll see some real world MacGyver action. Our mission in life is to "get it done."

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

[...]Interesting factoid, there were people (aside from the Amish) as late as the 1980's who hadn't gotten electricity yet (they still burned oil lamps), didn't have access to supermarket foods, or phones, no running water (it was all hand pumped water, melted snow, rivers, etc), lived in dugouts (a type of half in the ground house), and lived in much the same way as our ancestors did around the turn of the century. Heck, there's still lots of places in Alaska that have no roads to them, and a surprising number with no running water, no power, etc. No joke. [...]

And the sorts of places where there are a large proportion of such people are the sorts of places that could be better isolated from some apocalyptic event. You can imaginge the few survivors stranded in what's left of the cities, struggling to work out how to get back their access to Wikipedia to read how to rebuild their world, only to find tribes on their doorstep telling them, "We're your new bosses." Puts a new slant on the old "and the meek shall inherit the earth"

[gmw]

This being the Writer's Corner, I thought I'd ask: Where do we fit in? Can anyone see a place for writers in a post apocalyptic world? Maybe fiction writers have to turn to non-fiction, journal keepers of the struggle to survive. How much new literary work is such a world really going to need or want?