There is a new novel coming out early next year that should be extremely thought provoking - World Made by Hand. Here is a blurb from the publisher:In the best-seller The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. With World Made By Hand Kunstler makes an imaginative leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like after these coming catastrophes—the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars—converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy. And the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. As the heat of summer intensifies, the residents struggle with the new way of life in a world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish. A captivating, utterly realistic novel, World Made by Hand takes speculative fiction beyond the apocalypse and shows what happens when life gets extremely local.
Sounds pretty interesting to me. While I'm not a fanatic on the climate change front, my recent foray into the world of Distributism has me very interested in this novel. I love Distributist thought, but I think I'm with Kunstler that it will take a series of global catastrophes to bring that thought to the forefront of public life. It could be a total flop of a book but I think I'll give it a shot.
H/T: Veritas et Venustas
2 comments:
The post-apocalyptic New York story for me will always be a battle royal between Vonnegut’s Slapstick and the Kurt Russell camp fest which is Escape from New York. But this looks like a fun read, although many of these books seem to topple over due to: too much concept and not enough plot. However all are innocent until proven guilty. On a side note why are there so many books about after the decline. The fall from grace it’s self always being told by that old dude with cats in the Library of Congress from Logan’s Run as cautionary tale to the viewer of why we should change our ways. I think these works finger that part of our psyche that craves the “return to zero”, and not the midcourse correction that is warranted. Fight Club always being more entertaining than An Inconvenient Truth.
And the free association free for all is ended… Say that five times fast.
I hear you Clark, it has the possibility to be a complete mess. The interviews I've seen with him are nothing if not entertaining, so he might be able to pull it off. I'm more interested in how he deals with the return to small scale communities than with the global environmental crisis aspect. If scientists (and the media) were always correct in their prognostications, we would have frozen and fried a few times in the last 100 years or so. As you said, we need some small corrections rather than huge fear driven revolutions. But hey, that would be the politics of solutions and we all know politicians hate that...
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