I am usually all in with well written fiction that follows what I believe to be a realistic account of our destiny.

That destiny might be the demise of humanity or humanity populating the universe. In the former, I insist that we do not go gentle and that we display a little nobility in our demise. In fiction representing a more positive future, I like to see us bumbling along as we always have, making lots of mistakes but always overcoming them. I see our future expansion likely to be more like 16th century colonialism than “brave new world”.

I don’t know how to work with fiberglass, I have no small engine maintenance skills, (and I can’t refine gasoline!). I can’t weave sailcloth or make rope, and I have no carpentry skills to speak of. And even if I and my community were able to put together a small fleet, or even one seaworthy vessel, what would we have worth trading? And could we catch enough fish to feed ourselves without a knowledge of fishing that did not depend on now-unavailable technologies, like line, hooks, nets and so on? And although I am familiar with my local waters and the marine life, I don’t even know how to preserve smoked mullet, one of my favorite seafood dishes!

In fact, I toyed with this very scenario as a plot for a novel, and soon came to the conclusion that there was no way I could convince myself it was workable, much less persuade my readers that it was even possible. And of course, I have no idea how to organize the social collective needed to provide and assemble the total ensemble of skills needed to supplement each individual’s skills. I don’t think I have the leadership skills to make it happen, either. Being a good boss may be the hardest job of all.

Technologies, even the simplest and most primitive ones, are not things. They are systems. They require a pre-existing infrastructure. Each technology, be it fishing, hunting, farming, herding cattle, whatever, is the result of a long evolution from simpler systems. The tools and social organization needed to implement these systems can be improved on, or built upon, but it can’t be raised from scratch overnight. Occasionally, a culture can adopt a new way of earning a living from a neighboring culture, the way the Plains Indians learned horse tech from the Spanish, but they already had a functioning and successful culture that could keep them alive for a few generations until the new tech was mastered and integrated into their environment.

You’re right, it takes a village. This is why I am betting on places like India. A village can raise food and make tools, with un-powered machinery. It has potters, weavers, carpenters, a blacksmith; and it can trade with neighbors who might harbor a tanner, a harness maker, a wainwright, a cooper, a work animal tamer, and so on. The abandoned cities could be mined for raw materials. In fact, in remote agricultural villages, life might change very little. This is how I visualize the landscape of Gaul and Britain after the Legions went home. It probably wasn’t all that different from the time before the Legions first came.

Ish’s problem in Earth Abides is that his initial tribe was too small. He was the only curious mind in the tribe and his child who also had an curious mind died young. Nobody was interested in getting the electricity turned back on and it didn’t happen. Were his initial tribe larger they would have had a larger group to pool resources and skills together.

In Stephen King’s The Stand, the ‘good’ people gathered in Colorado and the ‘bad’ gathered in Las Vegas. The gathering allowed both sides to pool resources and get basic services running again. While King’s methods of gathering were outlandish, I think the concept is correct. Gathering and pooling resources is crucial.

Some parts of the country are more likely to stabilize than others. The Pacific Northwest has a large hydroelectric infrastructure and a growing wind power infrastructure. Hydro takes a skill set that may be hard to maintain, but even so I think a small community that gathered around a dam might be able to keep the lights on. Even easier would be wind power. We have so many windmills dotting the landscape here that maintaining them and finding parts by canabalizing others should be able to keep the lights on fairly easily. That is of course assuming the community can come up with a way of keeping the generators lubricated as the oil supplies run out or go bad. If the community is large enough and they have a big enough brain pool, they might have a chance.

Another good book is David Brin’s The Postman. The part I like least about the book, but is the most telling about the nature of the fledgling communities has to do with the AI. In the book the, the community has an AI which has become almost a deity to the community in that all important questions get asked of the AI and the people have faith in the answers. The protaganist soon discovers its a sham and that the AI died long ago, when he finds the answers getting very general and folksy compared to pre-apocolypse answers. The general theme of the book was it was unnecessary though. What the community needed was to believe they were a part of a larger civilization and that one day everything would be restored. I find that argument intriguing and speaks to the power of optimism and hope.

So I would say having a large enough community of skills, in a location with easily obtained electricity (also food and water), and a sense of hope are the key ingredients to surviving the apocalypse.

Before the Romans, they Mycenaean civilization of the Eastern Mediterranean vanished (probably because of the volcanic eruption and tsunami of Thera), and Greece had its Dark Age and barbarian invaders. People still remembered how to read and write, work metals, raise livestock, construct buildings, build and sail ships, weave cloth, farm. Things didn’t slide back to caveman status. Also, there was contact with other civilizations, the Byzantine empire held out for almost another thousand years after the fall of Rome, and the Arab civilization preserved much of what we still remember of the Roman world.

China has gone through multiple collapses through its long history, but it always seemed to recover. India has had many ruling civilizations, but it has remained civilized. The Egyptian civilization eventually disappeared, although it managed to last as long as everyone else put together! Other civilizations, such as the Amerind cultures of the Andes, Central America and Mexico kept on recovering from various disasters until the Spaniards succeeded in crushing them altogether.

It appears that as long as people can still farm, make metal tools and weapons, and construct buildings and carry on trade, some sort of village culture, leading to feudalism and city-states will take over.

What concerns me is that in our civilization, these basic village tasks are now beyond the capability of everyone except a few hobbyists. Even farmers today can’t farm the way they did a century ago, we’ve become addicted to farm machinery, chemicals, irrigation and seed, and not enough people today actually know how to use oxen and plow to grow food, much less have the gear and animals. Making cloth, mining and smelting metals, constructing buildings, even starting a fire without matches is beyond the skill level of most of us (myself included).

I fear modern man has become so addicted to his technology that he may not be able to recover to a neolithic slash-and-burn agricultural village or even nomadic hunter-gatherer level after the fall. After what little ammunition and game there still is available is exhausted, I fear we will relapse to cannibalism, and the survivors of that will eventually stabilize at some paleolithic level.

My guess as to which modern nation will be most likely to survive an end-of-civilization scenario, restabilize at the agricultural village level, and eventually recover to some form of pre-technological civilization: India.

I just finished Station Eleven this weekend. It reminded me a lot of Earth Abides, but with more interesting characters and a nonlinear format that was a lot like putting together a puzzle without seeing the box top. The closer you got to the end, it all fit together in a satisfying way.

Station Eleven had a more optimistic ending than Earth Abides, but my sense is that once entropy on that scale starts there is no stopping it until humanity hits rock bottom.

Synopsis: the Ownership Class are retiring to gated communities (in near earth orbit!)with guaranteed Major Medical while the hoi polloi makes do as best they can speaking Spanglish in a blasted urban landscape with second-rate mass-production medical care administered by faceless (robotic) bureaucrats.

The tech and art direction will be instantly familiar, South African director/writer Neill Blomkamp gave us “District 9″, so the movie is visually interesting, and the orbiting executive ghetto where the job creators and other one percenters live in suburban golf-club splendor is a beautiful contrast to the squalor of mid-21st century LA. (Think: beautiful downtown Aleppo.) The “Elysium” of the title, will remind you of an exclusive Ringworld, no doubt designed by Del Webb and financed by The Donald..

The movie could be better SF, but keep an eye on Jody Foster as a deliciously evil executive bitch, a Carly Fiorina on steroids, fighting tenaciously to preserve “our freedoms and all we’ve worked for”. If you don’t mind your metaphors a little obvious and ham-fisted, you’ll have no trouble picking out the parallels between the wimpy and ineffectual (but totally sold-out) liberal Elysium executives, the impeccably groomed and coiffed Establishment Republican management, and their barely under control Tea Party thug enforcers. When you factor in the 47% marooned dirtside, you get the perfect tetrafecta: Bosses, Babbitts, Bunkers and Bubbas.

Great stuff.

Another Brunner work that had an impact on me is Shockwave Rider, probably the first story of computer hacking I ever read. It was an eye-opener, as much for the basic idea that those mysterious temples of computing could be penetrated and suborned, as much for the specific techniques he imagined (and fairly well).

The best contemporary depiction of the future as it currently looks to me would be Matt Damon’s movie Elysium of a couple of years ago. I saw it while I was reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, and Damon’s movie seemed like a supplement to the book, a fictionalized rendering of the factual trends in a work of non-fiction. “If this keeps up…” is a poor guide to the future, I know, but projecting the growth of inequality Piketty documents a couple of centuries into the future, and you get Elyisum‘s world of the 1% floating along in orbit in pristine splendor, exploiting and oppressing the 99% trapped on the hellish surface of a planet ravaged by capitalism. Heavy stuff.

Lately I’ve been streaming old episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and one of many I’d never seen before was from about 1995, a two-part called “Past Tense”. It involved time travel, to San Francisco in 2024, and I was blown away by its prescience. Times were hard because of “the economy”, homeless people were warehoused in ghettos called “sanctuaries” while the wealthy elite frolicked. There was a riot brewing. People logged into the “Interface” and sometimes had trouble “getting on the net”. For an extra veja du tingle, the backstory referenced events in 2015. Doesn’t often happen that you get to verify the predictions made twenty years ago. That one was uncanny.

Ask me again in a year, Jody, and I’ll probably give a different answer. The future’s a moving target and the mirror is always distorted.

Of course, this means that most of the technology and infrastructure is still intact, although not very realistic by modern standards. For example, hydro power supplies electricity to some communities for months after the event, until maintenance failures bring them down.

Stewart was a trained physical geographer, though, so his description of how the natural world reacts when the hand of man is suddenly withdrawn is very well thought out. His books “Storm” and “Fire” are descriptions of natural phenomena which are still read today. And his account of how the human race responds after the biological attack in both the short and long term is also quite convincing. I wouldn’t doubt it would still be worth reading today.