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The best time to read chilling fiction and non-fiction is during the long, hot summer.
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Photo: Jesse Butler
The summer offers us the chance to get some sun, relax in the pool and (if you’re one of the lucky few) take time to do some reading for pleasure. It’s nice to welcome the season and to get into its hot and humid mood by reading fiction or non-fiction whose narratives take place in a hot and humid place. But as the months of heat drag on, especially if you live somewhere especially sunny and warm, the summer presents an opportunity to read works whose setting is not hot, humid and welcoming, but rather cold, dry and forbidding. After all, one can always put down a book about a cold and dark place (either figuratively or literally) and forget it by walking into the burning sunlight. In this sense, one can escape from the escape that is recreational reading by simply putting the book down and realizing that, after all, it only tells a story about some far away place in a different time (or season at least). In fact, some books represent their worlds as so dark and bleak that the best (or perhaps the only good) time to read them is in the middle of summer, when their chilling presentation can easily be countered by a pleasant walk outside in the blazing heat.
There are several very books that fall into the latter category, both fiction and non-fiction. As for non-fiction there are James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down and Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over. Each has to do with, more or less, with the phenomenon of “peak oil” – the time at which half of all recoverable petroleum has been extracted and after which oil production will go into inevitable decline. As far as fiction goes, there are Jean Hegland’s brilliant Into the Forrest, James Van Pelt’s Summer of the Apocalypse, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and George R. Stewart’s 1949 classic Earth Abides. This article will serve only as an introduction to each of these books. Later articles will focus on each in more depth in turn.
First, the non-fiction. Peak oil, the time after which production of petroleum begins its inevitable decline, has entered our cultural lexicon. Although the notion is technical, it’s easy to understand how the decline of oil production will have profound effects on every aspect of the lives of everyone in the developed world. A sort of worst-case scenario regarding peak oil is laid out in the following. First, note that world wide economic activity is (or at least was until fairly recently) increasing. Countries, like India and China, whose populations have historically consumed relatively little are beginning to enter the global economy in terms of importing more finished goods and purchasing more services. More energy (and so more petroleum) is needed to manufacture and transport all the goods that emerging markets in China and India demand. So with the global peak of oil production, supply necessarily declines, but demand continues to increase (as long as markets continue to emerge in places like India and China). Simple economics indicates that the price of oil will rapidly increase at this point.
One might wonder, “Well, so, the price of gas at the pump increases, we’ve seen that before.” The troubling fact is, and each of these three non-fiction books explain it well, albeit in significantly different ways, that it’s not just the price of gasoline that increases with an increase in the price of petroleum. The price of everything increases. Everything in the economy of developed nations is dependent upon petroleum: to manufacture, transport, market and sell goods; to provide transportation for workers to get to their jobs; to grow, preserve and transport the food we eat; etc. When oil becomes scarce, everything about the way we conduct our business will have to change.
So how do we deal with these changes that must take place? Can we deal with these changes and still live in a manner that is at all similar to how we live now? These are questions explored in James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. He imagines that peak oil and its aftermath will devastate what we have come to think of as business as usual. According to Kunstler, there simply will be nothing like the 2009 global economy during a time of energy scarcity. He believes that we will eventually, after the crises and “die-off” that will follow soon after peak oil, come to live again as we did in the mid-nineteenth century, before the introduction of cheap petroleum and all the advances and comforts it afforded. It’s an interesting vision about where we’ll be one hundred years from now. His predictions about how we’ll get there are quite alarming but compelling (in the way a bone-chilling horror story is).
If Kunstler’s imagined scenarios for what will happen seem more the product of emotion than those of data and dispassionate deliberation, Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over offer a reasonable counterbalance. Not that Heinberg thinks that business as usual will or even can continue; he sees the need for the same sort of urgency as does Kunstler, but argues for action in a different manner. Heinberg has assessed (nearly) every factor involved in our use of energy, and comes to the conclusion that unless we take significant action now (or possibly in 2007) it may be too late to save the global economy from a “hard landing” in the form of world wide depression and collapse of social, cultural and economic institutions. (The second edition of The Party’s Over was published in 2005, and since we’re seeing something like the beginnings of what he imagines maybe the window of opportunity is already almost closed.) Heinberg has written several books on the topic of energy, resources and depletion. I hope to have the chance to write about each of these books soon.
Finally, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down takes a more positive position than do the previous two authors on what each sees as the rapidly approaching twin crises of energy and resource scarcity. Homer-Dixon sees that amid the chaos and discomfort that may arise from peak oil and what follows it, there will be ample chances to benefit and perhaps even prosper. A relatively small subset of his work echoes that of Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. But whereas, McKibben focuses specifically on how local economies and self-sufficiency lead the way toward the more livable and sustainable “durable future”, Homer-Dixon’s thesis has much more broad focus – he hypothesizes that society’s complexity combined with the challenges looming near in the future will lead inevitably to a breakdown. But, from such a breakdown, can emerge a new, system of social organization better suited for its members to the world as it will become. The view is interesting in the abstract, but there aren’t as many details as one would like about just how we can prepare for the re-emergence of a social set-up from the wreck of the old. What can we do to prepare for the change? What would be a suitable “bridge system” in the interim? The Upside of Down doesn’t provide complete answers to those questions.
So what might it be like to live through and after the times these three non-fiction books describe? I’ll say something briefly about the four works of fiction I mentioned above, and I’ll do so in the following order: from least disturbing to most disturbing. (With this ordering, the walk in the summer sun will be that much more welcomed after you’re finished reading this.)
George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides tells the story of the very few survivors of a global pandemic that eliminates the vast majority of the human population. The story is very good, yet quaint by today’s standards. For example, the few people that are left after the rest of humanity is destroyed are relatively peaceful and cooperative. The account of how the survivors come to live in their newly depopulated environment is fascinating – George Stewart presaged, in a lighter and much more optimistic way, much of what James Howard Kunstler envisions. By the end of the book, the descendents (grandchildren and great-grandchildren) of those who survived the pandemic are using lemon tree and yew bows to hunt and defend themselves and they wear animal skin shirts, but they still wear blue jeans. One gets the sense that over time, human will revert to a hunter-gatherer existence, but the reversion will be slow.
Into the Forest is a superb novel. Jean Hegland’s writing has an almost lyrical quality which makes it, in terms of craft, a close second to The Road. Unlike Earth Abides, Into the Forest deals with the time just after the collapse of the (overly) complicated civilization that occupies North America in the end of the twentieth century (the book was published in 1998). In the book, two sisters and their father live on an isolated house in northern California. First, there are intermittent power outages, then the town near the house experiences various shortages. Finally, the situation in town (and, we’re meant to infer in all other towns as well) collapses, and the family must withdraw to their isolated house and struggle for survival. There is a “back to nature” theme in Into the Forest as well, with a much more individualist twist than in Earth Abides.
Summer of the Apocalypse by James van Pelt is built around a clever conceit: the story of a young boy’s experience of the collapse of society in North America is framed by an old man’s experience of trying to begin anew a society based on literacy. But the two are the same person: the old man is the young boy grown to adulthood and then to old age. With this set-up, the old man’s framing story is of a trip to former university town with a large library. The young boy’s framed story is of a trip with his mother and father to the wilderness amid the chaos of the initial collapse. The narrative of Summer of the Apocalypse is ultimately one of redemption, but not the sort of redemption one might expect. There is a deep primitivism in van Pelt’s conclusion similar to the tone of The Long Emergency.
At last, we have Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The road of the title is walked along (very slowly and cautiously because there is always vicious and violent meanness about), not driven on (because no cars work in the post apocalyptic future). A father and son must negotiate the scorched and barren world after what seems to have been a global chemical or nuclear devastation. Their only real destination is the sea. It’s unclear why they’ve set this course, but in the bleak and desolate picture McCarthy paints, it’s understandable that the wanderers should take whatever path they can toward someplace other than where they are. Like each of the other three works of fiction we’ve considered, The Road presents another narrative of redemption. But Cormac McCarthy taps into such a dark and sinister vein in his writing that what counts as redemption in his book is simply a relief from the agony of trying to survive. Even with such a simple and depressing story, McCarthy’s writing is hypnotic. This book gives one a cramped feeling in the stomach and makes the temperature seems a few degrees cooler – excellent reading for a blazing hot summer.
A film based on McCarthy’s book directed by John Hillcoat will be released in the Fall of 2009. There are two trailers on imdb.com.
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