JCC These Are a Few of My Favorite End of the World Scenarios

With The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell takes yet another final chapter stab at the fall of civilization. Unlike the stirring conclusion of Cloud Atlas, the latest novel offers a much more moderately plausible combined climate change/population overshoot/peak oil scenario, with a future history that really pops. Here's the basic chronology:

2033 - major flooding heavily damages many coastal cities
2037 - more major flooding further damages coastal cities
2037 - a new influenza-like global epidemic kills millions. "ratflu"
2038 - "Gigastorm" downs hundreds of aircraft crossing the Pacific
2030-2040 - one by one, the last remaining oil states stop exporting oil. Aging, failing nuclear reactors around the world are abandoned as it becomes impossible to source fissionable uranium.
2040 - natural gas supplies are depleted worldwide, effectively ending its commercial use for heating, electrical generation and fertilizer production
2039 - China establishes client states/colonies as foreign protectorate regions in collapsed areas (e.g. the coast of Ireland) to provide a stream of agricultural goods in exchange for cheap manufactured necessities
2039 - gasoline and diesel no longer available as a consumer good. Almost all supplies are rationed by governments for strategic national priorities.
2039 - global food chain is in shambles. Coastal fisheries are mostly extinct.
2040 - Mandarin becomes the default language for what remains of international trade
2040 - "Netcrash One" - collapse of electrical grids and scarcity of fossil fuel dooms the world wide web, powering off server farms with massive loss of a half-century of stored data.
2041 - Iceland goes into heavily armed isolation as one of the few countries with enough geothermal power to fuel a post-industrial style society.
2041 - typical for most people living in former first world countries to have only 1 or 2 hours of reliable electricity a day
2042 - most communications satellites have failed, and net-enabled communication becomes sporadic and unreliable.
2043 - "Netcrash Two" - the power grids of many regions fail completely, signalling the final stages of the "Endarkenment." Most of Europe and North America has collaspes into regional and local small governments, with large swaths of warlordism and complete anarchy.
2044 - famine becomes a global, widespread phenomenon as agribusiness fails and global shipping capacity plummets.
2045- Greenland's glaciers are largely melted.
2045 - most people with private solar power have had their photovoltaic panels stolen by armed bands or requisitioned by local governments.
2046 - firewood supplies are badly depleted worldwide. Remaining governments ration lowgrade coal to families for heat and cooking.
2030-2050 - many new religious cults emphasizing the Endarkenment as punishment from God take root around the world.

He probably pushes the climate change disasters a bit early. I'd have left those for the 2080s and beyond, but that's just me. Otherwise, I give it 4.5 mushroom clouds out of a possible 5.

 

I wish it were a bit less "Day After Tomorrow-ish," but I think it captures the right tone.

By the way, I think Clive Owens' King Arthur is ripe for a reboot, only with the setting in the early 2050s of the David Mitchell universe. It could be so much better than Mad Max.

 

And I'm out.

 

Was it fun to read?

 

It's a great novel. But like Cloud Atlas its scifi/fantasy elements are interwoven with a long story about many other things. You have to be ok with its genre-jumping instability.

 

up next is California by Edan Lepucki.

 

Personally I'm more worried about the disastrous effects of peak whiskers on kittens. To say nothing of sufficiently high volumes of raindrops on roses causing catastrophic flooding.

 

Took you that long? The nonsense Sinophobia and/or Sinophilia did it for me.

 

Kurt Vonnegut also gives the Chinese an out from the end of civilization in Galapagos. The Chinese engineer themselves to microscopic size.

 

i can't wait

 

I meant reading the post.

 

So far, California is really odd, but strangely beautiful. A major character attended a college modeled straightforwardly on Deep Springs, funny for me, because I know two Deep Springs grads fairly well, so recognized the story source immediately. There are only a handful of kids attending that school at any one time, so it's I think fairly rare to know any Deep Springs grads. But I know one who's a professor and another who's a professional writer. The author's a woman, so clearly wasn't a student there. Anything she knows about the school would like my awareness of the school be completely second-hand.

The California apocalypse seems to happen extremely fast. No dates available, but it looks like it takes about 8 years for a combination of climate change disasters and some bad luck natural disasters to more or less destroy western civilization, although we don't learn much about what is happening outside California

year 1 - main character are still attending college. Resource depletion scarcity becoming a more and more salient source of economic duress
year 2 - California coast hit by major storms/flooding
year 3 - student and populist uprisings. Suicide bombers in malls, etc.
year 3 or 4 - L.A. earthquake
year 3 or 4. Wealthy Californians leave big cities to form walled "Communities" under their own martial law (very walking dead-ish)
year 5 - 8. California cities collapsed. Groups of survivalists try to make it in the wilderness, form trading communities of left over goods.

The author has been sketchy about the details of the collapse, partly because the logistics don't make all that much sense, but the novel is extremely well written, and some of the things that happen remind me a lot of my father's stories of the south before the Rural Electrification Act and the arrival of the TVA.

In any case, what the New Deal joined together, the collapse of civilization can easily put asunder. A North American Rural De-Electrification seems like a likely scenario for a future history.

And what's the beef with the word "Endarkenment"? It's catchy. Been used elsewhere, but evocative.

 

That it sounds like a Twilight sequel.

 

boo! unlike!

Next up: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

 

I vote for a Dinosaur Laser fight

 

Thanks to that stupid ad during the Oscars, that scenario will forever more be known as the Zombee Apocalypse

 

Station Eleven

The "Georgian Flu" kills 95% of the population. The economy collapses, and the survivors piece together a ragged post-industrial culture. Caravans of stripped-down, horse-pulled pickup trucks travel between settlements just like in the original Fallout video games.

 

These Final Hours - Barrington, Illinois is one of the few multiplexes in the country showing this long-awaited 2013 Australian asteroid apocalypse.

It's a variation of 1959's On the Beach. An all life-killing asteroid has plunked down on the opposite side of the globe, and Australia is left waiting for the end of all things.

Have tickets for Friday night!

 

The other night I was watching an interview with Jack White on Conan O'Brien. He said he was reading a book about the black plague.

Is this you Jack?

 

Of all my favorite end of the world scenarios, a new plague is my most favoritest. Given the cost and logistics of forcibly sterilizing a few billion people or making them fight each other to the death, probably the most humane way to bring the human population under control would be an engineered plague that kills 90% of the people it infects. Someday, some government will try it. India, or China, or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, Indonesia or any of the countries that are so perversely, insanely, grotesquely overpopulated.


Next on my reading list:

In the Country of Last Things, by Paul Auster.

 

I like post-apocalyptic movies and books but usually not in-the-act-of apocalypse ones. There are exceptions like the first half of ID4.

 

I prefer to think that we will once again return to the moon, decide it's time to build a luxury resort there, but accidentally blow up a huge chunk while terraforming it, thus collapsing its orbit and sending it crashing down into Earth.