IF they don’t eat much. IF they live within walking distance of a supply source. IF others didn’t get there and clear it out first. IF something else doesn’t kill them first.
And after the pandemic runs its course, there would be a second, smaller wave of mass death as the insulin and other drugs run out. Then a third wave of death because of the contamination from billions of rotting corpses. Then another wave from medical problems that come from once-simple things like eating rotten food. Then another wave from what used to be childhood day-home-from-school diseases but had a resurgence because of the anti-vaccination morons. Stupid people would die because they don’t know how to get clean water and they aren’t smart enough to dig their latrines downstream from the well. People would decide to finally settle scores on racial, economic, social, or entirely personal nonsense. Without antibiotics, you could die from getting a cut on your foot. In a post-apocalyptic world, lack of shoes or soap could be fatal.
Almost all post-apocalypse stories get one thing wrong - they posit an absurdly high number of survivors.
Well, yeah, there would be a lot of those things to contend with, but they would be in the context of the material abundance I was talking about. That’s what I think would be an interesting world to explore in fiction–people figuring out how to rebuild society and deal with no medicine or fuel or bananas, but having enough propane tanks to at Ace Hardware to cook with for two years and more honey and dried beans than they could eat. Those weird imbalances seem to be more plausible than the absurd abundance of material in this country somehow evaporating.
I just don’t know that I agree with that. Humanity faces apocalypse all the time and rebuilds and continues. The Visigoths burn everything to the ground, the volcano explodes, shit breaks down, and a few years later there are people trading bread for fish and planting crops.
I liked the book, but one thing that I noted (perhaps because of my Midwestern roots) is that there’s a point where the main characters find some cows (months or maybe a couple of years after the downfall of civilization) and milk them. That is not how cows work, given that it would would be a long time since they calved and nobody’s been milking them since. And the normal reproductive cycle of cattle leading to new calves and milk isn’t going to really happen given the rarity of bulls).
I like the idea that the survivors are all wearing the most expensive, most chic, most affluent clothing available. It’s in utter abundance, relative to the remaining population. All the stuff that was unaffordable and scarce before the collapse becomes just “daily wear” afterward.
Except now we don’t have easy access to energy; all the easy oil is going to be gone. They have to blow up mountaintops to get to the coal. Try rebuilding an oil platform from scratch that can drill thousands of feet under the ocean floor. Or try manufacturing solar panels without modern manufacturing, which is reliant on shipping raw materials from all over the earth. We’re fairly reliant on phosphorous for fertilizer in the modern era.
Humanity may survive in small enclaves. But civilization might not recover if the problem is big enough.
‘Alas, Babylon’ was a fairly typical post-apocalyptic book for its time (early 60s, when the threat of nuclear war was on everyone’s mind). One of the things I remember, going back to the superabundance of high-end goods, is that one of the secondary characters was a crook who passed through Miami shortly after most of Florida was irradiated by fallout. He brought back a duffel full of jewelry, which he was trading for all types of consumables. Then people figured out that a. they weren’t making any more toilet paper, and b. a lot of the gold had sopped up radiation and was now deadly.
Exactly. The survivors are learning how to do without gasoline and medicine, but all have cashmere sweaters, $600 hiking boots, and can open a bottle of $200 bourbon whenever they feel like it. Or, a bunch of city folk need to learn hunt, but they’ve got hundreds of high-end rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition to learn with, and five years of dried beans and canned tuna to give them time to learn. I think that’s a weird world to think about.
That might be a fair criticism. I did like it though. It has a gentle melancholy feel and - something I really treasure in any sort of sf/f - it’s played for small stakes. It covers a few people trying to have a decent life rather than decide the fate of the universe, and even the villains we meet are pretty small fry in the larger scheme of things.
I have always interpreted this as not so much there isn’t survival stuff, but that nobody remembers how to use it. Canning is a dying art, most folks these days would starve in the midst of a wheat field, and hunting and, even moreso, preparing game is not something most would be able to pull off. Agree about “Earth Abides.”. One of my favorite survival tales.
Yes, even most people who DO have experience in farming don’t have much experience doing so without modern infrastructure like running water snd electricity. Humanity would eventually work it out (as the novel basically suggested it did) but a whole lot of people would find themselves hungry in the meantime.
