Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.
I have my own ideas about what the end of the world is going to look like. Fiction, naturally, has its own idea as well. How do they stack up?
The Road – Not a chance. Nada. Zip. Nil. A world where nothing grows anymore? (Read the book..that’s indeed what one of the stated problems is. No flora of any kind. Plenty of dead vegetation around, but nothing alive and growing. Makes you wonder where the oxygen is coming from.) Although the mechanism of the apocalypse is never mentioned in the book, the implication is that there is a nuclear winter going on as a result of either a nuclear exchange or possibly a celestial event. In either case, all plant life all around the globe isn’t going to just stop.
The Rift – Megaquake in the midwest? Possible, although I call it highly unlikely. Even then its not really an end of the world event for the people who don’t live nearby. If you life in that region, yeah your life just got interesting. However I think the folks in Fairbanks, AK and Honolulu, HI aren’t going to be too concerned.
The Survivalist – This comes in two flavors since thats the direction the book took. Starting with the first nine books or so: a nuclear exchange that devastates the major superpowers and is followed up by an invasion of the US? Possible, but, again, seems terribly unlikely. After about book #9 or so the entire atmosphere of the Earth was destroyed by the consequences of the nuclear exchange, eradicating all life from the planet except for a few small groups….I’m ranking that right up there with the scenario in The Road.
Lucifer’s Hammer – Comet smacks the planet leading to global devastation. Hmmmm…well, it’s possible. And, to some degree, it’s happened before. The scenario presented in the book seems plausible with it’s consequences, at least to an unscientific type like myself. But, lets look at it another way. Imagine that your lifespan is, say, about 100 years. Folks who believe in science over superstition figure the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Your lifespan is 1/45,000,000th of the age of the planet…what are the odds that an event like that will happen in the miniscule blink of an eye that is your lifetime. Pretty small, I’d say.
One Second After – The entire US is crippled by an EMP strike. Chaos and hijinks ensue. Probably the most plausible so far but with a couple caveats. There’s plenty of science out there to support this sort of view, but the fact is that no one has ever done anything on a large enough scale like this to determine if it actually would be as destructive as portrayed. Everything stops? Everything? I’m the first to admit that I probably havent read as much as I should have on the subject, but what I have read seems to suggest that the smaller an objects profile or ’signature’, the less damage it will receive. The analogy I see used is radio waves…a smaller antennae receives far less signal than a larger one. A large device with plenty of radiating wiring and other conductive materials is going to receive a larger share of the pulse than a smaller system. As I read it, that means an electrical substation will be toast but my wristwatch might be just fine.
Zombie fiction – Right up there with the “Left Behind” series. Ditto for anything by S.M Sterling…fun to read and absolutely not gonna happen.
Red Dawn/Invasion USA/Invasion – A vulnerable US faces an invasion from a foreign power. In Red Dawn (the first one) it was the Soviets with the help of Latin American revolutionaries. In Eric Harry’s book, Invasion, its a powerful Chinese military. And, in Chuck Norris’s feel-good classic its..well, everybody. I really see Chuck Norris’ version being the most likely scenario of those three…laugh if you will…but let’s look at it. In the other two scenarios you have massive military invasion scenarios. In the Chuck Norris scenario you have very, very small groups of fighters sowing chaos and violence in carefully orchestrated events. An excellent example is where a few guys shoot up a bar and make it appear that it was a corrupt police action attacking the bar patrons. Riots ensue. In this manner you don’t need an invading army, you have the population do it for you. Heck, six guys shut down LA by knocking the crap out of a black motorist in ‘92…it just as easily could have been six guys faking the incident and letting the video ‘leak’ to cause rioting and chaos. Look at the 9/11 episode. Twenty guys shutdown all air traffic in the US, started a war, effected some massive political and economic changes, polarized certain demographics, and didn’t need an army of tens of thousands landing on a beach to do it. So, the terrorism-as-mechanism-of-apocalypse has a bit of life to it.
Soylent Green – Overpopulation leading to state-sponsored cannibalism? Never going to happen. Overpopulation has a way of fixing itself. It’s like the old joke about clan warfare being Scottish birth control. You get enough humans on one piece of real estate, they’ll take care of the overpopulation problem eventually. Think ‘liebensraum’. (And by that, I mean they go to war.)
Mad Max – Global dystopia because of fuel shortages? Possible, I suppose, except Im having a hard time believing that a lack of fuel regresses civilization into the leather-clad, crossbow-shooting carnage that was the Mad Max series of films. And, you know, for a world that presumably had run out of gasoline they sure had some awesome car chases. Even if the Peak Oil crowd is right, I don’t think the end of the world will result from it. Craptacular standard of living? Maybe. Regression to 19th century lifestyle? Unlikely, but possible. Lord Humongous and V8 Interceptors? No.
Jericho – I’d say the first season, and especially the first few episodes, were probably about as realistic as youre going to get in a fictional setting. (Which isnt to say Jericho was technically accurate in every regard, but it certainly had more ‘lifelike’ aspects to it than other treatments of similar material.) Hunger, fuel shortage, looting, social issues arising from disaster, etc, etc….definitely interesting. The day-to-day aspects of survival interested me far more than the conspiracy plot that eventually overwhelmed the series (esp. the abbreviated season two.) Sure it had some obvious deus ex machina moments, but still enjoyable. The premise of individual nuclear warheads smuggled into cities and detonated is, in my opinion, more likely than a genuine nuclear exchange but still, to me, seems pretty unlikely.
Atlas Shrugged – Well, thats really what it is…an end of the world book. While it’s a bit heavy-handed and so very, very, very long (a 68-page speech? Seriously??) some of the premises and events portrayed in it seem to be either coming to pass or darn near close to it. This is one of those books that polarizes people, which I suppose is the hallmark of good literature. Like everything you find between the covers of a book, take it with a grain of salt. However, the premises of pillorization (did I just make up a word?) of the rich, the idea of wealth redistribution, the notion that the individual is subordinate to the ‘greater good’, etc, etc, all seem to be getting too much play these days. So, I’d say the half of the book about that is correct, the notion that there’ll be a great change that sets all that aside and ushers in an age of personal responsibility and moral freedom? Not holding my breath.
What’s interesting is that, as far as books go, the scenarios I see being most likely aren’t found in fiction but rather in history texts. A little Great Depression here, some Weimar Republic there, a bunch of Carter Administration to hold it all together and -whammo- you’ve pretty much defined the times we live in. What;s really interesting is that across the entire pantheon of fiction and literature there is virtually nothing that, as far as I know, contrived anything like the situation we are currently in. You’d think someone somewhere would have thought it up, but, no, it was easier to dream up Russian invasions and zombie uprisings than to predict what’s going on now.
