Archer Garrett has a new book out

Archer Garrett, who we reviewed last with the front end of his apocalyptic series, The Western Front has a new book out, that seems well positioned within the Steam Punk genre.

I am working (doorstep to doorstep) 11-1/2 hours these days, and that is set to increase, so I am behind on my reading, so I don't know if I'll be able to make it to this one.  It is listed at 60,000 words so it is not one of those kindle short stories disguised as a novel.

The blurb:

"A Classic Science Fiction Adventure in the Spirit of Jules Verne."

Imagine a world of extremes.  The Northern Lights dance across the Caribbean, mighty tempests are a common occurrence and the pendulum of politics swings from one radical to the next.  Welcome to Terra, an alternate earth somewhere across the multiverse, circa 1890.

It's a world of bizarre technological divergences.  Steamwork airships soar high above and are plagued by sky pirates.  Mighty sea creatures, the products of a prolonged Industrial Revolution's rampant pollution, haunt the seas.  Cities glow by the light of ethereal, alchemical reagents, while evil lurks in the shadows just beyond.

William Stallworth is a Pulse Chaser, able to leap from one world to another.  He came to Terra in search of adventure, but instead finds a world on the precipice of a great conflict - and a mysterious man that knows who he really is.  Can he turn back what's been set in motion, or will he forfeit his own life trying?

60,000 words.

Genres:  Steampunk; Classic Scifi; Scifi Adventure

Northern lights dancing in the Caribbean occurred with the first big solar flare of 1859 so there may be a little bit of apocalyptic action.  Maybe the ethereal currents will just all go to pieces.

Caribbean style self sufficiency

Food pricing was a driving issue with the Arab Spring, and it remains an issue for a lot of other countries.

As Cost of Importing Food Soars, Jamaica Turns to the Earth
Damian Cave, New York Times, 3 August 2013

Across the Caribbean, food imports have become a budget-busting problem, prompting one of the world’s most fertile regions to reclaim its agricultural past. But instead of turning to big agribusinesses, officials are recruiting everyone they can to combat the cost of imports, which have roughly doubled in price over the past decade. In Jamaica, Haiti, the Bahamas and elsewhere, local farm-to-table production is not a restaurant sales pitch; it is a government motto.

“We’re in a food crisis,” said Hilson Baptiste, the agriculture minister of Antigua and Barbuda... “Every country is concerned about it. How can we produce our own? How can we feed our own?”

Jamaica started earlier than most. A decade ago, the government unveiled a national food security campaign with the slogan “grow what we eat, eat what we grow.” Grocery stores now identify local produce with large stickers and prominent displays.

Members of rival political parties have also been mostly unified in support of expanding agriculture by experimental means; Jamaica is now one of several countries that have given out thousands of seed kits to encourage backyard farming.

Schools are heavily involved in the effort: 400 in Jamaica now feature gardens maintained by students and teachers. In Antigua and Barbuda, students are now sent out regularly on planting missions, adding thousands of avocado, orange, breadfruit and mango trees to the islands, but in Jamaica, gardening and cooking are often part of every school day.

Jamaica is showing a lot more sense than a lot of other countries in this regard.  The United States has been a net exporter throughout its existence, so it has never been much of an issue here, and is one reason that the United States has a buffer against a lot of the popular collapse theories.  Or at least the theories that don't involve overnight catastrophes.

 

But a country that is not self sufficient in food finds itself in a much more precarious position in a more "gentle" decline.  Thus the Arab oil producers interest in nuclear power plants to desalinate sea water.

Post Apocalyptic Feminism

I have read both of, and reviewed the second book, in James Howard Kunstler's World Made By Hand post-apocalyptic series.

 

Personally I thought they were more about middle age wish fulfillment than an accurate accounting of a possible future.

 

But apparently the author, who is touchy feely with the more leftward (sustainable) side of the survival spectrum, so there was fallout I didn't even consider.

Reality does not have an ideology: Class, Race, Hierarchy, and Social Relations in The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler, 30 July 2013

The characters in my novels lived very differently than people do in these late days of turbo-petro-industrialism. The economy of their town and the county surrounding it — the extent of normal travel in the new times — was centered on agriculture and the activities that supported it and derived from it. The division of labor had changed drastically in my fictional world, household management especially. Without microwave ovens, washing machines, heating furnaces, and other mechanical slaves that we take for granted, running a household required a lot more work. It was my heuristic judgment (i.e., guess) that such conditions would likely propel work assignments back to more traditional arrangements between men and women, especially because the care of very young children takes place in the home and, despite the wishful propaganda of our times, such care happens to fall mostly to mothers among the higher primates. (The vaunted role of “house-husband” might be improbable if it were not for the fact that so many “breadwinner” jobs today can be done by anybody, male, female, or someone in between.)

Anyway, the reaction to this fictional experiment was surprisingly pugnacious. High and low, far and wide, women denounced my book in formal reviews and casual emails. There was a unifying theme to them, though: a refusal to consider the possibility that social relations might change no matter what happened to the economy. That, and outrage that anyone might suggest a retrograde path for the recent achievements of feminism. It seemed self-evident to me that a lot of this achievement was provisional, depending on larger macro historical trends. That idea alone was greeted, in my replies to reader emails, by the sharpest opprobrium, since it was assumed that the political victories of recent decades have become permanent installations of the human condition. I recognize that, as a principle of politics, privileges and rights attained are rarely given up without a fight. But I wondered at the failure of imagination I was witnessing, especially among educated women readers.

I don't know.  In the near term, a soft collapse (which was the case of the distantly Upstate New York where the novel takes place, if not for the rest of the planet) into a lower level of technology probably isn't going to be particularly favorable to men or women.  It's not as if there is a huge amount of folks out there who have a whole lot of bankable survival skills.  He has the usual Navy SEAL types (backed up by a magical bee queen mama), but compared to the overall population total that makes for a very small number of people.  In some of the slash and burn cultures (the east agricultural type to get back up and running without fossil fuels) women were the main farmers.

 

So I think there is some fairness to some of the criticism. In the near term, the outcomes will be far more random than his novels indicates.  Historically, women were just as involved in the physical labor that went into feeding a family.  Not all cultures broke down the labor effort they way American frontier settlers did.

 

So while I think the feminists are likely being a bit clueless (he didn't link to specific complaints), that doesn't mean that Kunstler is isn't clueless as well.  If I had to take a guess, you will have near random small grouping of adults, with an equally random grouping of small children.  Given the stress, and likely starvation involved, there probably will be relatively few infants until there is a settling down.  Which is about where things are when his novels get started.

Verizon, copper, and the return of the Jutes

I had seen some rumblings of this somewhere, but it looks like it is not immediately going away.

 

I would guess, that one sign of overreach is the inability of an Empire to maintain its infrastructure.  A less extreme version of the Romans pulling out of Britain and leaving it to the Angles, and Saxons, and Jutes.

Verizon Ready to "Kill Copper" and Take Hostages
Rainbow Girl, Corrente, 26 July 2013 (hat tip: NC)

The main pilot program rolled out in Fire Island, NY, post-Sandy [shock doctrine opportunity.] Sandy damaged all the copper lines and Verizon has a monopoly for copper phone service in Fire Island. Instead of fixing the existing phone lines, Verizon -- eager to find opportunities to roll our "Voice Link" -- an ObamaCare like product that is expensive, does not work and causes life-threatening and working-people's-economy threatening things -- tells Fire Islanders take our "Voice Link" or get lost. And the NY Public Service Commission is "considering" Verizon's request to kill all copper and force its customers to buy this defective, overpriced product -- in all it's markets.

Hopefully, when the Jutes show up, the warning call from the Fire Islanders will get through.  After all, while Jutes (gave their name to Jutland) are a bit rare on the ground these days, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition either.