Post-apocalyptic breakfast

When doing book reviews, I always make note at the end with regards to the "realism" of the book.  I used to refer to it as grittiness, but realized that some novels that were otherwise pretty unbelievable, certainly could be called "gritty".

The general point is to take into account how much the novel actual worries about day-to-day survival or life patterns in a world that is greatly changed.

Well obviously, in a lot of post-apocalyptic settings, people are going to be starving.  But not in all, some folks are better prepared, and other stories take place long enough after the initial collapse, that there has been a bit of a recovery.

One item, I never gave much thought to was people's eating patterns.  For instance, will people eat breakfast?  I would have thought so, but apparently they didn't use to:

Ian Mortimer on Life in the Tudor Era
Five Books Interviews, 21 March 2013

Did people not have breakfast in Tudor times?

Before about 1600 people tended not to eat breakfast. It’s in the last decades of the 16^th century that breakfast became habitual. In the Middle Ages you would eat breakfast if you were going on a long journey and therefore getting up early, or if you were a worker working in a field, on a harvest day, which might be a 16 or 18 hour long working day. But on the whole most people didn’t eat breakfast. They had dinner in the late morning and then supper in the mid-to late afternoon. Those were the two meals of the day. There were a few exceptions – aristocratic families who started having ceremonial breakfasts in the 16^th century and if you were ill you might have breakfast as well.

But in the 16^th century all the times started to get shifted around, because people increasingly worked for other people, rather than sorting out their own times of working during the day. Therefore they have to stay at work till much later, so they can’t have supper till much later, so they start eating lunch instead of dinner in the late morning and they have to have breakfast before they start. So there is a shift to a three meal pattern.

So presuming there has been a major break with today's lifestyle, it is very possible we won't be eating breakfast.

Slowing collapse of fast food

I am not a complete fan of Tainter's "Complexity is Death" meme, but he is extremely popular in the doom and gloom crowd, so I felt that clear signs of his thesis should be reported on.

Fast-food drive-thrus are getting slower
Bruce Horovitz, USA Today, 30 September 2013 (hat tip: MR)

Never mind that its first name is "fast." The amount of time that consumers are spending waiting in lines at fast-food drive-thru windows is getting longer, not shorter, mostly due to the growing complexity of new products that the major fast-food chains are selling.

In this case it is competitive pressure that is making the menu more complex.  I don't think that is one of the drivers that Tainter includes within his causes of society becoming too complex for sustainability, but complexity is complexity.

 

Since one of my complaints with Tainter is that he offers no measurable benchmarks, its all faux-precision as far as I can tell - maybe we finally have something to measure.

Parable of the Sower: A Review

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is an apocalyptic novel set in the outer suburbs of Los Angeles within the context of a very slow collapse caused by global warming and a related economic collapse within the United States.  Although reasonable as a stand alone novel, it was planned to have three books written in the series.  At her death, only the second book, the Parable of Talents, was written. I "read" this novel in an audio format.

 

Ocatvia Butler (1947-2006) is a very famous science fiction writer.  She is winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards.   Previous to this novel, I had not read any of her work because I it seemed to gain much of its accolades from its feminist and racial politically correct (pc) themes.  To the extent that she was also writing at a period where my interest in Science Fiction was waning , and she was competing with the cyber-punk genre, I never got around to reading any of her work.  At least based on this novel, I view that as unfortunate. 

Although the various blurbs of the book seem to work very hard at making it sound like some sort of new age awakening, it is mostly a pretty straightforward book of small group survival in a very hostile, collapsed environment. 

The story starts as a very slow collapse, which around its mid-point becomes a very hard and fast personal end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it (eotwawki) disaster.  Although there is none of the ridiculous information dumps of internet-inspired survivalist advice, there is a fair amount of general survival advice.  She goes so far as to describe the contents of a very poor person's go-bag (aka bug out bag), and weapon familiarization and target practice are recommended.  There is the problem of when to leave a stable, but very tenous situation.  And the costs of the timing are extreme.  People are raped.  Major characters die, and a lot of general unpleasantness ensues.

The heroine, and sole narrator, is a young African-American lady who by the novels ending has just reached her 18th birthday.  Although racial issues are not ignored, there is none of the false empowerment often seen in novels where women are the primary leader.

The story starts in a small walled off community.  Note that this not a gated community, but literally, a semi-fortified wall community that has tried to isolate itself from its collapsing surroundings.  The author explores the tenuous alliance that exists within the small community, and the even more tenuous connection with the remnants of the old capitalist economy.  It is a world of extreme libertarianism.  The police only show up if you have the cash to pay them.

When it finally shows up, the fast-collapse involves the destruction of this world, and the setting out of a small group of survivors to a vague destination to the north.

The themes involve all sorts of ideas that would be common in the "prepper-survivalist" milieu, including fire arms training, accumulation of seed packets, and emergency escape plans.  It also includes the more subtle threats of corporate enslavement, and life where what little abundance still remains works very much to the advantage of the wealthy.

The young lady does embrace a philosophy that she call earth seed.  It combines the willingness to embrace and shape change, with the greater goal of sending humans out to the stars.  As a sort of semi-Buddhist rational, it is reasonable enough, although the goal of reaching the stars as human colonists seems more than a little far fetched given the current earth-bound situation.  The goal of the novel is far closer to that of the search for potable water, than the search for the stars.

The name of the novel comes from Matthew:

Mathew 13: 3-9

 “A farmer went out to sow his seed. ⁴ As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵ Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. ⁶ But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. ⁷ Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. ⁸ Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. ⁹ Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

This quote comes at the end of the novel, and presumably indicates that those who cannot accept the change in circumstances, or for that matter, those who are simply unlucky, are destined to perish.

 

I did like this novel very much. It was much starker, and much bleaker than I expected.  Although the cause of collapse is not the same, it reads like a precursor to McCarthy's famously dark novel The Road.  Communal efforts at survival are problematic in the face of an overwhelming onslaught, and even the prepared have their casualties.  The reading of the audio format was well done and seamlessly executed.

 

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high.  Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting.  Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation.  Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

The novel has a few of the speculative elements of science:  illicit drugs not yet evented, and the side effects of these drugs.  The effects of global warming, a long drought, are rather plausible given the current drought in the West.  Issues of supplies, the value of cash, the need for a paying job even in a severe collapse, are all very well thought out items. With one point off for the science fiction elements, we will call it a six.

For a novel that does not always hammer its lessons over your head, but often teaches through demonstration, it is generally a pretty fast moving affair.  The action gets started in the second half, but even the first half has enough internal community and family issues to keep it interesting.  A literary 6.

Doomsday Squad: A Review

Dom Gober's Doomsday Squad is an apocalyptic tale that postulates a potential black revolution starting in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s.  There is a mysterious radical group and a lot of blood and explosions on the streets, but the revolutions success hangs on a knifes edge.

Doomsday Squad is one of a series of novels written by Joseph Nazel (1944-2006) (his real name) that involved unrest within the African-American urban community.  Some of them are linked strongly to the belief that the drug trade is used to keep blacks within the inner city in their place.  I chose this book because many of Mr. Nazel's novels are collectible, and this one by being listed under a different name was less expensive. Nazel mostly wrote under his own  name.  But as with many pulp writers, to disguise the immense output of sometimes rather similar novels, they would release some of them under a different name.

A brief biography (from here):

Nazel was a combat veteran of the Vietnam War who went on to become a prolific writer and chronicler of the black experience in America. He worked as an editor for a variety of black publications, including the Watts Times and Players magazine. But Nazel is best remembered for his books, of which there were at least sixty. 

There are more details at a Los Angeles Times Obituary .

The story begins with an attack on a local armory, an attack that ends with the death of some police officers who come on the scene in mid-crime. The revolutionary gang is mostly white idealists turned savage, and a lone embittered black Vietnam veteran.  Although in theory they all want the same thing, there is more than a little bit of a cultural clash within the group.

The second storyline of the novel involves a black narcotics police detective who recognizes the Veteran from a photograph and sets out to dissuade him from his plans.  The story is to some degree a race between the revolutionaries, and the black police officer.  The waters are muddied considerably because both the revolutionaries and the detective have people they are answerable to.

In the end, there is a lot of chaos, but the existing order is given at least a temporary reprieve.

Did I enjoy the novel?  I did up to a point.  It has a dated feel, but the writing quality is better than I expected of pulp fiction.   The novel is an interesting insight in to what would be acceptable to a black audience of the day, and shows fairly clearly why African Americans are culturally the most conservative section of the current Democratic Party's constituencies.  There is a strong desire for moral behavior, and  horror and general condemnation of the drug culture. There is a strong desire for social justice, but also an understanding that without the police, as racist as they might be, society would be much worse off.  So, I did enjoy it, but some that was truthfully because of the curiosity factor.  The story itself is clever, but not amazingly so.

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high.  Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting.  Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation.  Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

Realism is difficult.  With modern police techniques, and our militarized police, this type of threat, would not be all that compelling today.  The actions occur within the modern world, and the activities take place within a modern setting, so I'll punt and call it a 4.

Readability is straightforward.  There is a fair amount of action, mixed in with equal amounts of philosophic dialog.  Fast and slow mix together for a 5.