The Pendulum # 15
Four Books About the End of the World as We Know It
I’m not sure if it’s a touch of procrastinitis or maybe just feeling a little burned out but this week I did not get around to writing much of anything. My wife and I spent a couple of days with relatives two hours drive away so that worked out perfectly as I needed the break.
In any event, I had my fill of non-fiction and needed a fiction break so I started reading a new novel. We had picked it up at the local Jaywalkers Jamboree a couple of weeks ago. Main Street is blocked to traffic and becomes a pedestrian mall as local businesses offer sales and food trucks abound. Camrose Public Library had a table and were selling mystery books. Books wrapped in brown paper with a cryptic message written on it. One said “The sequel to a best-selling dystopian novel.” I snapped it up. Just two bucks.
The novel was One Year After by William R. Forstchen. Never heard of the novel or the author before. But the premise is intriguing so I started reading it July 1st. Over half way through now.
Before getting to the story, there are several ideas on what could cause Armageddon, the apocalypse, or the end of the world as we know it. And One Year After is the fourth story I’ve read now where the end of the world is revealed as a primitive society with none of the modern conveniences we take for granted. We are so dependent on our electronic devices and on the electrical grid that it hard to imagine what life would be like without them.
But what would cause such an event? In the first such book I read, The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, the story follows some young people in a very orthodox religious community where the greatest heresy is mutation. The story takes place after a nuclear war has obliterated much of the planet. The survivors are outlying communities like the one in the story. It is in rural Newfoundland. The radioactive fallout has caused many mutations and species purity is prized above all. An inspector inspects all crops and all new born livestock. If it is mutated, it is destroyed. Signs are everywhere reading “WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!” The story follows a young boy who makes friends with a girl who is harboring a terrible secret. She has six toes on one foot. If discovered, she would be banished to the Badlands.
The second such book I read was Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Here the former technological world is destroyed by ideology, by collectivism. Collectivism, of course, is anti-capitalistic. And it demands that the group take priority over the individual. In Anthem, any innovation has to be approved by a council of “scientists” who are anything but scientific. Names have been replaced by numbers that look like the old style phone numbers—a word followed by five numbers. The hero is Equality 7-2521. The word “I” has been lost and everyone uses the pronoun “we” in self-reference. If you think the current broo-ha-ha about gender pronouns is absurd, it is nothing short of scary when the pronouns I, me, mine are lost.
So there we have two post-apocalyptic worlds where technology has been lost, one caused by nuclear annihilation, the other by collectivism. But there is a third possibility. Some event causes a collapse of technology as we know it. Approaching the year 2000, for example, it was widely believed by some that the tick over from 1999 to 2000 would cause the collapse of computer systems around the world. That didn’t happen, of course. But the other two post-apocalyptic novels I’ve read are just that. A world in which some event triggers the collapse of modern technology.
Which brings me to the third book, The Second Sleep by Robert Harris. Here some unspecified event led to the collapse of civilization as we know it by incapacitating computer networks. And like The Chrysalids, the world here has reverted to a fundamentalist religious orthodoxy and primitive technology. It has some amusing moments including one where the protagonist, Christopher Fairfax, an Anglican priest sent to replace the parish’s recently deceased Father Lacy, discovers Lacy had a private collection of artifacts from the end times, including a slim oblong piece of plastic and glass with the devil’s insignia on the back—an apple with a bite taken out of it. Adam and Eve’s famous apple from the tree of knowledge.
And the fourth such apocalyptic novel is the one I’m reading now, One Year After, a sequel to One Second After. It is the second in a quadrilogy, the third novel being The Final Day and the fourth Five Years After. I thought about reading the novels in order, but decided to plow into the one I have. It’s intriguing enough that I will likely follow up with the other two three novels in the series.
Of the four I’ve read or am reading, this is the most realistic and the scariest. Scariest because it is the most likely to happen. In One Second After, the United States is attacked by a rogue terrorist group, but not by nuclear weapons as such but by EMP weapons. EMP stands for Electro-Magnetic Pulse. An intense electro-magnetic pulse can destroy computer systems as well as the electrical grid.
I had not heard about EMPs before, but they can be naturally occurring as well as deliberately used as weapons. According to Wikipedia, lightning is an electro-magnetic pulse which causes physical damage to whatever it strikes. But other EMPs need not strike in the same fashion as lightning which is narrowly targeted. The article notes that “The first recorded damage from an electromagnetic pulse came with the solar storm of August 1859, or the Carrington Event.”
On September 1, 1859, there was a huge solar flare. “A geomagnetic storm of this magnitude occurring today has the potential to cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts and damage due to extended cuts of the electrical power grid.”
While for many, the noticeable effects were magnificent displays of the aurora borealis, but “telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks.” One startling effect was that some telegraph operators turned off their power sources and were still bale to send message from the power generated by the EMP. This, as I recall, was one of the lost inventions that Nicola Tesla worked on, transmission of power through the air.
In the novel, the EMPs are detonated some distance above the ground and the impulses fried electrical systems over a wide range. The terrorist group, thought to be a coalition of Iran and North Korea or terrorists financed by those rogue states, sets off three over the United States, one over Japan, and one meant to target western Europe misfired and actually fried Moscow. Britain and Canada are among the unaffected nations.
In the first novel, the EMPs are deployed and as a result of the destruction of most of the electrical grid as well as computer systems, over 80 percent of the population of the United States is killed. Without modern technology, they are literally bombed back into the stone age. All vehicles with electronic systems are put out of commission. Society goes back to horse and buggy and cars from pre-electronic times salvaged from museums.
The first novel follows the immediate aftermath of the EMP attack. The protagonist, John Matherson, loses one of his daughters, a diabetic, because they run out of insulin. Things taken for granted have deadly consequences when they are no longer around. There are gangs of marauders looting and pillaging and Matherson and his community fight a deadly battle against one such group called the Posse.
In the second novel, the one I‘m reading, two years have passed since the EMP attack and one year since the end of the first novel. Things have settled down but are still primitive. John drives an old pre-electronic 1960 Edsel. They have managed to set up a hospital. But without electricity and modern supplies, it is a touch and go situation. Gasoline and other supplies, including medications and ammo, are strictly rationed. In fact, ammo as well as silver coins are the money of this society.
There are some fascinating displays of ingenuity as two people living in and managing the university library find a stash of journals of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers going back to 1884. The debates over Edison’s direct current and Tesla’s alternating current fill pages upon pages of these early journals. And they include patent descriptions for inventions then considered novel but today regarded as ordinary. A group is organized to dig through part of the local dam holding back a reservoir to drain the lake behind it, install some piping in the gap, and rebuild the gap around the piping. The pipe is a conduit to a makeshift powerhouse where a turbine will be built to generate electricity again based on the old patent drawings from those ancient magazines.
But the main focus of the story is on the attempt by the provisional government of the United States at a retreat in Bluemont, Virginia to re-establish control over the US. The west coast has been occupied by China. Mexico also controls parts of the country. Both in the guise of providing aid. But the provisional government is not just out to wrest control back from China and Mexico, they also want to quell civil unrest throughout the country by mobilizing an Army of National Recovery. A draft has been instituted to recruit a one million strong force to ruthlessly put down any dissident groups.
This meets with considerable resistance from Matherson and his North Carolina community as well as independent groups, one of which has formed an alliance with Matherson’s town. Dale Fredericks, the officious local head honcho of the government, headquartered in the nearby town of Asheville, wants to summarily execute a bunch of people the government has designated as terrorists, people including Forrest Burnett, the head of Matherson’s new allies.
Fredericks also offers Matherson a top position in the provisional government’s military. The tradeoff will be a reduction of the draft list to half. And a safe haven for Matherson and his family in Bluemont. The offer turns into a demand and Matherson is told he is being drafted and a refusal will turn him into a rebel outlaw as well.
A power struggle is looming between Matherson and his new allies, and the military dictatorship of the provisional government. That’s where I am now. The novel is a page turner, gripping and intense, with heroes to admire and villains to despise. Where it will end, I don’t know.
But that is also a peril faced by a country devastated by an EMP. Whereas two of the novels I mentioned ended in theocratic states, and one ended up with a collectivist dictatorship, this novel projects a power-mad government bent on ruthless suppression of dissent.
The scariest thing about the novel is that an EMP need not be the result of a deliberate terrorist attack. It could well be effected by a once in a lifetime solar event like the Carrington Event. Or computer systems could be wiped out by a viral attack which anti-virus software manufacturers are unable to cope with.
People are becoming more and more aware of the danger of EMPs. Underneath the Goodreads description for One Year Later are listed the following books: After the EMP: The Darkness Trilogy by Harley Tate (fiction), and How to Survive an EMP Attack by Nicholas Randall (non-fiction).
Other Links of Interest
A too real concern and a major reason for not going to digital currency.