I’ve only read the first of the Dies the Fire books, so I don’t know what Stirling proposed, but my feeling on Europe would be that it’s a geographically smaller and much more densely populated area than the US. The things we discussed in this thread would cross-apply pretty well to the problems in Stirling’s setup.
If someplace as relatively unpopulated as the Pacific northwest has problems as bad as depicted in the first book, anyplace with a higher population density is going to be really screwed. Dependence on high technology makes things much worse than for places that don’t use it much. The higher the tech, the worse off the area. Third-world countries will just have some inconveniences. People in those areas are used to dealing with people or animal power for the most part, and have less dependence on trade and moving food and other goods from place to place.
First-world people, on the other hand, depend on their technology for practically everything, from food to sanitation to transportation. Modern supermarkets can run out of some foods in time periods measured in hours if they don’t get their shipments on time. A run on stores could cause food riots in a day or two if transport alone was interrupted because people will panic even if they’re not really hungry yet when they realize that more lettuce or whatever isn’t coming.
Take a look at this population density map from Wikipedia. Everything higher than blue on that map, with higher technology than, say, high third-world is going to be pretty much wiped out. It’s not just the lights going out, it’s people killing each other, bad sanitation and resultant plagues, and no food. No matter what the attitude of the people/government in those areas, I wouldn’t count on having more than small scattered bands of survivors.
If descriptions of what happened in Salem (pop. 150,000, 400,000 in metro area) made your stomach turn, imagine what a city with millions of people and a dense metro population like Los Angeles or New York would look like. The city would be partially destroyed by fire and riots, and the area for miles and miles around would be devastated from the passage of refugees.
Oregon wouldn’t be typical; I imagine most surviving communities in the US – and probably Canada and Europe too – would be hard-line Christian theocracies.
After all, who except God could change the laws of physics? And if He did something that drastic, He must be truly pissed at us and our high-tech civilization with its lack of morals! Looking at these places a few years after the change, they’d make Saudi Arabia look like Amsterdam.
I’ve only read an excerpt of Dies the Fire, and the writing wasn’t very good, so I didn’t buy the book. But the descriptions I’ve heard sound like it’s kind of a ripoff of Stephen Boyett’s Ariel. Any opinions on that?
**Sleel ** has it right about Europe and France in particular. Stirling is clear that there are survivors in Europe - isolated communities in mountain areas, islands etc. (the Pope is based in northern Italy as well as the Brits on the Isle of Wight) - but in much of western Europe the population density is too high (as it is in the North East of the USA and Southern California). The idea is that as the millions flee the mega cities they eat out everything within a 200 mile or so circle - the distance they can flee on foot - and in highly developed areas these circles overlap leaving no “civilised” survivors, just cannibal bands.
The second trilogy - The Sunrise Lands - starts to explore this idea. I don’t think it is much of a spoiler to say that the first book involves a theocracy based in Montana (see the first nine chapters on smstirling.com).
I can easily see a lot of California being a dead zone. Yeah, it has a lot of good farming land, but like someone above said, big cities overlap eachother. As soon as the power is lost I can see refugees heading north out of L.A. And Bakersfield already has over 300,000, way more than can be fed by itself.
But I also think that a community would band together and hold off the hungry from trying to take their food, they might be able to hold out. A group of isolated communities seems more likely.
On his website, Striling has figures and a timeline of Europe (Britain is his focus, but he talks of the continent also). Interesting stuff.
Any guesses on why the Alien Space Bats acted? Apparently their ethics will allow them to take action which will kill off 9/10 of a sentient species – but not all of it, which they could have done just as easily.
Here’s an idea: They were doing us a favor. They knew, having seen it many times before, that we were heading toward total anthropogenic destruction/collapse of our global ecosystem’s carrying capacity, an extinction-level even on the order of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. The Change was the only way to preserve both the natural biosphere and a remnant of our species.
Variation on the same: The Alien Space Bats are Alien Space Nazis, obsessed with eugenics. They perpetrated the Change to accelerate our evolution, to clean up our gene pool, to reverse the “dysgenic pressure” of high-tech civilization, to produce an environment where only the strongest, healthiest and smartest can survive.
BG It seems to me that you think that the Alien Space Bats are concerned with us as a species, working through moral or amoral reasons to improve us or save us. What if they just are culling the herd before a feast? It seems to me that any species who are capable of performing alterations in the basic laws of physics would think we are nothing more than smart animals.
I think it might have something to do with that quick radio report Mike Havell heard in his plane before it went down. That’s why I think the cause could plausibly be Japanese scientists screwing around with a particle accelarator.
Or, maybe there are Elder Gods, the ones worshipped by Clan MacKenzie, finally making their presence known to the world. You’ve got to admit that the state of the things post-Change makes it easier for them (those gods) to grow their base of believers. The MacKenzies seen to have the inside track on a religion that actually works.
I remember in “Meeting at Corvallis”, they sent out a scouting expedition south. They reported that the highways out of LA were packed full of dessicated corpses dried to beef jerky. Hundreds of thousands of people tried to walk out and died of thirst.
If it’s food they want, it would be far more cost-effective for them to set themselves up as our gods and demand sacrifices in the form of dressed sides of beef or pork. And an industrialized high-tech economy could provide them with a lot more of that.
If they just want to eliminate a potential competitor for galactic dominance – why leave any of us alive at all?
Well, maybe they’re conservationists. They don’t wanna exterminate humans, just thin the population down to a manageable level. After all, extinction is forever. Chop the human population down by 90% and stick us in a low-tech preserve for the next couple millenia. There’s no telling what the motivation of alien space bats might be, that’s why they’re alien space bats.
Their motivation is irrelevant, which is why Stirling is right to leave such questions unanswered. They created a planet where electricity and gunpowder and engines don’t work anymore because Stirling wanted it that way.
Note that I normally think saying “Frodo couldn’t destroy the ring because Tolkien wrote it that way!” isn’t useful. Of course the author is in charge of creating the story, and everything that happens happens because the author wrote it that way. But usually it’s more productive and interesting to explore the work of fiction as if the characters really did have free will. But sometimes it’s useful to take a step back and analyze things from a meta-perspective. So asking “What was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?” is sort of pointless, because it’s whatever you want it to be, the briefcase is a McGuffin. In this case, the motivations of the ASBs are a McGuffin and therefore aren’t interesting to speculate about, because the novels are about dealing with the loss of technological civilization rather than dealing with dastardly ASBs.
To analogize, let’s look at Phillip Jose Farmer’s “Riverworld”. All of humanity is ressurected on a strange planet that consists of one gigantic river. Eventually Burton and company reach the control center and discover the mysteries of Riverworld. Except the problem with this is that the mysteries are much more interesting before they’re revealed, the attempt to discover the mysteries is much more interesting than the mysteries.
So unless the story is going to be about Mike Havel tracking down the ASBs and kicking their asses for what they’ve done to Earth, the ASBs should be kept completely offstage. Their motivations are irrelevant, their technology is irrelevant, speculation about them is irrelevant, because they are simply the hand of the author creating an interesting situation to read about.
Well put Lemur866. As you said in an earlier post, its like the Ring of Fire in the 163X books…it doesn’t really matter how or why it happened. Its not central to the story. I know that Eric Flint made a half hearted effort to explain why it happened, but thankfully he then moved on to the core of the story. In Dies the Fire its even less useful to wonder why or how it happened…its just part of the plot to get us to think in terms of how a high tech society would react if the rug was pulled out from under them suddenly…and what would emerge from the ruins. Personally I think its the Old Gods™ who are behind it all…I never did like Alien Space Bats!
The sample chapters from The Sunrise Lands have me hooked and pissed that I have to wait for the rest of the book. But now I need to go re-read Dies The Fire to remember the radio snippet that Havel overheard right after the Change.
Well, does everyone here know that “Alien Space Bats” is a term of art in the alternate history community? It means exactly what I’m talking about some unknown and unknowable force that changes history for inscrutable reasons. They can be anything the author wants…time travelers, aliens, gods, whatever, the point is that they introduce the changes that the author of the story/scenario desires, but aren’t important to the story/scenario.
So if the story is “What If Spartacus Had A Piper Cub?”, ASBs send a Piper Cub back in time to Spartacus, but have no further impact on the story. The story isn’t about the ASBs, it’s about, well, what would happen if Spartacus had a Piper Cub.
There’s a reference to the “charnal house” of Southern California in the online chapters of The Sunrise Lands too.
After reading those chapters online, I’m thinking that the reason for the change concerns The Old Gods of the Clan MacKenzie. Now whether they caused it, or have stepped in to fix something others have caused, remains to be seen.
I hope not, because I find the Clan MacKenzie extremly boring. I read every page, but I really want to just skip ahead. I do skim the songs/rituals and whatnot. I just wish he’d spend more time on the Bearkillers.
I definitely get the impression that the pagan gods definitely exist and are real in the post-Change world. But it’s not necessarily clear that they existed and were real in the PRE-Change world.
Well put Lemur866. As you said in an earlier post, its like the Ring of Fire in the 163X books…it doesn’t really matter how or why it happened. Its not central to the story. I know that Eric Flint made a half hearted effort to explain why it happened, but thankfully he then moved on to the core of the story. In Dies the Fire its even less useful to wonder why or how it happened…its just part of the plot to get us to think in terms of how a high tech society would react if the rug was pulled out from under them suddenly…and what would emerge from the ruins. Personally I think its the Old Gods™ who are behind it all…I never did like Alien Space Bats!
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