I think I recall reading in an earlier thread on this subject that King didn’t have a good/bad divide in mind but rather one between freedom/authority or something like that.
So you could be a good person who happens to believe in rules and authority and end up in Vegas.
All by myself, thanks. If I had to choose, Boulder, of course but I’d just as soon live alone. And very happily, as long as I had food, drugs, alcohol and books (most importantly)! Barring any unforeseen injuries or accidents, that is! (That’s what I loved about the ‘extended’ version of the novel was the little stories about the people that just got screwed)!
Yeah, me too. I know exactly what you mean!
Yeah, I remember having the usual “What would I do?” daydreams and then realizing that 0.6% of 20,000 is still 120 people. Even if half of them fall down open manholes or die from eating expired Hot Pockets, that’s still quite a line at the ammo counter. And that’s just a town in the suburbs so you have everyone from the adjoining suburbs around as well.
Anyway, Boulder seems the only logical choice. Even if the “fun” people went to Vegas, Flagg has them all on work details and with strict rules. Skip work to smoke weed and Boulder will just frown disapprovingly at you while Vegas puts you on a cross outside of town.
I think I’d probably stay here on my little farm. I’d have to learn to hunt or go vegetarian. My horses would get a lot more use.
But if it came down to Vegas vs Boulder, not knowing the end of the story, I’d probably be one of the people who chooses Vegas, then slips away as it gets more and more restrictive. I like rules and I think I’d be more comfortable where people were expected to conform. The Vegas people seemed hard-working and cheerful, for the most part, except Flagg’s little cadre. I’m not cruel, and the eventual crucifixions would drive me out.
Stg
As a number of people in this thread have pointed out, the number of survivors was much larger than the number of people in either Vegas or Boulder. I seem to recall that King posited that most of the survivors didn’t go to either one - they stayed pretty much where they were.
I’m a tech and I would have chosen Boulder. Mother Abigail would have kept me in a rage mostly but…
Vegas has Flagg and the Happy Crappy guy with the car and the high heel boots wanted to go there. Big red flagg right there.
Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. First of all. 99.4% is too low. That leaves 60,000 people walking around NYC. Also, I was under the impression that people were being driven by their dreams to choose one side or another. If you remained in place, I would think the nightmares would drive you crazy.
Neither.
I’m not big on joining up or mystic visions reaching out to me in dreams. That said, 99.6% of people wiped out would likely leave me alone, mourning, and single. So if some post apocalyptic babe wanted to, she could lure me into traveling with her to any damn place.
I’d live in Boulder metro. Close enough so that I could hop on a moped and get the latest Randall Flag news. But far enough away so that Fran and her conveniently immune children wouldn’t get on my nerves.
Boulder. This is a community of people who are fundamentally law-abiding, pro-society types. I might be annoyed by the way they do things, but we’d ultimately have the same goals. I’d happily slot myself into the bureaucracy and put my accounting skills to good use in helping things to get up and running.
Vegas is just a ghost ship full of diseased cannibal rats, to borrow from another thread here. They can perhaps be forced into a functional bunch through application of sufficient force, but they’re not really a coherent group of nice people. While I might see more rewards more quickly if I went to Vegas, I’m pretty sure I’d wind up getting shivved by some scumbag eventually, even if we permit some alternate ending where I’m not vaporized.
60,000 people if the mortality rate was evenly distributed. I don’t think the immuned people would be necessarily evenly distributed and there would be some non immuned people who hadn’t run into anyone with the plague yet. I’d think NYC would be sunk since there’s no way you could avoid the plague there really. I’d bet the survival rate would be higher in isolated rural areas that can be self sufficient. If you never meet anyone with the plague, you could survive.
I hadn’t heard that, but it makes sense. Boulder was about working together and doing things by consensus; Vegas was all about The Man ruling with an iron fist, working towards The Man’s goals, rather than the Community’s goals.
I’m pretty sure that a 99.4% mortality rate means that 99.4% of people who contract the disease die from it. Remote groups who had no outside contact and never contracted the illness would only add to the total surviving people on Earth.
The book made the US seem a lot more depopulated than it should have been, especially in New York when Larry was roaming around with Rita. I suspect the real answer is that “99.4%” sounded sufficiently high in King’s mind and he never bothered to pick up a calculator.
Given the state of my respiratory system odds are high that I’d go fairly early in the plague, but since God is picking and choosing: if I were spared and had to choose it’d definitely be Boulder. I don’t even want to go to Vegas now.
Just to nitpick, more like 42,000 (again assuming that the mortality is evenly distributed). The population of NYC in 1980 was about 7 million, not the 8 million of today. The book was written in 1978.
You’d still think that Larry and Rita would run into a lot more of these 42k souls in their travels around the metropolitan area.
The mortality rate of Captain Trips bugged me too because there should have been more survivors, but I think he did a good job of explaining that the survivors had a high mortality rate after the fact. So I accept that maybe 99.94% of the survivors kicked it too, leaving us with numbers more in line with the books. Didn’t Glen also wax philosophical about less modern societies having a less post-flu mortality rate?
This fits with what I feel: Boulder is about consensus among the people as to how to govern themselves; Vegas is about obeying rules handed down from above. As such, I’d go to Boulder.
Not everyone had the dreams. IIRC, King specifically mentions that and that a lot of people go elsewhere or stay in place.
Boulder, definitely, although I’m not too keen on the whole Mother Abigail benign theocracy; I’m more of a democrat (big and small “D”). But I’d probably be killed or enslaved or stave to death if I wasn’t in some kind of a community after Captain Trips does his thang, and I do NOT want to be in Vegas with all of the killers and bikers and crazies.