Simple tech ain't so simple

My new series is going to be set long after the apocalypse, and the world (or at least continent) as we know it will have fallen back to a 17th or 16th century world. Wheels, for instance, will be carved, wooden, and "tires" will be of salvaged metal strips. Someone has to do the salvage work. Someone has to carve the wheels.

Not that there will be gasoline engines to pull the contraptions the wheels are on, mind you. Horses or people! Or people just drag the plow or ard themselves, roped into it, rather than like this guy who apparently has some deer-dalmation hybrid pulling his. (Egypt. interesting place. 😏)

My book is partly set in a wooden windmill, where grain is ground for the community. I've been educating myself on the history of windmills, and how complex they grew with people adapting them using nothing but quite simple tools. Lubricated by bee's wax, these machines sawed wood, ground grain, made Holland habitable, made paint, and all sorts of other items for use or trade. I enjoyed musing about the innovations, who came up with them, how long it took to get it "right," and the sort of person who could innovate. Honestly, it took me a week of studying them to figure out the basics!

Consider the design of a millstone, carved by a stone carver or millwright by hand. They must have started with just two stones, millennia ago, and came to this point.The more you think about the design--and read up a little on it--you see what an astonishing bit of technology the design is. It grind the grain, it pushes the grain out, and it doesn't pulverize the grain. The stones are further apart near the center and closer at the edge. The design controls the movement of the grain (eventually down into a hopper.) Most rotate about 2 times per second. Here's one design, but most look something like this.

I'm reading widely, not quite knowing what will be of use. And some of this is based on TV shows I watched years ago, like "Life After People," where they explained how the buildings, bridges, and monuments of our culture will fall apart quickly in the absence of our keeping them up (and having the petroleum to do so). Articles I've been bookmarking for over a year might apply--like the "fruit walls of the 16th century" article I found that shows how to grow fruit by using the heat-storing capacity of southern-facing clay or brick walls to create a warmer microclimate that ripens the fruit sooner and allows you to grow figs in Montreal. (I may not need this, but it's the sort of thing I bookmark and may or may not use.)

My writing process is, as I do this research, it starts to come together for me, characters begin to pop into my mind (Who does the windsmith interact with most often? What is her role in the community? What kind of person could carve millstones for a living?) I simultaneously gain the knowledge I need to make details correct and (I hope) vivid and get to know my cast of characters. When it feels ripe I begin to outline a series or book, though I also have self-imposed deadlines, so it darned well better ripen up on time! :D

Jan 1, I plan to type the words "Chapter 1" and get going on the new series. It's a little unusual for indie post-apocalyptic, as the apocalypse will be rather far in the past, but there are similarities in how it's a survival adventure, and new sort of apocalyptic events will spring up for the characters to deal with. As a minor point, climate change may have been nasty for the Oil Apocalypse characters, but when it changes back for their descendants to a colder world, a new kind of climate change will be just as difficult to adapt to. There are other problems they'll face, but I won't spoil it for you. It's coming in 2019.

Oil Apocalypse: the Germ

Not just the germ for the Oil Apocalypse series of novels, but for my thinking about the collapse of civilization, sprouted decades ago, at university. There, I read various Club of Rome publications and Limits to Growth (which is entirely right in general, though people slam it for being wrong in a few specifics). Political science professors introduced to me to some fascinating principles that I absorbed. I didn’t think of this often as a young adult--I was busy getting laid and establishing a career like most people in their 20s--but it was percolating in the back of my mind. I wasn't yet a writer and didn't think people like me could be writers.

If you want to know more about Limits to Growth, an easy way to learn is to read this recent article.

I became interested in the topic of collapse--why and how civilizations fall--long before the Jared Diamond book on it. I should start with the 1988 book Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy, a seminal political science work that focuses largely on military power and how it first builds empires and then contributes to the collapse of them. I took some archeology courses in the 1990s and learned more about ancient civilizations that are naught but ruins now and why they may have ended. The Diamond book Collapse was released, and I read that. He speaks a lot of resource depletion due to overpopulation as a core cause of collapse. I’ve since read Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, which talks about complexity of systems being the cause of collapse, a sort of weight that accumulates until it breaks a society into smaller, more manageable pieces. I’m currently working my way through mathematician Peter Turchin’s writing on the topic which analyzes the matter in a slightly different way. I suspect none has THE answer, but I suspect each has a piece of an answer to the question “what makes complex societies collapse?”

If you wander over to youtube, you’ll find interviews and lectures by all these men, or you can go read the Wikipedia pages on each of the mentioned books and get this gist.

If you’re not in the mood to read or listen to lectures, the most important thing to know is this: because of various causes, civilizations always collapse. It’s an inescapable rule, just like “you will die” is a rule. Whatever nation-state you inhabit is not immune to ending, as you are not immune to death. Wave your flag harder in response to this statement all you want, but it won’t stop the inevitable collapse. Rome’s empire fell. Alexander the Great conquered a huge swath of land but you’ll notice most of those conquered people don’t speak Greek any longer. Persia fell. The Mongols became something less than Genghis might have hoped. The sun sets pretty quickly on the British Empire nowadays. Collapse happens.

Often, collapse is more like "contraction." Rome fell, but you know, there is still a Rome in Italy, and some of the people there are descended from Imperial Romans.

Here's something to ponder: because we are in part a global society now, quite intertwined, trading goods across vast distances, is it more likely that if, say, the United States collapses will it take Canada, Australia, Britain, Japan, and Saudi Arabia with it? In the not-too-remote past, this was not so. Portugal used to be an empire of great power. When it collapsed from that position and because a much less powerful nation, it was good for the rest of Europe, not bad. It probably would be a real problem if that happened today--and not just because of the EU.

Another interesting question is: what does collapse look like in the modern age? Does it happen boom, overnight? Preppers obviously think so and most post-apocalyptic novels, including mine, cater to that belief/fear/desire. Or does it happen slowly, in a stair-step fashion, and in such a way that only a few people understand that they are living in the midst of a collapse as it occurs?

Part of the problem with how the human mind works is that we want simple answers and we think better when contemplating the short term. Trying to think about the collapse of vast civilizations, including how our own will collapse, takes a disinterested perspective, and a broad view.

While my other post-apocalyptic novels are about a specific triggering event, the Oil Apocalypse series depended on my inventing imaginary answers to these more complicated questions of how and how quickly collapse occurs. There is no way to write an exciting novel while including all of this information I’ve learned. I tried to hint at some of the complexities of the slow collapse leading up to the catastrophic event of the destruction of the Ras Tanura port in book 1 of my series, and I hope I was neither too subtle about that, nor too dull and academic. Spoiler alert: there's a second series planned for a long, long time after this series. That's because I think people will survive collapse, and I make this belief into fictional reality in series 2.

So in books 2-4 of the first series, and in the second series, I’ll let the slow collapse continue....

The Oil Apocalypse Blogs: 1

As I begin to blog about the topics that I’ve researched and that led me to situate this novel series at the end of petroleum, I hardly know where to begin.

I’ll start with answering general questions friends and readers have already asked me and imaginary questions that other people might ask in the future.

Do you believe that oil is coming to an end?

Without a doubt.

It’s a finite resource. The world population increases daily by almost a quarter of a million people, India and China, the most populous nations, become bigger users of fossil fuels every day, and it takes tens of millions of years for new oil to be made via geological processes. So yes, absolutely, it’s coming to an end. I don’t need to “believe” it, no more than I need to “believe” in gravity or molybdenum or the planet Mercury. Oil will run out.

But I’ve read in the newspaper there is plenty. Don’t you believe the official measures of available oil and predictions of how long it will last?

Not for a second. These figures come from the oil industry itself (remember, the folks you brought you Deep Horizon and the Exxon Valdez?), which is fixated on short-term profit, not the long-term health of civilization, and from the same governments who have lied about everything they can lie about for my entire life. Obviously none is to be trusted and all have their own vested economic interests that make lying advantageous to them. They aren’t wholly on my side and have plenty of incentive to lie, so I don’t believe them.

So who do you believe?

Sorry, but I have no one reliable to offer you in exchange for those liars. I’ve read every peak oil/post oil book there is out there, watched all the documentaries, read hundreds of blog posts by everyone from social scientists to actuaries to economists to “recovering oil executives,” to the Grand Archdruid, to back-to-the-earth small organic farmers who use horses and hoes instead of tractors, and there is so much panic-mongering and so many unlikely claims, so many crazy cults that don’t allow dissent or questions if you wish to clarify the source of their claims, it’s hard to know whom to believe. So I don’t believe any of them either.

Sure, that’s because some are clearly nutty, but also because the most rational and well-read of them are predicting details about a future that is unpredictable. I don’t know the future, and they don’t know. Some (not much) new oil could be discovered. New technologies might emerge to get oil out of tar sands more efficiently. Nobody knows the shape of the future, and while someone out there (probably a few gas executives and intelligence agencies) is certain how much gasoline is truly left, they aren’t sharing that info.

We do all know this: oil is a finite resource and more than half that ever was has already been burned.

Wikimedia. Oil production and use. Hubbert's Peak in action to 2003

When will oil entirely run out?

Not a clue. After I’m dead and gone, no doubt, and probably before 100 years has passed, but other than that, without someone first telling us the truth about how much there is, I would not hazard a guess. (Okay, I did hazard a guess in writing this novel series, but Slashed is set about a generation from now, and that seems far too soon for us living in the real, non-fictional world. I didn’t want the world unrecognizable, so I chose that time frame and a world political arrangement that had the US dependent on one foreign source that gets shut off in an instant. Artistic license.)

more to come next week

Zooniverse.org

A month or so ago, when I had my writing work done for the day, I looked at email and there was a notice from zooniverse.org. I did an hour of work immediately and made a minor contribution to science. Not bad for a slow afternoon.

If you don’t know what Zooniverse is, it’s a coalition of scientists who have projects that they need a lot of human eyes on. Online volunteers provide the eyes. I believe the first project was “galaxy zoo,” identifying galaxies in deep-space Hubble images. I participated in that for a time, when I had internet and spare time. Along the way, I’ve also taken part in:

Snapshot Serengeti: Wild animals (and a rare human) trigger still cameras, and you pick out what animals were caught in the shot, how many, and what they were doing. 

Whale Song: There is a classification system for whale songs (who knew?) and I listened to several and tried to classify them within that system.

Shakespeare’s World: I turned some handwritten letters from the Elizabethan Era into computer files. The content of the letters was interesting. Parties, family, food, politics were among the topics. I assumed beforehand that the language would be quite different than our own, but it was quite similar.

Operation War Diary: WWI field notes. This was far more interesting than I thought it would be. I gravitated to the medical officers’ and ambulance teams’ notes and learned a good deal about wounds, mental illness and STDs in WWI. (Spoiler alert: soldiers get VD. A lot.) Both this and the Shakespeare era letters reminded me of how important primary documents are to historical novelists. You learn a lot of detail by reading, not necessarily what you’re looking for, but all of it adding up to the world coming alive in your mind.

Cyclone Center: Identifying satellite images of hurricanes in their various stages. Despite knowing something about this topic, I found this one tough.

Arizona Batwatch: The “Arizona” drew my eye, and I watched several ten-second clips of bats flying around the entrance to their homes, counted the critters, identified moments of hovering, of bumping into each other (they do!) and the rare landing caught on film. I found a double landing my first afternoon--and the first afternoon of crowd sourcing the project--and the scientists running the project were clearly stoked about it. A scientist who is working on that area of research will be very happy to know which clips to look at to study the landings in more detail.

Computers can pick out some meaning out of data (computers discover most comets these days by comparing images and seeing the dot that shouldn’t be there, for instance), but they can’t do what the human eye and brain can. Certain patterns are too complicated for even the best computer programs to analyze. Only our minds and eyes can do it.

In my youth I didn’t have the opportunity to study much science after high school, and yet I’ve had the chance to do some later in life through volunteer opportunities, both real life and online. At Zooniverse, you too can do real science. Don’t have a PhD in it but love astronomy or biology? You can still add to humanity’s knowledge about that field. Volunteers have discovered new types of galaxies, distant supernovae, and more. You only have a half-hour per week, or even less time? No matter. You can still help unlock Nature’s secrets. G’on over and take a gander. You might find something that calls to you.