Earth abides
A disease of unparalleled destructive force has sprung up almost simultaneously in every corner of the globe, all but destroying the human race. One survivor, strangely immune to the effects of the epidemic, ventures forward to experience a world without man. What he ultimately discovers will prove far more astonishing than anything he'd either dreaded or hoped for.
Stats for nerds
18recommend
32mentions
25people
2008–2025years
72% recommend28% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Typically the embedded story (at least in the stories I'm familiar with)
Maybe read the three classics dystopian sci-fi:
Or just classic scifi:The Earth Abides Day of the Triffids On the Beach
Or authors of “modern” classics:Anything by Phillip K. Dick Most things by Robert Heinlein
Even Dune is a pretty grim future for all the non-player characters. Never mind Margret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, McCarthy’s The Road, and Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.William Gibson John Scalzi - Earth Abides by George R. Stewart is a more gentle post-apocalyptic story, but very beautiful. Not really much in the way of hackers. I like how it chronicles a procession of animal population boom and bust cycles that would naturally happen in the wake of humans disappearing.
- Earth Abides by George R. Stewart takes place around the Berkeley area in a post-apocalyptic world. Not quite sci-fi but a fantastic read nonetheless.
- I rather enjoyed the book Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. It considers all these problems in depth through it's narrative.
- There is a good book called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides Earth Abides, the most the lead character manages to pass on of all of our technology is the (fire)bow/arrows. Everything else is lost, even though it takes years for everything to run down.
- >Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town.
The issue with this type of thinking is that it assumes some level of material surplus before those books are both physically and intellectually lost to future generations.
A societal collapse already implies a critical level of material scarcity that would make information or industrial preservation low on the totem pole. Where are you going to get the raw and human resources to maintain what remains let alone rebuild industrial processes? And what if those "human resources" don't want to rebuild?
The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart has a pretty candid take on what would happen if an academic survived a systemic collapse of the United States and tried to rebuild the Old World from what was left of the survivors. I think Stewart's vision is extremely plausible, even with the advent of the Internet and digital storage, possibly more so.
