Warning, this post contains very modest spoilers associated with the novel Station Eleven by Emily Mandel. They are not much of a spoiler, but you are warned.
One
artifact of science fiction becoming mainstream is that one has to
deal with reviewers and even readers who have not had the benefit of knowing the genre, those who have not submitted to the discipline required to truly understand faster than light travel, telepathy, multi dimensional time portals and a host of other topics. These mainstream critics may thus not be qualified to understand the field and its conventions. It can lead to some unfortunate encounters such as when a fellow undergraduate at college once said "You should read Pynchon, he writes science fiction that is actually good" and I thought to myself, I will probably hate Pynchon. Well, I did not hate Pynchon, nor do I hate Station Eleven by Mandel, but it is not great science fiction despite what the reviews say. But Station Eleven did have an unexpected benefit. Although it was not intentional on the part of the author it alerted me to a terrible danger facing this nation as it
awaits the inevitable collapse of civilization.
Station
11 is the highly acclaimed fourth novel by Emily Mandel about
the world after a pandemic. It has its moments. I might give it a
sold B- or so, but never, ever the acclaim that it is getting. The
point of this post is not to review the novel per se, but to report
to you an unexpected weakness that could inhibit our recovery from the type of disaster the novel describes.
You see, one
of the unintended subtexts of the novel is to reveal just how powerless and
incompetent a bunch of liberal arts majors are without their
internet. This was not an intentional theme of the author, rather it
is an accident that is revealed by the author's (and the reviewer's)
ignorance of what would be possible technologically even in the
absence of electrical power, the internet, and high octane gasoline.
This is apparently a disaster novel written by an English major.
Very good at crafting paragraphs but not too bright when it comes to
technology about which she clearly knows almost nothing.
So
now two light spoilers although the first one isnlt much of a spoiler
since you probably can not get through the first two pages without
figuring it out.
Spoiler
number one: Station 11 is set in a near future where
99.9 percent of humanity has died of a particularly infectious and
fatal form of the flu. You can be infected by being around someone
who already has it, no direct contact is necessary, and anyone who
gets it is dead within a few days which is presumed to be long enough
to infect everyone else. The end result is that within about a
month pretty much everyone is dead. The people who do survive have
to go out to the country to find food and create the setting for the
rest of the novel.
In
our second spoiler, we reveal that people are reduced to bows and
arrows and it is a major plot point that some unknown people have
actually recreated a small electricity grid. Technology you see has
completely gone away and we are back to perhaps Late Antiquity or so.
In other words, people know about horses, wheels, and plows, but
can only dream of having a refrigerator or an electric light.
This
is what comes of a deficient education system. This is what comes
of having children raised on the Internet and reality television.
You
see, seeing as how this is set in the near future, Toronto and the
state of Illinois, where our plot mostly takes place, has something
called a library. Probably every small town has one. And in this
library are books. And down the street, now abandoned, are machine
shops. And yes, while the rotary tools might very well be powered by
electricity that is not immediately available, there are other ways
to use those tools even without electrical power.
First, build one of these and use it to distill alcohol...
Then go to your local abandoned hardware store and pick up one of these....
On
top of that, it is not so hard to build a steam engine out of all the
spare parts left around after everybody dies. One could easily build
water driven devices and steam engines even without electricity or
gasoline. A handy stream and some wood will do. And they can be
rigged to drive a magnet with wire (which is lying around after the
apocalypse in every building) and you have an electrical generator.
If
you want to repurpose any of those millions of abandoned automobiles,
where, you might wonder, would the gasoline come from since the story
has established that gasoline went away through evaporation in a few
years?
Well, not all engines run well on alcohol, but many can be tuned to run acceptably well. Many engines such as one finds in things like portable power generators, available and in stock at your local hardware store, are made to run on a variety of fuels. Even more useful, but more specialized and less immediately available, are belt driven generators which can use a variety of motive forces. This is something that could be easily interfaced to a water wheel or wind mill.
Here is an article on converting your car to run on alcohol and how to distill your own by Mr. Keat Drane. See http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/ethanol_drane.html. This article is filled with interesting information about the history of fuels to power engines, and how to distill your own fuel.
Here is an article on converting your car to run on alcohol and how to distill your own by Mr. Keat Drane. See http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/ethanol_drane.html. This article is filled with interesting information about the history of fuels to power engines, and how to distill your own fuel.
The
great American philosopher, Clint Eastwood, said that “A man has
got to know his limitations” (1) and very clearly Ms. Mandel does
not know what she does not know.
But
Mandel has done us a favor and just in the nick of time. She has
alerted us to the complete ignorance so many of our citizens have
about how the basic things in their life work. We can not choose who will survive the inevitable destruction of civilization, and if they are all English majors then we would have a second disaster on our hands.
I
hope you will join me in petitioning our public servants to create
remedial education programs, programs which must be made mandatory
for all English majors, to correct this dangerous knowledge gap
before it is too late.
Station
Eleven by Emily Mandel on Amazon.com
_________________________________________
1.
This is from Magnum Force, and Mr. Eastwood was being
sarcastic.
