survival | CW Hawes

Getting Around After The Apocalypse

Should we ever find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic (PA) world, what will we rely on for our transportation and cartage needs? Will it be the horse as many, if not most, PA writers speculate? Probably not.

But if we won’t be using horses in a PA world, what will be our options? Fortunately we have three excellent ones.

For the past four weeks I’ve been talking about transportation in a PA world. And I’ve made a point that we won’t be using the horse — books, movies, and TV shows to the contrary.

Horses are skittish, high-maintenance animals. In addition, they are not only dangerous but have pretty much always been the speciality of the rich. The poor and middle class used their feet or dog carts. Or perhaps rented a horse and wagon.

Even in the 1800s, when the horse was everywhere, most folks did not own a horse. They were simply too expensive to maintain. So why would things be any different in PA world, where survival of the human is going to take precedence over everything else?

In fact, the most valuable use of the horse, should we find one, just might be to fill our stomachs.

Aside from our feet, what are our land transportation options?

First off, we have man’s best friend: the dog. Dogs have been with us longer than horses. They are also far more manageable and versatile than horses.

Dogs can guard our possessions, warn us that intruders or predators are about, haul our goods, and, while we can’t ride them, they can pull us about in a cart or sled. In addition, most of us know dogs. The same can’t be said for horses.

Dogs. Probably the most practical animal in a PA world.

But when it comes to transportation, what we are most familiar with are cars and trucks.

Just because the gasoline runs dry doesn’t mean we can’t use our cars or our trucks. We simply need to think outside the box. And the answers are already before us: steam-power and wood gas. Both of which are established technology. No need to reinvent the wheel.

1970s Dutcher prototype steam car-owned by Jay Leno

Converting an internal combustion engine to run on steam would take a considerable amount of machining, but it can be done. In fact, it has been done many times over by steam-power aficionados. The tech is out there, and has been since at least the 1970s.

All the savvy prepper and survivalist has to do is find the info on the Internet and print out the instructions. Now, rather than later. Then, when the SHTF, team up with a machinist to rebuild engines and to make boilers and burners. Easy-peasy.

Steam cars. It’s really what we should be driving today.

Wood gasification is also established tech. Once again, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Wood gas can fuel our cars and trucks, be used to fuel our stoves and furnaces, provide us with lighting, as well as provide power for industry. And in a PA world, bringing back industry will go a long way towards building back a new and better world.

Many countries survived on wood gas in World War II. Why wouldn’t survivors do the same in a PA world?

Once again, the savvy prepper and survivalist simply needs to print off the abundant material available on the Internet (now, rather than later), and life will be good when the SHTF.

So, the next time you read a book, or watch a movie, or TV show that makes abundant use of the horse after the apocalypse just chalk it up to the writer’s love for westerns — because that’s the only place where the horse was king. And most westerns are the stuff of fantasy.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

CW Hawes is a playwright, award-winning poet, and a fictioneer; as well as an armchair philosopher, political theorist, and social commentator. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

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For the Weekend 2

I’m not a fan of social media. For the most part, IMO, it is a massive, non-productive time suck. Having written that, I want to qualify the statement by saying, every cloud has a silver lining — and that includes social media.

I’ve met some fantastic writers on Facebook and Twitter — people I’d never have otherwise met.

And many, if not most, of those writers are in the same position I am: their book sales are so low they are invisible on Amazon and elsewhere.

So I do my part to help promote my fellow writers. To promote good books that aren’t going to show in the first few pages of Amazon search results. Books that live somewhere below the top 300,000 in the paid Kindle store.

Today, I want to draw your attention to Don’t Dream It’s Over by Matthew Cormack.

If my memory serves me right, I met Matthew on Facebook. He refers to himself as a weekend writer. A hobbyist who is nevertheless serious about crafting a memorable story.

The world of the post-apocalyptic Piranha Pandemic is terrifyingly real. It is exactly how I see the survivors of a worldwide disaster coping — both the positive and negative, the good and the bad. The worldbuilding is stunningly realistic.

Don’t Dream It’s Over is the first book set in the Piranha Pandemic world. I don’t want to gush, so I’ll simply say — I love this book.

Cormack has the ability to create characters so complexly real you think you’ve met them before. They are flesh and bones, meat and potatoes real.

He has uncanny psychological insight into how people act under stress and imparts that realism to his characters.

Don’t Dream It’s Over is told in a diary format that Cormack handles with aplomb. The narrative is natural. The narrator, Peter, draws you into his tale. It’s as if he is writing to you. Telling you his story.

Don’t Dream It’s Over has all the makings of a classic. The writing is better than that found in S. Fowler Wright’s classics Deluge and Dawn. The world is more realistic than that of George R Stewart’s Earth Abides and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.

Don’t Dream It’s Over is an amazing book by an amazing storyteller. Take a trip to a world that doesn’t exist, but very well could, all while sitting in your easy chair. And if you do, you’ll be prepared should COVID become truly terrifying.

You can get Don’t Dream It’s Over on Amazon for only 99¢, or for free on KU!

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Cozy Catastrophe Review: Earth Abides

The cozy catastrophe can have no better representative than George R Stewart’s Earth Abides. To the modern reader who is expecting a thrilling nail biter of a novel, oozing zombies at every turn, this is not the book for you.

However, if you are looking for a thought-provoking story of a person, a story of a person’s life, a story about a real person who is not always likable and yet has a vision that rallies people around him, a story of hope and inspiration — than this book is your cup of tea.

Earth Abides is about Isherwood Williams and his life after he survives a rattlesnake bite and a deadly pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s population. While the world of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and into the ‘60s quaked in its boots worrying over a nuclear holocaust, Stewart showed us there are other things about which we need to be concerned. Primary of which is our lack of concern about our impact on the natural world and its counter-impact on us.

When Ish, as he is called, comes down out of the mountains where he has been hiking and discovers the world as he knew it had died in a matter of weeks, we see a person befuddled by the enormity of the tragedy and yet one who as a result develops the resolve to not let knowledge die. He gets a car and drives from his home in California to New York City and then back to California, taking in a grand tour of the devastated country.

What Ish learns is that people don’t know how to survive for the most part and secondly, they never knew what to live for. What really matters in life. Earth Abides is in part philosophy masquerading as a novel. The questions Ish asks himself and what he eventually demands of the group that collects around him are important questions we should all ask ourselves before disaster strikes us.

Ish discovers that the world of businessmen and middle-class values does not prepare one for the real stuff of life. Stewart contrasts a southern African-American family with a Euro-American couple in New York City.

The poor blacks know more of life than the prosperous whites. The African-Americans set about to create a family of survivors: a man, a woman, and a young boy. Ish finds the woman pregnant. They have collected some farm animals and planted a garden. They make Ish realize that is what he needs to do rather than simply scavenge the detritus of the dead world.

The white couple in New York, by contrast, have no children, drink booze all day, play cards, read mysteries, and eat their meals out of tin cans, sometimes to Chateau Margaux. They have not given one thought as to what will happen when winter comes. Ish likes them for they are not despondent over what happened, but he realizes they will not survive because they don’t know how to and aren’t capable of thinking beyond their urban middle-class box.

George R Stewart wrote Earth Abides in the 1940s, it was published in 1949. His language is a bit dated by our politically correct standards and his science is also. But Stewart’s vision of hope is timeless. He was a professor of English at UC Berkeley. He was educated at Princeton, Berkeley, and Columbia. Dr Stewart was something of a polymath and unfortunately is virtually forgotten today. He wrote widely on a great array of subjects.

Stewart’s vision of a possible future for the human race is an interesting one. In a time when blacks were largely ignored by the greater society, Stewart shows them to hold the future in their hands. They know how to survive. Ish, whose name is symbolic, Ish meaning man in Hebrew, and is white marries a woman, Emma, who is at least partly African-American. That in an era in which miscegenation was very much taboo. Emma’s name is also symbolic for it means whole or universal. Ish calls her “the Mother of Nations”.

The style of writing is a partial throw back to the Victorian third person omniscient, which I find to put a certain distance between the reader and the story. For the story is told to me by an all-knowing narrator. Earth Abides is somewhat in this style and therefore creates a certain distance between reader and story. If one can overlook the manner of the telling, then one will find the classic that this novel truly is.

The detractors of the cozy, and I’m primarily pointing a finger at Brian Aldiss and Jo Walton and those websites that repeat their criticisms, have so narrowly defined what the cozy is, as though it is solely a British thing, they have turned off readers to a truly great treasure trove of fiction that can stimulate the best in us in the here and now. Earth Abides busts wide open what very much appears to be the self-loathing of Aldiss and Walton. Their own dislike of their own middle-class existence.

In Earth Abides, we see a college student collect together a band of largely working class people and craftsmen. He draws inspiration from a class and race that was marginalized in his day and age. The main character breaks the old taboos in his quest for a better society, but realizes he can’t do it alone. Earth Abides is not a tale filled with thrills and spills. It is one filled with ideas and filled with hope for a better world. Something we all want. It is the classic cozy catastrophe.

Comments are always welcome! Until next time, happy reading!

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