Post Oil Fiction

From the headlines and the prices at the gas pump it looks as if Peak Oil has arrived or is very close. The end of the oil age is here and writers of fiction seem to have noticed.

In particular my good friend James H. Kunstler has attracted a lot of attention with his thought provoking and entertaining novel “A World Made By Hand.” Kunstler’s thesis is that the end of cheap readily available oil will bring modern technological civilization to a crashing halt. In the novel near future America has been reduced to a 19^th Century level of existence where people grow their own food, ride horses for transportation and make their own clothes. The average person’s universe is centered around their home town and technology is a fond memory. The idea is not a particularly new one but it’s one that hasn’t been well explored by writers and other artists.

Now I can’t think of any major novels set in a post oil world and of only one truly influential work of modern art set in such a world. “The Mad Max” movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in these films a lawman living in near future Australia the title character “Mad Max” played by transplanted American Mel Gibson struggles to survive in an energy starved wasteland ravaged by post modern barbarians. In the first film gasoline is a precious commodity and gangs of speed crazed motorhead bandits terrorize the highways stealing gasoline. In the second film, “The Road Warrior” a small community of civilized people struggle to defend an oil well from a warlord and his army of high speed punks long enough to get enough oil to fuel their journey to farms by the coast. In the third film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” oil is a thing of the past and cars are powered by methane harvested from pigs raised in a post industrial trading post that features gladiatorial games and trial by combat for entertainment.

Now most of the post petroleum novelists won’t admit it but Mad Max is their inspiration. The original film was supposedly based on some Australians violent reaction to fuel shortages in the 1970s. The film’s writer and director George Miller says it was inspired by the auto related injuries he treated as an emergency room doctor in the early 1970s.

Today’s post oil novels of which Kunstler’s is the first to achieve some press attention are vastly different vehicles. They seek to warn and inform the reader as well as entertain. I won’t survey these books here, Frank Kaminski has already done an excellent of job of that over at www.energybulletin.net.

I will offer some criticism here these novels seem to be driven by a number of conflicting intentions. The first being very good intention to warn average people that the oil is running out and we should do something about it. I applaud this it’s about some time somebody made a serious effort to alert the public and prepare them for the looming catastrophe that is Peak Oil.

Underlying these good intentions are some darker and more questionable trains of thoughts. The first being technophobia the fear and suspicion of technology and the thought they’d we’d all be better off without all these confusing new fangled gadgets like computers and cell phones. Some of these writers like Kunstler (who as far as I know makes use of all these gadgets in his personal life) try to demonstrate that we can live without these things and be better off without them. Now technophobia is nothing new it is a natural and perhaps logical reaction to technological change which isn’t always progress (the replacement of rail travel by automobiles for example). On some level these novels represent a desire for a simpler less technological way of life and wishful thinking that all the technology will go away so we can live like people again.

Such novels also feed into our irrational fears that we can’t live without the technology. They are based on the premise that technological civilization is a fragile thing that will easily breakdown and collapse. The fear that all the things we take for granted and depend upon will disappear overnight. It’s a powerful fear and a good one for novelists to exploit so on some level these writers are like Stephen King. They’re stoking our fears to sell books, which is nothing new or wrong. Tales of a dark future where civilization has collapsed or the bad guys have won have always sold and will probably always sell.

There is also a strong nostalgia in such writing, the age old dream that people will return to a simple life close to the soil where they live by the fruit of their hands. Such glorification of country life and peasant culture is age old and found in almost all cultures. In America we see it in everything from Thomas Jefferson (who was the owner of a factory farm that utilized slave labor)’s vision of a republic of small farmers to the Andy Griffith Show. The farther we get from real country life twelve hours of back breaking labor on the farm, no electricity, no running water, no medicine, the specter of starvation at the door and sharecropping, the more appealing such nonsense will become. Only people whose grandparents enjoyed running water and supermarkets can fall so quickly for such fantasies. The idea that the old traditional America of small farmers and shop owners which was itself a fantasy will come back and save us once big business and big government has failed is appealing but not necessarily realistic.

Now it’s obvious that the post oil writers are cherry picking the future and naturally choosing one that confirms to their hopes, fears and desires. That’s fine and natural, it’s what science fiction writers have always done and should do. Still it makes me a little hungry for a different vision.

What about a post oil future where civilization hasn’t collapsed where the cities still function and most of us still work for a living. Where computers still work and most of us still bank at the ATM. What would that look like? My guess something like modern Japan rabbit warren cities, most people using mass transit to get around and far more authoritarian government with a much more militaristic police force to make people behave. I haven’t seen many books like that although Paul Dinni’s wonderful animated TV show “Batman Beyond” gave us an intriguing vision of such a future where average people try to cope amid diminished expectations and technological wonder.

Now I’m that up on modern literature but I haven’t seen many books with such a vision. Although I clearly see the beginnings of it here in my hometown of Denver where developers are putting up lots of apartment blocks and rowhouses and the government is building an efficient electric powered rail transit system to move us around. I take the light rail everyday, its clean efficient, fast and often crowded. I also notice that there’s a Wackenhut transit cop who wears a brown paramilitary uniform and carries an automatic pistol on almost every train. I have a feeling that’s our future so it’s what I’ll write about. So perhaps what we need is a post oil novel with a different vision. So maybe I’ll try and write it.