World Made by Hand: A Novel
by James Howard Kunstler
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Book Summary Information
Author: James Howard KunstlerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-11
ISBN: 0871139782
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Book Reviews of World Made by Hand: A Novel
Book Review: Interesting for showing the author's own idiosyncracies, but not credible.
Summary: 2 Stars
Paul Krugman had a column the other day at the New York Times. It's about the fragile nature of world trade, and how nationalism and protectionism could cause it to unravel more easily than one might think.
The eye-opener, though, is how he uses the pre-WWI economy as an example of a global one not unlike our own:
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"Writing in 1919, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes described the world economy as it was on the eve of World War I. "The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world."
"And Keynes's Londoner "regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement ... The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion ... appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice."
"But then came three decades of war, revolution, political instability, depression and more war. By the end of World War II, the world was fragmented economically as well as politically. And it took a couple of generations to put it back together."
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Why was this particularly striking to me?
Well, there's a sub-set of those who believe in peak oil who also clearly think that industrial society cannot exist without oil. One loud exponent of this view is Jim Kunstler, and he's expressed it in his nominally non-fiction book "The Long Emergency" and his novel "World Made By Hand." He says at the web site for the novel that one of his main goals was to provide a "credible" scenario for our future. So he shows us a world about 15 years from now (or as far into the future as we are from 1993) -- that has been ravaged by disease, has had a complete economic and political breakdown, has no real communication other than by foot or horse, etc., etc. In other words, he posits a world at about 1830's levels of tech in about 15 years.
And he calls this "credible."
So, what about the Keynes quotes up there from Krugman? Well, the Age of Oil really began with the gusher that was found at Spindletop, Texas, in 1901. But it took a long time for oil to percolate through society. The world Keynes is describing is one without oil.
But, notably, it's one *with* industry.
And that's the largest problem I have with the with the most pessimistic among the peak oil crowd. I'm willing to give them their premises regarding oil production itself. Although, if Hubbert, Deffeyes, Campbell, and others are to be believed, that means a symmetrical curve. Just as I remember Keynes' London, I also recall the US of the 1950's, which was when the interstates and the suburbs were first being built -- and that was with global oil production of roughly what one would expect in the 2060's if we're at peak now.
What this goes to is what Patrick Nielsen Hayden once described as the real surprise the Boomers got -- they never expected to live this long. That wasn't just because of shooting their collective wad so young. It's because they were told, incessantly, throughout their youth that either they'd go up in nuclear smoke, or a population crisis, or an environmental one. And now they're in their 60s, and they're not dead yet. Heck, they're more prosperous than they ever thought possible.
Kunstler gets to sounding like that a lot. Just like there are some who (mostly jokingly) complain about not having their jet packs, Kunstler comes across as complaining as not having his apocalypse yet.
I'm willing to give him peak oil. But that means a rollback to 1910 or so, at worst.
But he's a moralist at heart. Which means his beef isn't really with petroleum, or even the car suburb he so soundly excoriates, it's with industrial society as a whole. So he overreaches, and becomes, well...
Not credible.
One of the disturbing things about this science fiction novel (Kunstler vigorously resists this label, but hey -- it quacks like sf, it waddles like sf, it sheds feathers like sf) is how poor the world-building is. This wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't that the world-building is the point.
The Guardian recently had an article about a kid who's managed to build a wind turbine for UK?20. One of the "features" of Kunstler's scenario is that there's no electricity. This is particularly strange when one considers that Kunstler sets his story in a clear cognate to his home of Saratoga Springs, which gets most of its power from Niagara's hydro plant, which has no vulnerability to oil, peak or otherwise. Rather than mention Niagara even once in the book, Kunstler focuses instead on the number of small hydro plants that've been dismantled regionally, and mills as well. But compared to the over 2500 megawatts of Niagara, anything local is probably a rounding error.
My point, though, is that the UK?20 wind turbine was developed specifically for places with limited infrastructure, and is mostly made from scrap. Kunstler realizes his post-oil world is full of scrap -- but apparently no one has the initiative needed to build such objects on their own. No, they don't behave like human beings in the real world, they just drown in their passivity because the author needs them to so he can make his polemical point. This is known as "bad writing."
Similarly, he posits that not even bicycles can exist. because, you know, bicycles use rubber tires, and without oil you can't either make synthetic rubber or transport natural rubber. Which is true, but irrelevant. Bicycles existed from 1817 to the 1870s without rubber tires. In fact, you can still find bikes with wooden wheels around the globe.
However, even all this can be laid aside because... well, no oil, no gasoline, yes? So, rusting hulks of cars dotting the landscape, yes? Each and every one of them sitting on top of four wheels lined by...
Rubber.
Again, Kunstler rubs the reader's nose in how this new world requires fiendish ingenuity when it comes to salvaging the detritus of industrialism.
But not, you know, *too much* ingenuity. Like using a substance surrounding them.
Treating your characters like marionettes, just to prove a point. I sure am glad a sophisticated literary novelist would never resort to such cheap genre hackery.
Another aspect of the poor world-building in this cautionary science fiction novel: Its all-or-nothing-at-all nature.
One of the things Kunstler posits is that a) the United States' government as we know it will mostly disappear, since it won't be able to exert power over distance, and b) nothing will take its place except in the extreme local sense -- local large landowners who will be proto-aristocrats with proto-serfs, local anarchy, etc.
This shows (as do the other points above) a profound ignorance of history.
One of the things that governments do, in living memory no less, is ration things. Whether one is talking about the various rationing measures in the US during WWII, or "austerity Britain" after the war, or even as far back as Mesopotamian city-states -- governments ration scarce commodities, and keep the share needed to maintain power for themselves.
In this way, Walter Tevis' "The Steps of the Sun" is far more realistic than Kunstler. It too shows a world of dwindling resources, but it also shows a US government that manages to maintain supersonic fighters -- at the end of a barrel.
There's also just human nature at work. I've said before that Leopold Kohr's "The Breakdown of Nations" continues to be one of the most prophetic works of the 20th Century. Even if you grant Kunstler that the federal government would "wither away," to serve his polemic point, the likelihood is quite strong that the US would split up into a series of regional nations. (Which is what the states nominally are, but hey.) It's not as if US Grant and the Army of the Potomac will come along to force them back together. (Or, if they did, it would prove how wrong the idea of diminished Federal power is.)
But that splintering shows another problem -- Kunstler portrays a US which is uniformly on the skids, "powerless" in the literal black-out sense.
Given his background as an amateur urban critic, you'd think Kunstler had read Jane Jacobs. And, if so, you'd think he'd know about her idea that any given national economy is really the sum of individual urban economies (see her "The Economy of Cities")
Assuming that the larger regional cities would become primate capital cities of new splinter nations, I suggest that they would have a wide variety of outcomes. Seattle, where I live, gets 90% of its electricity from hydro, and another 9% from other non-fossil sources. In our region, I imagine Vancouver and Portland have similar non-petroleum sourcing.
I don't know the strengths and weaknesses of other cities. But this region's cities in particular are fairly well off compared to others if it comes to the great darkness Kunstler foresees.
And that's the problem. In the same way J. M. Straczynski used to make fun of some science fiction series for portraying the species of any given planet as being uniform, without ethnic, sectarian, or other divisions, Kunstler's attempts to make the entire world one vast homogeneous passive pity party are absolutely laughable. Even in the nightmare scenario he gives to himself, there will be winners, losers, and imbalances of outcome.
Summary of World Made by Hand: A Novel
In the best-seller The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. With World Made By Hand Kunstler makes an imaginative leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like after these coming catastrophes-the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars-converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they thought it would be. ?Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy. And the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren't sure. As the heat of summer intensifies, the residents struggle with the new way of life in a world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish. A captivating, utterly realistic novel, World Made by Hand takes speculative fiction beyond the apocalypse and shows what happens when life gets extremely local.
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