Back in the day when I was writing a novel every school break (summer, easter, xmas) because my degree was worthless and I knew it before I graduated, I was trying for near future scifi, and for strong realism. I got educated on cutting edge technology, some of which is FINALLY getting into the public's hands, and wrote about it as if it were reasonably common, off the shelf. I tried to predict how new technologies would impact social structure, because good scifi includes that. Bad scifi pretends it is a secret and throws out a conspiracy to keep it that way. There's no such thing as a secret. There are too many smart people and too many witnesses. So I made sure to insist that tech impacts culture, and that gets pretty tricky.
When I learned about Peak Oil, it got a lot more tricky. The best prediction I can come up with is that our society has passed the point where we hold any respect for violent reaction. We're more grown up than that. Segments of our nation which predictably violate adult responses get marginalized and defunded. Thus Oakland is poor. Nobody respects them. Energy depletion without rioting was a pretty big step, and in my younger days I still believed rioting could accomplish something. I matured. It became obvious that rioting just brings in the military and their belt fed machineguns make short work of an angry crowd. QED. Duh.
So my vision of Peak Oil really changed. The general panic I expected at first was proven, again and again, to be wrong. And I learned from it. These days I'm highly suspicious of any cult insisting that riots will break out if they don't get what they want. We're becoming a post-violence society. There's still individual sprees, and still thugs worth shooting, and I still support the individual right to a firearm for self defense, but crowd-riots? Not so much. In the face of that huge social change, Peak Oil becomes a lot more about economics and politics. And poverty, since its economically based.
If you don't have cheap energy to do things, that leaves expensive energy, which is why gasoline is nearly $4/gal. That's not that much, when you think about how much a gallon of gasoline can do compared to the same value of food and a bicycle. A gallon of gas will take me 30 miles in half an hour. I can't do that with a bike in the same time. Most people aren't buying the superfancy high fuel economy cars to replace their reasonably good fuel economy cars. They just keep the old one going and watch the price of fuel rise, bit by bit, tax by tax. People who don't own cars look more seriously at things like scooters, motorcycles, and even bicycles if their commute is short enough. It makes sense in those circumstances. You still want a car for grocery shopping and rainy days, but this being California rain is often an empty threat. We have 300 dry days a year, here. That's 300 days you could be riding a scooter and getting 100 mpg. Double what a Prius claims, for about 10% of the cost. And scooters are fun in all the ways a Prius isn't.
So the future I see? Its not riots and gun fight and forcing down canned food. Its riding scooters on dusty roads, using your laptop or tablet to access social media and work software, and solar panels charging up home batteries because the power poles don't have lines anymore, stolen by junkies for drugs, shipped off to China. That probably sounds absurd, but consider what is already happening around you and extrapolate things a little further, 5-15 years from now. In 2006 we had a booming economy. In 2013, the present day, it's complete sh17. Seven years changed the world, so don't think things are going back to how they were, ever again.
It's fun to think outside the box like this. So many people are really fixated on how things were they don't understand that those days are gone forever. I really don't know, for example, just how much of the oil that will eventually be pumped out of the Monterey Shale through frac(k)ing will actually stay in California and how much will go onto the world market and end up in China. Nobody knows. If they pay the best, that's where the oil will go. And if its going there, we won't have it for our easy motoring lifestyles here. Not so great, right?
Think about how unfun it is for a Mom is a rural house trying to get her kids to school 12 miles away. She might be really interested in teleconferencing and home schooling if everybody has to bike into work, or spend a week worth of battery charging to get the old electric car that distance, then pay to recharge it for the trip home while paying for motel room overnight too. Not fun. Especially with modern single moms having multiple kids from various fathers and getting a free ride from the Socialist govt because those kids will grow up to be little Socialists too. The circle of tax funded life is complete. All except for who is paying for that, since all our jobs went to China and India. Continue that trend and eventually we'll have full unemployment. And that's something fun to write about. Grim, but fun. If all markets become Black, and all jobs secret to avoid taxation, what will life be like?
Vegetable gardens, chicken eggs, govt cheese and govt wheat? We could eat like African refugees. Our health care system is collapsing thanks to that Hawaiian who talks but never listens. Is famine far behind? Will unneeded population get shipped away from disaster areas, like LA will become without cheap oil to pump water over those passes to LA? Will the population be forcibly moved elsewhere to refugee camps? Perhaps on the Mexican border as a not-so-subtle threat to get the hell out? Will the current and next generations be forced onto farms to grow govt wheat, like peasants? Like slave labor? Would make a heck of a story. Of course, if you worked out the details like a fantasy villain, you'd offer to cancel debt from bankruptcy and student loans if the prisoner completes a farm training course and offer low cost loans and rent of a tractor/combine etc so they end up with entirely new debt slavery tied to land growing food for the useless eaters everywhere else. This big transition could be called the "Cultural Revolution". Sounds really progressive right?
Showing future poverty in a believable way makes for a fine setting. Allowing biological imperatives to shine through the wall of p00p even makes for hilarious romantic comedy. And that's the best thing of all. Telling a common romance in a strange but plausible setting, without the need for magic, that's a fine aim for any modern fiction author. And you can tell the story of love in a such a strange world.
One of the authors I really liked for this kind of scifi was Nancy Kress. Her Sleepless Trilogy was a fantastic study of how bioengineered people use their advantages and become slaves of the Federal govt because the population, which holds the votes, decide their existence is an unfair advantage and so they deserve to be unpaid slaves and are considered subhuman experiments by unethical war criminals. They blame the victims, and Kress is absolutely right that the public is evil enough to do this. This sort of institutionalized redistribution of wealth and labor by the masses benefiting calling it "fair" is one of those things which causes revolutions. Those never turn out well. The good people always die first. Sort of like that current healthcare law.
Keeping the above in mind, writing interesting scifi that's about adult people being adult, living in the setting you've created in a believable way, doing normal things and quietly surviving and trying to find stress relief whenever possible, that's what we're all doing today. When I was a member of the Chatsubo 20 years ago, we were extreme cutting edge futurists. When the Internet got easy, and computer use was normal for any office job and people started carrying cellphones and then smart phones and their hand held more computing power than our best machines of the early 90s? Well, hell. Cyberpunk wasn't punk anymore. It was normal. And that was a big deal for writers. Most of us gave up writing. Our movement went a certain distance and stopped.
I shifted into Peak Oil because it was a huge game changer for any scifi setting and was told by everyone that $4/gal is impossible and would never happen. Ahem. This is important because SUVs are gas hogs and won't be very useful in the future. Most high fuel economy vehicles will stay running, and low weight vehicles require less power to and less fuel to get the same job done, moving a person to work and back. Thus motorcycles and scooters are the vehicle of the future... not flying cars. The youth of today know this and are adapting. I see a lot of 18 year old students on restored old motorcycles or scooters, commuting to college and back. They've already made the choice and are living with it. They're easy to spot because they don't ride like they're angry. They're very careful. Restoring old bikes and keeping them running into the future is a wonderful and realistic contrast to the supercar/SUV their parents were so obsessed with. Two wheels are far more risky and far more efficient and green than a big SUV or battery laden Prius. More economical. And more realistic in the post-oil world.
So in a realistic future, there will be few cars, lots of scooters and motorcycles, and lots of bicycles in towns. We'll still have smartphones and laptops, but unemployment will likely be very high since neither political party is willing to shut down imports from China. I'm guessing there's
How weird will it be to see a fat person when everybody is bicycling everywhere and starving most of the time? These are great questions to ask and add to potential characterization. If you have to personally bring back your empty beer bottles to get more beer at the local brewery, despite their weight, by bicycle because you don't get a gas allowance, you're going to want it to be really good beer. Knowing the current administration are nothing but Haters, and we'll probably continue that pattern until the USA can't sustain itself and falls apart like Spain after the Armada sank, how does a solid indifference to Easterners impact Western lives? When the antics of Washington are less interesting that those of Vancouver, the Hong Kong of the West Coast, will people in Spokane smirk at the gossip rags out of Seattle? Will folks bicycle to a barnstorming air show for a family outing or date? Will some people have horsedrawn buggies and park in a different area from the bicycles so the stink isn't putting people off their picnic lunch? What does it cost to pay a stableboy to mind your horse while you watch planes for a couple hours? How much do you tip them to hitch the horse up for you so you can stay clean for your date? And did you get enough charge for your smartphone to record the whole thing for your Facepage? Peak oil makes for some really weird juxtapositions, and I love that its actually quite plausible. Even likely.
I do hope others are out there thinking about this and writing fiction because seeing its possible to have some fun in a post oil world, one we really can't avoid, is a very positive message. Getting wet on your way home from work by bicycle isn't much fun, but somehow I think we'll live.
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