My current nonfiction read―and it's a pretty hefty one―is Jared Diamond's Collapse. Subtitled "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", the book details a number of failed societies, some of which weren't entirely at fault, or could be forgiven for not seeing what was coming.
The case of Norse Greenland is an interesting one. The settlement of Iceland, despite some turnarounds, was basically successful, in that most of Iceland's current population is descended from Medieval Norse, probably Norwegians. Not so, Greenland. Settlers did arrive from mainland Scandinavia, and they had ideas. But the subarctic climate and rocky soil didn't support their farming economy at all. In this and other ways they tried to keep going as if they were still in Europe, but they weren't. Inuit settlers actually got there later but their methods of hunting and their innovative kayaks gave them the advantage.
William Vollman's novel The Ice Shirt is a fictionalized account of this history. I read it a while ago. It's pretty vivid.
The case of Norse Greenland is an interesting one. The settlement of Iceland, despite some turnarounds, was basically successful, in that most of Iceland's current population is descended from Medieval Norse, probably Norwegians. Not so, Greenland. Settlers did arrive from mainland Scandinavia, and they had ideas. But the subarctic climate and rocky soil didn't support their farming economy at all. In this and other ways they tried to keep going as if they were still in Europe, but they weren't. Inuit settlers actually got there later but their methods of hunting and their innovative kayaks gave them the advantage.
William Vollman's novel The Ice Shirt is a fictionalized account of this history. I read it a while ago. It's pretty vivid.
2 comments:
So you've been taking a stroll along doomsday lane, have you? Collapse is one I read when it came out, but despite the fact it was very well done, and had taken a lot of work, I thought it could just as well have been written decades earlier. Still, it should have had more impact than it did in view of the fact that things for the larger part of modern human society had already grown much worse since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the Erlich's Population Bomb were published and dismissed (okay, the Erlich's were a little too alarmist about the immediate consequences but correct in essence). Nevertheless, civilizational collapse and the essential causes were well understood before Jared Diamond wrote Collapse. Perhaps his premise that avoiding bad consequences is a simple matter of human habit is the saddest conclusion of all.
My favourite doomer book began after everybody was already gone (Rapture, perhaps?). Alan Weisman's The World Without Us was a most refreshing experience. Maybe I was imagining myself as a happy otter or, more likely, as some free spirit of the air simply able to witness the process. I liked it so much I'm pretty sure I sent you a copy back then - published only a year or so after Jared Diamond's book.
As entertaining a website as any I could suggest taking a look at is The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. "May we live long and die out".
I'm still having trouble reading novels about people being in freezing cold conditions. :)
Oddly enough it wasn't so much an interest in doomsaying in general that drew me to this one. Diamond is right that our population and environmental issues will be resolved in the coming decades; it's just a question of how pleasant or unpleasant that resolution is. As a writer I'm interested in some of the ways societies have collapsed in the past, and how the individual members have dealt with that. Henderson Island in the Pacific was a weird case since it was basically a coral atoll that could only survive by trading with other nearby islands, which eventually became non-viable.
I have heard of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. They kind of overlap with weird fiction fans. Writers like Lovecraft and Ligotti appeal to them, for reasons beyond those guys not having any kids.
Well, if you read about freezing cold conditions at least you can be pretty sure no one will find a foot long millipede in their tent. :)
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