If you’ve followed my posts marked research, you’ve noticed many of them are news about how American society might change and harvest energy in a post-oil world. Ever since I read James Kunstler’s The Long Emergency in 2005, I’ve thought that world would make a fascinating yet realistic setting for a book or comic or screenplay. So I’ve been slowly accumulating bits of news that might make it into my eventual story.
That is, until last month, when a couple of weeks ago, when James Kunstler had a novel published called World Made By Hand, about American society in a post-oil world.
And you know, fair enough. It’s his sandbox anyway, so it’s only right that he plays in it first. It reminds me of the time I had this great idea to record MST3K-style podcasts to be played along with the original movie on DVD… and then Mike Nelson debuted Rifftrax two months later. In both cases, I wanted to fill a genre niche I would personally pay money to experience, only to find it had been filled by the originator of the niche. So naturally, I raced out to Borders and purchased Kunstler’s novel.
And my god, it is… so… not very good.
Let’s get the praise out of the way first: the best part of the novel is, as expected, the setting. Kunstler’s strength lies in his dystopian futurist speculation, and here he imagines, for example, exactly how suburban homes would be stripped of useful materials in ways I might not have imagined. And his writing style, as always, is smooth and readable.
But his plot is wooden, his dialogue clunky, and his ending is eighteen layers of awful. Plot threads are introduced, then never pursued. On top of that, Kunstler’s own prejudices come through too strongly. His protagonist is a thinly-veined version of himself: about the same age, lives in the same area, has the same distaste for cars and suburbia. Naturally, the town names him Mayor because he’s such a great guy, and three different hot women throw themselves at him during the course of the book.
The entire country has become a terrifying wasteland — except for upstate New York, where the novel is set, and where Kunstler happens to live. I would say this is a case of writing what the author knows, except for two things: LA and DC have been nuked by Muslim terrorists and every other major city is unlivable due to race wars. The Long Emergency included a passage about how Mexicans were illegally crossing the border in order to take the southwestern US back for Mexico, a belief held by people such as Pat Buchanan and rebutted well by Jon Stewart. Basically, if American society collapsed due to a lack of gasoline and electricity, Kunstler believes the first thing brown and black people would do is conspire to Kill Whitey, and only racially unified areas will be livable. Um… okay.
Kunstler also hews a little too closely to The Long Emergency, which is not unexpected. If he didn’t think everything in that book would happen, he wouldn’t have included them in the first place. Still, even Kunstler admits that the world will never entirely run out of oil, it will just become too scarce to run an economy, so it might have been nice for some oil to show up in World Made By Hand. I also would have liked some ingenuity in repurposing those cars and suburban homes, re-opening lines of communication, etc. We live in a world with cheap, handcranked laptops, yet Kunstler believes that when confronted with an apocalyptic lack of electricity, America will immediately give up and either go feral or go Amish?
Meh. Maybe he does believe it, or maybe he just finds that a more interesting story to tell. Either way, perhaps there is room for a post-oil America story of my own… if I ever get back to my writing.
