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After Oil #1
After Oil: SF Visions Of A Post-Petroleum World
Author John Michael Greer, host of the blog "The Archdruid Report," a weekly peak oil blog, brings together twelve original tales selected from among his readers. Each story offers glimpses into possible futures where oil scarcity and lower energy availability spell the end of modern industrial society.
244 pages, Paperback
First published October 29, 2012
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About the author
John Michael Greer
194Ìýbooks488ÌýfollowersJohn Michael Greer is an author of over thirty books and the blogger behind The Archdruid Report. He served as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. His work addresses a range of subjects, including climate change, peak oil, the future of industrial society, and the occult. He also writes science fiction and fantasy. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 14, 2014
This book is a collection of short stories by 11 authors (D.Trammel, K.O'Neill, S.Harelson, E.A.Freeman, C.McGuire, H.J.Lerwill, A.Morrow, R.S.Ellis, T.Goverde, P.Steiner, and J.D.Smith,) carefully selected by John Michael Greer to match the common theme: the post-oil apocalyptic decline.
So, about the theme. Our "modern way of life," fed by seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap oil, is lost forever. The deal is simple enough: there is no more supply of cheap oil (the expensive oil still exists, here and there.) As the Kubler-Ross model suggests, there are five stages of loss and grief: denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The heroes of the short stories are all pictured at various stages of their psychological adjustment process. Let say, for the denial/isolation, there is a story about some local reading club: a bunch of bibliophiles who get together every day to drink ersatz-coffee and discuss their favorite books. The books are getting scarce, as the people use the paper to heat their homes. The latter theme is pressed in few more stories: how people struggle to preserve the knowledge, including anything printed. In one story they salvage old hard disks loaded with e-books, in another - a group of teenagers tries to get a password to an old laptop, in another � mother saves a Calculus book for her son, in hope that he may have brighter future.
The story genres range from the melancholic descriptive narration to an outright Steampunk. Yes, Steampunk! How else would you classify a bunch of people in semi-military uniforms and Victorian dresses, traversing the United States at 40 miles per hour on a solar-powered Zeppelin? There is a dystopian story, like a much shortened version of the Orwell's 1984. Imagine a government bureaucrat working in the Energy Control Agency and making sure that everybody in the USA get just enough electricity and gas to survive, and not a single watt above it (once in a while, he cannot manage it too well and few hundred people die; pity, but inevitable.) There is an Utopia legend, as it would be told in Africa 100 years after the civilization. There are a couple of folk stories, placed in the countryside and featuring movie shows administered from horse-pulled wagons, similar to J.H.Kunstler novels. There is a barefoot boy who wants to drop off from school and become a 'savager.' This is how they call scavengers (rag-pickers) in the post-oil world, same as in McKay's Houston, 2030. And there is even a mockery of the Silmarillion, the poetic world made of garbage!
Taking the psychological side of the stories, it is probably less important that the physics and logic are sometimes violated. If there is no running water in the tap, the sewers will not flow for too long. If the laptop battery has not been charged for ten years, it is only good as a source of Lithium, and not much else. If there is no pharmaceutical industry and no refrigerated vans around, highly unstable Insulin will be available only to the super-rich, or, perhaps, will not be available at all. But, in the short stories, the authors do have their artistic license!
I enjoyed every single bit of it. Five stars.
So, about the theme. Our "modern way of life," fed by seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap oil, is lost forever. The deal is simple enough: there is no more supply of cheap oil (the expensive oil still exists, here and there.) As the Kubler-Ross model suggests, there are five stages of loss and grief: denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The heroes of the short stories are all pictured at various stages of their psychological adjustment process. Let say, for the denial/isolation, there is a story about some local reading club: a bunch of bibliophiles who get together every day to drink ersatz-coffee and discuss their favorite books. The books are getting scarce, as the people use the paper to heat their homes. The latter theme is pressed in few more stories: how people struggle to preserve the knowledge, including anything printed. In one story they salvage old hard disks loaded with e-books, in another - a group of teenagers tries to get a password to an old laptop, in another � mother saves a Calculus book for her son, in hope that he may have brighter future.
The story genres range from the melancholic descriptive narration to an outright Steampunk. Yes, Steampunk! How else would you classify a bunch of people in semi-military uniforms and Victorian dresses, traversing the United States at 40 miles per hour on a solar-powered Zeppelin? There is a dystopian story, like a much shortened version of the Orwell's 1984. Imagine a government bureaucrat working in the Energy Control Agency and making sure that everybody in the USA get just enough electricity and gas to survive, and not a single watt above it (once in a while, he cannot manage it too well and few hundred people die; pity, but inevitable.) There is an Utopia legend, as it would be told in Africa 100 years after the civilization. There are a couple of folk stories, placed in the countryside and featuring movie shows administered from horse-pulled wagons, similar to J.H.Kunstler novels. There is a barefoot boy who wants to drop off from school and become a 'savager.' This is how they call scavengers (rag-pickers) in the post-oil world, same as in McKay's Houston, 2030. And there is even a mockery of the Silmarillion, the poetic world made of garbage!
Taking the psychological side of the stories, it is probably less important that the physics and logic are sometimes violated. If there is no running water in the tap, the sewers will not flow for too long. If the laptop battery has not been charged for ten years, it is only good as a source of Lithium, and not much else. If there is no pharmaceutical industry and no refrigerated vans around, highly unstable Insulin will be available only to the super-rich, or, perhaps, will not be available at all. But, in the short stories, the authors do have their artistic license!
I enjoyed every single bit of it. Five stars.
September 5, 2015
I wanted to like this book better than I did. The concept itself is engaging, but unfortunately the execution left a lot to be desired. Several of the stories read more as YA entries written by young adults. (Not that there is anything wrong with that)
I don't fault the writers themselves so much. They are not professional authors for the most part, but rather participants over at Greer's blog. Greer, himself, though could have added far more credibility by editing better.
I don't fault the writers themselves so much. They are not professional authors for the most part, but rather participants over at Greer's blog. Greer, himself, though could have added far more credibility by editing better.
December 21, 2017
There are four excellent stories in this collection: "Maestra y Aprendiz" by Susan Harelson; "The Going" by Catherine McGuire; "Think like a Tinkerer" by Thijs Goverde; and "Winter's Tales" by editor John Michael Greer.
The rest are what you'd expect from "lesson" fiction: dull, ponderous, lectury, so poorly written that even the steampunk murder mystery couldn't hold my attention. Skip these and read the others above.
The rest are what you'd expect from "lesson" fiction: dull, ponderous, lectury, so poorly written that even the steampunk murder mystery couldn't hold my attention. Skip these and read the others above.
January 6, 2022
Fiction has been incredibly helpful with coming to terms with what is likely to doom our society (resource depletion) in the coming decades. Over the past 6 or so months, since I read Jared Diamond's book Collapse, I've had a bit of a crash course in collapse theory. At first it was purely academic and a way to own my "growth at all costs" college friends, but recently I've become pretty afraid. These stories were a great help–society will go on, just not in the form that we think.
That said, a few of these stories are not very well written, and others are a bit too moralistic. Hence the 4-stars.
Reading the biographies' of the authors at the end of the book was also comforting. So many people with different walks of life are thinking about these issues!
That said, a few of these stories are not very well written, and others are a bit too moralistic. Hence the 4-stars.
Reading the biographies' of the authors at the end of the book was also comforting. So many people with different walks of life are thinking about these issues!
January 14, 2022
interesting stories about what happens when the oil runs out.
November 25, 2014
The stories in this collection were surprisingly good considering that most were written by amateurs. Two brought me to tears, and the concluding tale by the Archdruid himself vividly illustrated his theory of and the themes discussed on .
March 16, 2014
Interesting imaginings of post oil humanity.
April 28, 2017
Some of these stories were meh. Some were pretty good. But I got tired of the subtext that life after fossil fuels would be primitive and hard, and nearly everything of the fossil fuel era would be forgotten. More optimism and less "message" would have pleased me more.
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