World Made by Hand
by James Howard Kunstler · first published 2008
9mentions
3recommended by
7HN commenters
2009–2023first – last mentioned
43% recommend43% neutral14% critical
In the wake of global catastrophes that have destroyed industrial civilization, the inhabitants of Union Grove, a small New York town, do anything they can to get by, as they struggle to deal with a new way of life over the course of an eventful summer.
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His Shipbreaker series is really good too. other authors: The world made by hand, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1689657.World_Made_by_Ha... Eternity Road, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/128533.Eternity_Road
on “Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology” ↗For a more critical and very thoughtful (if somewhat vengeful) look at peak oil and what it implies, see The Long Emergency and A World Made by Hand, both by James Kunstler. His book on suburban blight, The Geography of Nowhere, is also fascinating. http://kunstler.com/
on “Twenty Dollars Per Gallon: How the rising price of oil will change our lives” ↗OTOH, people could mine already-manufactured stuff from landfills; see World Made by Hand. Speaking of cyclic history, I also liked "The Peddler's Apprentice".
on “Jeff Bezos commissioning a giant clock to last 10,000 years.” ↗Wow, it feels like I stumbled on James Kunstler's site today: http://www.kunstler.com/index.php The way I see it, we really only have two choices: nuclear (fusion) power; or "A World Made by Hand". Solar doesn't provide much energy density. (unless you can build a Dyson sphere or a "Ringworld" and convert huge amounts of solar radiation for transport) Methane has more energy per KG than oil,…
on “Jeff Rubin: Oil and the End of Globalization” ↗Anyone ever read "A World Made by Hand" by Kunstler? He looked at this kind of thing back during the peak oil scare in 2008. It's not a happy book.
on “Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels?” ↗There's always "A World Made By Hand" by Kunstler if you want a picture of what life might be like after the world runs out of oil. It's more of the "dying not with a bang, but with a whimper" variety of post-apocalyptic book. It's bad,…
on “Getting humanity to bounce back faster in a post-apocalyptic world” ↗I haven't read the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Made_by_Hand series but my impression is that Kunstler would agree with you except with the caveat that there won't be cars or trains or buses overall, mostly just return to actual low-scale functioning like horses.
on “How to Quit Cars” ↗I read "Roadside Picnic" which is the Soviet sci-fi novel on which the movie is based. That has to be one of the bleakest most depressed sci-fi books of all time. It's up there with "A World Made by Hand" or "The Road" in terms of epic bleakness. It's weird that there is a literary style dedicated to exploring profund sadness and depression. It seems that somehow sadness has become obsolete in our society…
on “The Problem With Happiness” ↗I read a series of novels called “The World Made by Hand,” which take more of a slow collapse approach to post-apocalyptic fiction. One part of the books that stood out was how important it is, both in terms of overall health and hygiene as well as morale,…
on “First batch of student’s washing machines shipped to Iraq” ↗