Dried dung works quite well!

Well I deprived my new world of electricity. At first it doesn’t seem so bad after all I grew up in an era before fridges or freezers and we all could preserve food  - but wait a minute – the reason my world lacks electricity is because fossil fuel has vanished - no gas for cooking, so how would the food be heated that will be turned into jams and chutneys, into bottled goodies for the lean times?

Yes well – it can be done and those lucky enough to have a range or open fire could as long as they have the wood – or dried dung works quite well.

My world lost its transport systems. Okay in a town? Well no. Looting is inevitable once everyone realised there was no more food deliveries. Riots are panicky things –like a cornered animal – new rules and those who cannot kill to defend and feed their families are going to go without at best or die themselves.

So would it better to live in the countryside. Better chances of surviving? Grow your own food (fingers crossed on the weather), cut your own wood (hope you’re not in a treeless zone) get up with the dawn and sleep at sunset unless you can find some source of burnable oil (do you have an animal that can be rendered down?) Those starving folk from the towns are soon going to be knocking on your door!

So now those who are left can clothe themselves for quite a while from the shops. They can provide bedding for themselves. If, of course, they haven’t been taken over by gangs and cartels with enough guns to back up their claim of ownership. Oh I am so gloomy!

In the meantime the survivors freeze or melt as air-conditioning and heating systems go down. Having just recently had our temperatures across the UK go down to minus 16 degrees (okay I know many of you have worse!) I think a whole stack more survivors die. Recent heat-waves across Europe indicated an increasing mortality rate with every increased degree of temperature.

Back when our early ancestors colonized the globe they wandered into extreme climatic conditions and slowly over time acclimatized. Is there time for the progression from soft livers to hardy intrepids? I think so, but many would perish on the way. In later Chronicles mention of those who lose the survival battle, begin to spell out the many ways there are to die.

How hardy are we when it comes down to basics, how do our social structures cope? are questions for another day. As mentioned before, there had not been any planning in Ellen’s world, when I first sat down to write. Ellen was meant to be a short story so what need? I managed to save some of my characters from all the wars, riots and plundering by encasing them in rings of land mines – yup land mines. Now there’s a crazy idea!

Actually the mining was carried out by the government of the day to protect those who agreed. To save them from the fighting, the disorder the mines laid down for just as long as it took to restore law and order, then the army would removed them, No harm done. Indeed.

Except of course no one came back to remove them. Not for 50 years.

World Building: Living in Isolation

If you have read my  post at the beginning of Feb - World Building: Drawing Board? what Drawing Board - you will know I had scattered land mines around my new world. Of course I made life difficult for myself in the use of landmines.  However I did think that, based on our past history, we would be making use of them to defend ourselves from . . . well anything really. We have been using them indiscriminately for years now and although the clearance goes on apace across the globe, I believe if any nation felt threatened, even we who have signed up against their use, would make use of them. But, I didn’t truly think through the consequence of keeping settlements confined, like I did, for fifty years.  Ellen was, after all, supposed to be a short story!

Thinking of lifestyles we take for granted, what would we lose?  It wouldn’t be just depriving the survivors of fossil fuels but depriving them of food and water, if for some reason they had little expertise or knowledge.  Also trade and looking further afield for supplies was a route of survival I had cut off.  In 50 years objects deteriorate from use and external conditions.  Each settlement would have to have the wherewithal not just to produce its own food but its own cloth, tools and amenities.  No buying in from the next community, no money in fact for what use would it be.  I had crashed my survivors backwards in time, the only difference between them and the original inhabitants of a pre-industrial world being that they had modern knowledge.

I thought it could be done but I had to research hard to find the ‘yes’ to it all.  Cloth I already knew about, from my own experiments in the past.  Linen we all know but nettles, that hated weed of every garden, makes splendid cloth.  If sheep are around then of course fleece not only provides wool but felt, so warm and waterproof.

Food when there is no backup would be difficult. Could it be preserved when there was no refrigeration, would they be able to learn the old skills?  Most towns and bigger villages would have had libraries of some kind and, although recent events (closing libraries or making them electronic) would foil my plans, I did think that knowledge in books would help them survive. Drying and smoking is the easiest way to preserve food without any chemicals to help. Vinegar can easily be made and, if you could harness them, bees will give honey.  All ways of keeping harvests through the winter.

Could they make leather without chemicals?  This last took a lot of tracking down because I didn’t have the correct words to feed into the search engines.   I knew there had to be a method; after all, I reasoned, those early trappers in the opening up of the wilderness would not have lugged massive quantities of salt with them, on canoes, into the wilderness.  It would make no sense at all; apart from the weight, water would be bound to get in.  Yet skins must be cured or they become rank and spoiled.  Yes I know, you over the Atlantic know the trick, you still have a wilderness.  Maybe others with their own wilderness know the trick also.

Brain tanning.  The day I found it was a great day.  Not only because I had found it but because I found the whole process fascinating.  It seemed beautifully neat and natural that each creature has the right size brain to cure its skin.  Not only is nature wonderful but so too the early peoples of our world who discovered all these skills.

So they could clothe themselves, tan skins, preserve food.  In this blighted world could my survivors produce the food they preserved?  What kind of farming would they be able to do?  I visited our local organic farm and Andrew very kindly took me around explaining and listening to my plans.  I left a little discouraged because the size of the fields and my inability to see how my small bands of survivors could possibly plough and seed such vast areas, and this was a good farm with hedges and wildlife and reasonably-sized fields.  I had to have a think and do more research!

World Building: Drawing board? what drawing board

When I started the Sefuty Chronicles I had no very clear idea of the world I was writing about.  However, before I was half way through Ellen’s Tale I realised I would have to find out and fairly quickly.  I had an impression, of my own making, of the downsides of climate change; I needed to find out how realistic these were.

Apart from checking climate change scenarios the most important idea was how my survivors outside the city walls would fare.  I grew up here in the UK after the 2^nd world war with a romantic mental picture of farming.  Story book farms with cows, milked by hand! sheep, an odd pig complete with little pink piglets  eating scraps from the table. Dozens of chickens in the yard, ducks on the pond, and jolly fat farmers and their families.  It was a place of endless sunny days and the whole family would bring in the hay on the back of a hay wagon pulled by a shire horse, settle down to cream teas and merrymaking.  It never seemed to rain, harvests never flattened by the wind, never frozen into the ground by ice and snow.

Of course I became aware through my growing that life is different from the books.  However when I started writing I still had the mixed farm in mind.  All I had to do post climate change was eliminate the tractors and land rovers and bring back that Shire horse wasn’t it? Simple? Well no.  There may not have been fossil fuel any more, but neither would there have been many Shire horses, they are almost gone now.  I went back to medieval times to see if there were clues on survival for my country folk to be found there.  It seemed easy.  Take away the feudal lord of the manner and the tithes due to him and the church.  Calculate how much of everything they grew and survived on. 

As I researched it was with growing dismay I remembered I had put rings of landmines around every settlement.  In the ‘olden’ days they shared the heavy draught animals, as today expensive tractors may be shared, between villages and farms.  They exchanged foodstuffs they had with that they didn’t at markets.  They would share the bull, the ram. Between communities.  I had taken that mobility a way with never a second thought.

I searched self sufficiency books of the now, the articles and books about the past.  I travelled back as far as the Stone Age.  But everywhere the greatest difference was the mobility the other ages had.  I had myself, that year, in my garden, a plague of snails which demolished an entire harvest of cabbages before even the Cabbage White could get to them, and I realised that, all through the ages, harvests fail for so many reasons. While I continued buying cabbages from the village shop my survivors would not be able. 

While you can live without cabbage until the next season my research had been throwing up disasters a plenty with universal starvation from a ‘poor’ season.  It is of course always going on, we do though in this country think of famine and plagues of insects as happening somewhere else.  I had to try and think the impossible.  How would they survive without the ability to seek further afield, how would they survive if the weather wasn’t kind for a whole growing season.  What would then change in the ordering of societies as they faced this constant challenge to live? 

In my anthropology studies I had been fascinated at how environment and climate dictated so much of the social differences we find puzzling in our dealings with ‘others’  now I would have to work out if our social conventions could remain intact within the maelstrom of such a catastrophe.  It seemed the more I thought of one thing, i.e. how to farm, I saw the dominoes of consequence tipping, falling and sometimes landing lying askew.

It always came back to food.  Everything about the survivor’s way of life would begin with the security of their food.  As with the City I had placed Ellen in, food security was to be all.  However the world Ellen inhabited had the science and the wherewithal to secure the feeding of the survivors, had a certain mobility to travel further afield.  Not depending only on themselves they had an army to defend them.  My wilderness survivors had no science, and land mines not an army.  It was not a case of back to the drawing board as it was evident in writing my ‘short story’ of Ellen I had not visited a drawing board at all!


Read a review on Ellen's Tale on Goodreads at
http://bit.ly/ggMnut

see more about the Sefuty Chronicles at
http://www.albertaross,co.uk/

and about reading and books at
http://sefuty.livejournal.com/

I also blog about all manner of things at
http://www.didyoueverkissafrog.typepad.com/

you can follow me
http://twitter.com/albertaross