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Finished The Last Policeman and Countdown City.
Of course, we have to wait until mid-July for the third book to find out if the protagonist survives the impending asteroid.
A good book makes you think, and this one made me think about disaster preparedness. We aren't really financially in a position to stockpile enough food and other supplies to get through an impact winter right now (and ideally we would probably want to be off the coast and away from the city, but then, so would everybody else), but I was just idly thinking it out. One thing that is made clear in the books is that most people would be better prepared for the coming disaster if they and others hadn't left their jobs beforehand. By three months before the event food supplies are low, phones are basically gone, and huge swaths of the country have no power. There would be way more food stored for the after-the-end period if the farmers and distributors and whatnot had just stayed on the job instead of going "bucket list" or killing themselves, and it would last a lot longer if the electricity was reliable.
But anyway, I was idly thinking this out, and counting up the various people I would want to form a stay-alive-after-the-end! community with me, and calculating how many other people I'd end up inviting (would definitely want at least one doctor, plus some people with boy children so we might have a chance of long term survival there, and, oh yeah, people who know what the heck they're doing!) and I remembered that one of my IRL friends has a daughter with diabetes. And of course she's on the list, they're the only people I know who speak Turkish.
Well, shoot, what *do* diabetic survivalists plan to do? Insulin doesn't store that well, does it?
Gosh, I love google. Apparently, not only is it possible in an emergency situation to make your own insulin, but people have done it to save lives during WWII! As noted in the forum I got that info from there are some serious risks of reactions using insulin from the pancreas of various animals, not to mention the little fact that you might be short on beef after the end, but modern methods of insulin production (involving bacteria?) might actually manage to be more scalable to the home situation, though you wouldn't want to try it yourself unless you literally had no choice. (And I want to reiterate that one. If it isn't a life or death situation where the alternative is no insulin, please, let's leave medicine making to the professionals.)
A good book makes you think, and this one made me think about disaster preparedness. We aren't really financially in a position to stockpile enough food and other supplies to get through an impact winter right now (and ideally we would probably want to be off the coast and away from the city, but then, so would everybody else), but I was just idly thinking it out. One thing that is made clear in the books is that most people would be better prepared for the coming disaster if they and others hadn't left their jobs beforehand. By three months before the event food supplies are low, phones are basically gone, and huge swaths of the country have no power. There would be way more food stored for the after-the-end period if the farmers and distributors and whatnot had just stayed on the job instead of going "bucket list" or killing themselves, and it would last a lot longer if the electricity was reliable.
But anyway, I was idly thinking this out, and counting up the various people I would want to form a stay-alive-after-the-end! community with me, and calculating how many other people I'd end up inviting (would definitely want at least one doctor, plus some people with boy children so we might have a chance of long term survival there, and, oh yeah, people who know what the heck they're doing!) and I remembered that one of my IRL friends has a daughter with diabetes. And of course she's on the list, they're the only people I know who speak Turkish.
Well, shoot, what *do* diabetic survivalists plan to do? Insulin doesn't store that well, does it?
Gosh, I love google. Apparently, not only is it possible in an emergency situation to make your own insulin, but people have done it to save lives during WWII! As noted in the forum I got that info from there are some serious risks of reactions using insulin from the pancreas of various animals, not to mention the little fact that you might be short on beef after the end, but modern methods of insulin production (involving bacteria?) might actually manage to be more scalable to the home situation, though you wouldn't want to try it yourself unless you literally had no choice. (And I want to reiterate that one. If it isn't a life or death situation where the alternative is no insulin, please, let's leave medicine making to the professionals.)
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Ah, good old Lucifer's Hammer (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/218467.Lucifer_s_Hammer), the original big-comet-hits-Earth tale, before all those sucky movies. In all honesty, it sucks too - even back in the early 80's when I first read it, it sucked, because there's not a single character in it who's not a cardboard cut-out with a stereotype-label stuck on. It was a huge disappointment to me, because I was really into Larry Niven's Known Space stories (which utterly rock; if you've never read any, start with Ringworld (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61179.Ringworld?from_search=true)) - he doesn't exactly hide his odious neo-con personal politics in those, but at least he doesn't soapbox them the way he does in Lucifer's Hammer and other books set on Earth in the more-or-less modern era.
Therefore, I really can't recommend Lucifer's Hammer, despite that it's got some interesting ideas and was the first piece of fiction (that I know of) to deal with Life, Post-Comet in our own times. As far as actual survival skills go, it's painfully obvious that Larry Niven would not survive even a summer in the Wild alone without modern equipment, let alone a winter - not that winter in California is that big a deal, but he'd still die, because he has No Fucking Clue.
But Lucifer's Hammer isn't actually about surviving without modern amenities. It's really just a pretext for Ayn Rand-like, so-called 'Social Darwinist' wank, written for the Nerd Corps boys who know damn well that if the electricity ever goes off for good, they haven't got a single skill worth keeping them alive for. Not even manual labor or 'rough trade', because they're not very strong and not very attractive. In a lot of ways, Lucifer's Hammer reminds me of John Norman's Gor books, which appeal to a slightly different demographic of bitter white male losers who blame women and minorities for the fact that they're not the Masters of the World like they obviously should be.
Funny how it never occurs to those guys that the old white guys who ARE the Masters of the World have no intention of ever letting their tools and cannon-fodder share their power, any more than they'd invite dogs to sit at the dinner table - even their own most-trusted sheep-dogs and guard-dogs, let alone random strays, no matter how much they may wag their tails.
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Yeah, but it might be much pricier. And I bet you a dollar some of it is going to be people brewing stuff at home. Or trying to, at least. Most of the homemade medical market be useless or worse.
I'm not saying I think it would be an ideal situation, just that there is hope if the next-to-worst happens.
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Obama Explains The FEMA Camps (http://youtu.be/HkSkQgnEV-Q)