How then, do we move backwards? How does a society, with most of the people having no clue of future events, move from being dependent on a vast and intertwined network of goods and services produced by the indigenous people of whereever, to a local resource and renewable energy based society, and do so in the timeframe available (20-30 years using the most liberal extimates, 10-20 with resonable estimates, 5-10 with worst case scenarios), all the while prices on everything increasing, world politics getting more militaristic, governments continuously reducing civil liberties, shortages of goods on the market and weather patterns resembling bad Hollywood movies?
Joined: Aug 04, 2005 Posts: 421 Location: Traded the man in front of the tank for a cat playing the banjo
Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2005 8:56 am Post subject: Short PO fiction stories
I suggest a FICTION section where people can post, read and make comments on short (or long) PO fiction stories. _________________ When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem.
Joined: Sep 14, 2004 Posts: 6006 Location: Rural Virginia
Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2005 12:52 pm Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
Interesting suggestion, kevin. As someone who writes fiction myself, I have three reactions:
1. How many POers write fiction? I'd venture that only a tiny handful do.
2. Given the quality of writing shown by many posters (workmanlike, but hardly poetic), I'm not sure I'd want to read fiction by them. Blech.
3. Let's say you wrote a truly great story and posted it. What would keep others from stealing it? _________________ "Actually, humans died out long ago."
---Abused, abandoned hunting dog
"Things have entered a stage where the only change that is possible is for things to get worse."
---Me and my brother
Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2005 6:41 pm Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
I've read a couple of really good ones on a web site that was having a peak oil fiction contest. I can't find it now, despite numerous different keyword search attempts with Google. I'd really like to find it again.
Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2005 6:55 pm Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
Elfstrom wrote:
I've read a couple of really good ones on a web site that was having a peak oil fiction contest. I can't find it now, despite numerous different keyword search attempts with Google. I'd really like to find it again.
Found it. "peak oil"+"fiction contest", and the link was from right here on peakoil.com:
Joined: Aug 04, 2005 Posts: 421 Location: Traded the man in front of the tank for a cat playing the banjo
Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2005 3:35 am Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
Quote:
1. How many POers write fiction? I'd venture that only a tiny handful do.
I do! And many others do too so I don’t think that would be a problem.
Quote:
2. Given the quality of writing shown by many posters (workmanlike, but hardly poetic), I'm not sure I'd want to read fiction by them. Blech.
You are free of reading or not reading them. I warn you my english i bad.
Quote:
3. Let's say you wrote a truly great story and posted it. What would keep others from stealing it?
Nothing, if you don’t want people to steal your story don’t post it. I was thinking about writers who care more about people reading their stories than about people stealing them.
There is also a link to a contest here _________________ When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem.
Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2005 3:45 am Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
Heineken wrote:
1. How many POers write fiction? I'd venture that only a tiny handful do.
I do as well, and actually I'm part of a group of writers that write all the fiction stories for the Odyssey magazine (teen science magazine).
Heineken wrote:
2. Given the quality of writing shown by many posters (workmanlike, but hardly poetic), I'm not sure I'd want to read fiction by them.
I don't normally post poetically. That doesn't mean that I can't write poetically, it just means that I don't think poetry is appropiate for most posts.
As for people stealing my stories, I'm not in the least concerned. Posts here are dated. If somebody else published my story, I could prove it was posted here first.
Joined: Aug 15, 2005 Posts: 264 Location: Hicktown OK
Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2005 3:44 am Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
I would love to see a thread for nothing but fictional PO stories. _________________ Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.-H.G. Wells
Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 4:24 am Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
let me start with my story....a bit science fiction but bear with me.
============================================
The oil price had sky rocketed above US$200 and stocks of the world sunk to rock bottom. The realization only comes when they receive the electricity bills that goes beyond 4 digit numbers and found the public transports companies had closed down and had to either cycle, walk or grand theft auto those rich car owners before they run out of gas. There will be sudden surge in desperation crimes and begging became a norm in the streets. The government will issue food and water ration coupons to the people and there will be long queues for the rations.
Many lights are switch off to conserve electricity in public, private homes switch off the electricity completely either willingly or unwillingly by non-payment. Reservist will be recalled in all sectors of defense (Civil Defense, Police and Military) to secure the streets to prevent looting and out break of crimes. Suddenly, the state prisons had declared over populated and the police and military are given new power to judge criminals caught on the streets with only one sentence – death.
Bird Flu by then had spread across many countries and caused grave concerns on the wondering beggars in the streets. The government had created many quarantine death camps in the nature reserve. Late in the night, sirens had been sounded and the president had declare state of emergency and curfew had been implemented and those caught after 7pm in the street will be captured and placed in the bird flu contaminated death camps.
The neighboring country suddenly cut water supply as bombs went off, cutting water pipes into 2 and repair work being ordered immediately by the remaining government ministers. This order had been put on deaf ears as the starving workers are nowhere in sight, police and military became corrupted and people revolted in waves…causing death and destruction in a major revolution. Civil wars will began suddenly and infrastructure will reduce to rubble, emergency food rations storage facilities are being raided daily using weapons either given willingly by soldiers helping their own family or forcefully taken by killing the law enforcers.
The borders of neighboring countries are blocked by heavy military presence to prevent rampaging refugees from going into their countries and strangely preventing people from going out.
Wars of words by oil producing & consuming countries escalated to all out war, many major nuclear plants had suddenly exploded due to terrorist attack. Nuclear power countries had blamed each other for the disaster and had activated the nuclear ballistic missiles aimed at new and old enemies. Dust settles, sky darkens even in daylight…coldness engulf the world as ice quickly forms everywhere. Nuclear winter had arrived and 90% of the population perish progressively and remaining population have mutated descendants with small hands and legs, big head, grayish hairless skin with big eyes with no eye lashes.
3 years after the world destruction, humans from the International Space Station went back to unaffected region to join a band of underground early PO population that survive the disaster. They had called the day they disappear below ground the famous “Rapture” in the bible, they cannot reveal the location of the underground cities that they had built over the last few decades before the Peak Oil event.
The technology that the astronauts brought back is a space ship design able to travel faster then light and time travel together with zero point energy engines (Free unlimited Energy). PO pure un-mutated human race went back in time to warn the humans of the eventual dooms day event by spreading the gospel using religion(s).
The war started again when one of the pure human underground communities are discovered by the mutated humans and was pillaged and destroyed. They looted the technologies and they begun the mass production of the time machines and zero point energy devices.
War begun between PO pure and mutated humans, finally earth was devastated.
Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 5:33 am Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
Interesting idea. Actually to try and help me form a clearer picture in my mind of what PO would like to be I started to write my story as if I was in 2025 and looking back on the years 2005-2025 (date chosen because it would be about when I would retire if society holds together a bit like now).
I quickly got depressed, not from thinking about the hard life, but thinking about relationships that would be broken because transport would be difficult eg. family members that one can no longer meet with:- in my case children moving to another country, and the likelyhood of not seeing grandchildren. I already feel in mourning for some things that have not yet happened. So I will not post what I have written, at least not until I feel a bit better.
But it was a good exercise, and helped me think of some of the issues facing me, although I was nowhere near finishing the story. _________________ We should teach our children the 4-Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rejoice.
Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 7:33 am Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
Don't be so depressed....it's just fictional story....and here goes the final ending to the story.... So sorry this story might be a little off topic to Peak Oil but it's a essential ending to the previous depressing story....to make it more fictional.
===============================================
In the future, while the Pure Humans and Mutated Humans are fighting themselves to their own destruction, the pure humans rode hundreds of space ships came back with hundreds of abducted humans from the past. They are quickly deployed to fight against the mutated humans (aliens) but still unable to win the overwhelming number of "aliens". (The ratio of the mutated humans to the pure humans is 10,000 to 1)
The last remaining pure humans had escaped the claws of the "aliens" and fly through time in their last space ship back to Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947. Two "alien" space ships follow the the pure humans back to the past. After few hours of intense dog fights the pure humans managed to zap down both the "alien" space ships and being badly damaged themselves, crashed too. Only 1 or 2 remaining pure humans survived the crash.
The secret of time travel and technology of zero point energy was not understood at that point of time but the future events was told to the government through interrogation. These "history of the future" is so horrifying to them that they started the major cover up of the event and had started planning for the "Great Energy War" before it happens while keeping the remains of the UFOs and "aliens" corpses....totally secret by putting them in the moon base in 1969 REAL Apollo mission....NOT the studio produced mission that had been recorded months ahead......in Area 51.
The rest is history....as it repeats over and over...to the end.
Joined: Sep 14, 2004 Posts: 6006 Location: Rural Virginia
Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 4:04 pm Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
In the future we won't be "writing" PO stories, we'll be reciting it around the communal fire. It will take the form primarily of legends of a glorious and incomprehensible past. (And "we," of course, will be a severely depopulated pronoun.) _________________ "Actually, humans died out long ago."
---Abused, abandoned hunting dog
"Things have entered a stage where the only change that is possible is for things to get worse."
---Me and my brother
Joined: Sep 14, 2004 Posts: 6006 Location: Rural Virginia
Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 4:09 pm Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
Doly wrote:
Heineken wrote:
1. How many POers write fiction? I'd venture that only a tiny handful do.
I do as well, and actually I'm part of a group of writers that write all the fiction stories for the Odyssey magazine (teen science magazine).
Heineken wrote:
2. Given the quality of writing shown by many posters (workmanlike, but hardly poetic), I'm not sure I'd want to read fiction by them.
I don't normally post poetically. That doesn't mean that I can't write poetically, it just means that I don't think poetry is appropiate for most posts.
As for people stealing my stories, I'm not in the least concerned. Posts here are dated. If somebody else published my story, I could prove it was posted here first.
By "poetically" I did not mean poetry. I was referring to level of quality, or refinement, or ability to touch the soul or stir the blood. What can you say of degenerate writing infested with errors of logic, syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling? It's more a form of grunting, yet another sign of the general deterioration of our age. Few take pride in the written word these days---in fact, people celebrate their illiteracy as a patriotic or macho thing. _________________ "Actually, humans died out long ago."
---Abused, abandoned hunting dog
"Things have entered a stage where the only change that is possible is for things to get worse."
---Me and my brother
Last edited by Heineken on Tue May 23, 2006 4:14 pm; edited 3 times in total
Joined: Feb 02, 2006 Posts: 170 Location: Luther, OK
Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 4:10 pm Post subject: Re: Short PO fiction stories
Fiction serves a purpose far beyond entertainment. It is metaphorical in nature when well-composed. Hubbert's or Deffeyes' works are not really digestible by the common gas-guzzling citizen and unlikely to cause that type of "back burner" thinking that a good fiction like Aldous Huxley does.
So, yeah, I'd like to see some short stories posted. At the same time I think it's time to have some post-carbon inspired novels and novellettes out there for the public to get hold of. Whatever plants the seeds of change, is good. _________________ Nick J. Allen
Hilton, Oklahoma
"The Chinese have many hells. This one is the hell of valueless currency." -- J. Albertson
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