Last Light

Potemkin Villager · Post by **Potemkin Villager** » 09 May 2011, 13:56

adam2 wrote:
featherstick wrote:
For me the real value of the book was shaking me out of my Transition Town "everything-will-be-lovely-we'll-all-ride-bikes" bubble of false optimism, and making me think about hardening up my preps.
No reasonable preps would ensure survival in such circumstances, though many forms of stocking up would improve ones chances.
I know several people who have read Last Light and decided to become better prepared. They have spent from as little as £100 to as much as £10,000, but are undeniably better prepared than before.

I suppose this begs the question as to how "better prepared" it is worth becoming. I am wondering just what feathertick has in mind by hardening up his preps?

Whilst transitioneers are easy to lampoon, as indeed I have myself, in the end of the day the only workable survival mechanisms will involve making common cause with others rather than hunkering down in the bunker picking off the great unwashed with sniper rifle fire from behind the razor wire, electric fence and motion detectors.

Then there is the small matter of who you turn to when the solar electric inverter goes up in smoke and the electric fence fails.

tpals · Post by **tpals** » 27 May 2011, 03:35

I just finished reading it. Considering some of the rubbish that is published for TEOTWAWKI this really wasn't bad. Sobering without crossing the line into total depression (The Road).

Personally, I think the big conspiracy made it too easy to shrug off as fiction. It would have been more effective as a wake-up call just by shutting down all the middle eastern oil supplies.

Viewed as a story I enjoyed it and will look for more of his work.

Post by **mikepepler** » 27 May 2011, 10:29

You could read his sequel, Afterlight. Fills in some of the gaps, and a different kind of story.

jonny2mad · Post by **jonny2mad** » 07 Jun 2011, 21:38

I'm halfway through afterlight, and the thing it gets is the whole too few guns aspect of the transition town movement

.

Thats why transition towns fail in the book so you don't have a transition, well you do into barbarism and your transition towner's get raped, tortured, and murdered, because they have things people need and want and don't have a way to protect them.

It would be interesting to see how well transition towns might fare in say America or Switzerland .

Also when people say well its not about picking people off with sniper rifles behind razor wire its community, well your not going to be able in a fast collapse to take everyone into your community, in the book the people who do and who are armed and have rations still fall apart.

The best you can hope for is a group that you are able to feed and defend, and that has something to hold it together with strong in group out group boundary's

Lord Beria3 · Post by **Lord Beria3** » 08 Jun 2011, 11:02

Agreed.

Switzerland is a very interesting case - if any country can survive all the potential shit hitting out way it is that country. Every home has a nuclear bunker, it has a huge amount of money and has a strong national self-reliance ethos.

I am seriously thinking of moving to Switzerland at some point during the era of Scarcity Industrialism.

Mean Mr Mustard · Post by **Mean Mr Mustard** » 13 Jun 2011, 21:11

Just finished reading Afterlight. Thoroughly commended to all PowerSwitchers.

If M. Latoc had been a weird astrologist rather than a fundemental religious nutter, it would have been perfect.

Interesting reviews over at DODGY TAX AVOIDERS. Particularly this extract -

I will not provide any plot spoilers, but will mention Scarrow's imaginings of the future which may help those who would appreciate someone else's view of possible collapse scenarios.
* People who had prepared for collapse by establishing themselves as self sufficient had their places plundered as "The one thing they didn't have, though, was guns." (p 29)
* People who stockpiled food lasted only as long as their stockpile (p 82)
* Police and volunteers staff official road blocks out of London, but these quickly turn into opportunities to plunder fleeing citizens (p 148)
* "Survival through those first few weeks ... Everyone had done something they weren't proud of to stay alive" (p 29)
* Without electricity, water supplies stopped running and cholera became endemic in London within a week (p 29)
* Just-in-time warehousing and logistics collapsed on the first day of the crisis (p 39) as did share markets (and, thus, retirement incomes) (p 51). Yet despite this, for some days most people failed to appreciate the magnitude and longevity/ permanence of the change engulfing them.
* There were no government contingency plans for such a crisis (p 53). The government promptly requisitioned sites for refuges and staffed them with professionally qualified people (p 63), but Scarrow gives insufficient attention to how and why these refuges collapsed. Central planning failed because the senior bureaucrats were too close to politicians who wanted to "gild the lily" rather than confront the truth (p 233)
* In the 3-4 years immediately following the collapse, radical hybrid fundamentalist cults emerged, brutal to outsiders, questioners and non-believers. Scapegoating was at the core of their ideology (p 251)
4/5 for these points - good jumping off ideas for your own planning.
The greatest virtue of the book is the way Scarrow depicts a deep and abiding longing for the high-energy past which set the scene for the crisis in the first place. This longing holds people back from accommodating themselves to a low energy future. Scarrow also describes usefully the tensions between democracy and authoritarianism in surviving communities. In doing so he depicts the spread of false and vicious rumours to ostracize those who represent a danger to the power of incumbents or those who would replace them (p 291). Scarrow reminds us that true toughness is not the load you can benchpress or how big a gun you own and use - it's how much crap you can endure (p 415). 5/5 for recognizing the importance of these themes.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 14 Jun 2011, 11:46

I wonder if this forum helped?

Potemkin Villager · Post by **Potemkin Villager** » 20 Jun 2011, 20:44

DODGY TAX AVOIDERS reviews are a fascinating source of varied comment on the author's worldview obsessions affecting the premises of their fictional attempts at fleshing out possible post peak happenings .

The following refreshingly direct take on "Last Light" particularly struck me as an interesting piece of deconstruction. I would guess the author is neither white nor middle class!

Apocalypse, Daily Mail style, 15 Feb 2011
By Umm0n - See all my reviews
This review is from: Last Light (Hardcover)
'Last Light' is the story of a plucky middle-class family's fight to survive in a world which has descended into chaos and barbarity. Things get so bad they are forced to deal with all manner of danger including the feckless, ill-prepared scum from bad housing estates, starving to death after 3 days. Worse still are the marauding gangs of raping, murdering "chavs", half of whom don't realise there is a crisis going on. At one point they even encounter a black thug (he looks a bit like a little '50 cent' in case you struggle to visualise it).
The Peak Oil issue / subsequent collapse of society (the interesting bits) are very much under-explored. The Illuminati plot is just pointless and silly. I would have been kinder but the bigoted, patronising style of writing really wound me up.

Kentucky Fried Panda · Post by **Kentucky Fried Panda** » 20 Jun 2011, 20:49

Hey, do you think Alex Scarrow is a bit middle class?

Potemkin Villager · Post by **Potemkin Villager** » 20 Jun 2011, 21:29

Doomsday wrote:Hey, do you think Alex Scarrow is a bit middle class?

I don't really know but he sure would fit in as a Mail hack. I worked close to journalists for a number of years and I am quite familiar with their little foibles. I certainly agree with Ummon that "The Illuminati plot is just pointless and silly."

Another DODGY TAX AVOIDERS reviewer comments "I can't understand why 16 reviews give this book rave reviews. I found the story predictable, the characters at best two-dimensional and the logic reminiscent the ravings of a 9/11 conspiracist."

Good Lord are they suggesting that some of the reviews might actually have been written by the author or the publisher in a dasterdly undehand attempt to plug the book?

What a terribly wicked and totally unfounded suggestion!!

Kentucky Fried Panda · Post by **Kentucky Fried Panda** » 20 Jun 2011, 21:49

Afterlight is even worse y'know. It's at best fiction for young adults, and that is done much better elsewhere.

I don't recommend either book as they don't really have much to do with peak oil beyond the use of the phrase.

I think as research he skimmed JHK's The Long Emergency while waiting to get on a plane to wherever it is middle class people go on holiday to escape the great unwashed.

Potemkin Villager · Post by **Potemkin Villager** » 21 Jun 2011, 11:09

Doomsday wrote: wherever it is middle class people go on holiday to escape the great unwashed.

..... then get back to discover, shock horror, that the central heating has broken down and all their pipes are frozen?

Seriously though I also found the unhealthily relentless graphic descriptions of maiming, killing and rape totally voyeuristic. They do little to add to the central theme of the book because when you strip it down it does not have one.

I have recently started coming across the term "climate change pornography" and IMHO this book would fit the category of "societal breakdown pornography".

Kentucky Fried Panda · Post by **Kentucky Fried Panda** » 21 Jun 2011, 19:02

Roger Adair wrote:
Seriously though I also found the unhealthily relentless graphic descriptions of maiming, killing and rape totally voyeuristic. They do little to add to the central theme of the book because when you strip it down it does not have one.

I have recently started coming across the term "climate change pornography" and IMHO this book would fit the category of "societal breakdown pornography".

The violence is very unconvincing. It's like it was written by a small boy who has seen a fight or two in the playground and thinks that makes him qualified to go to war.

Lord Beria3 · Post by **Lord Beria3** » 23 Jun 2011, 16:20

Funny - because I found both novels good, although the sequel was much better without the dumb conspiracy plot.

The violence was terrifying and quite plausible - if you have ever read about the Middle Ages random and extreme violence was quite normal.

Kentucky Fried Panda · Post by **Kentucky Fried Panda** » 23 Jun 2011, 18:13

It's boys own adventure bullshit for most of the so called violence.

Read something where the author has first hand knowledge of battle and you'll see right through the armchair warrior walter mitty adventure.