Cats Would Do Great

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier (which I wrote about here) is a lot of things, but one part of the book details the slow elimination of human beings on Earth. While I was reading the book, I kept thinking: “would infrastructure really collapse that fast without people maintaining it” (about 6 months or less for some major pieces).

After learning about The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (a review is on the Washington Post site and he appeared on the Diane Rehm Show), I suppose I am convinced some things would disappear much faster.

Weisman’s book details what would happen to our planet without any people on it and it isn’t good for the Internet. For sure it is something that Web developers have known for a long time. Web sites not only don’t build themselves they also don’t keep themselves running!

From what I understand, cats and bronze statues come out great (dogs and cockroaches not so much). I have to read this book!

A Scientific Romance

When I picked up A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright, I thought I was going to read a steampunk novel. However, what I got included a lot more. In many ways it was like The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier (which I wrote about here) meets V for Vendetta (plus more).

There were so many themes and concepts that it seems silly to list them all, but here goes (in varying levels and not in order of importance):

Civilization, Archeology, Pandemic, Imperialism, Globalization, Time Travel, Industrial Revolution, Morality, Mad Cow Disease, Friendship, Steampunk, Human Society, Fossil Fuels, Monarchy, Victorian Undergarments, Neolithic Societies, Vegetarians, Rome, Evolution, Love, Academia, History, Environmentalism, Shakespeare, Computers, Nature, Science, Religion, Cities, Anarchy, Racism, Betrayal, Mortality, Crime, Plumbing, Genocide and Culture

Things not in this book: the Internet, Feminism and Space Aliens

Anyway, much of the action takes place on a walk from London to Scotland and, since that takes quite a long time, a fair amount of narrative takes place in the protagonist’s musings as he walks. The result is a lot of themes and concepts.

The Brief History Of The Dead

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier is now out in paperback. If you didn’t pick it up in hardcover, you should definitely pick it up now.

It is riddled with corporate intrigue and layered with environmental, apocalyptical, futuristic and globalization themes, which makes it an excellent page turner. It is the kind of book that you cannot put down and every time you are done with one chapter you must start the next.

But, its core narrative concept is what makes this such an excellent book (that those who have died have a conscious existence while they are in memory of the living). As long as someone who is still alive remembers you, you remain alive in a place called the City. In the City people work and vacation and carry on in a “normal” way.

One of the characters in the book tries to figure out how many people any given living person has ever known (basically to get an idea of how big the City actually is). It is the kind of thing that, after reading the book, I am tempted to figure out (by comparison, it kind of reminds me of Citizen Vince by Jess Walter. In Citizen Vince the protagonist tries to count up the number of people who he knows that are dead under the suspicion that he knows more dead people than living.).

Anyway, The Brief History of the Dead is a page turner and is thought provoking, but what makes it so great is the fantasy that somehow all those that we have known (and perhaps loved) have a second chance at opportunities that they missed in life. They have this chance, because we remember them.

It is a pleasant thought. Or, as Jake Barnes says in The Sun Also Rises:

Isn’t it pretty to think so? (251)