In the zone

I just finished reading Zone One, a book about a zombie apocalypse written by Colson Whitehead.  It is written about a 3 day period after the rebuilding phase of the apocalypse has begun.  The government has begun to reform, people are organizing, and the protagonist of the book is part of an effort to clean out the last zombies from a section of New York which they refer to as Zone One.

When I was reading it the whole thing seemed kind of silly.  After all, with 99% of the human race wiped out what possible use could New York be?  Big cities would be useful for a portion of the zombie apocalypse scenario where survivors are scrounging for food and tools but after that it is completely worthless.

New York, like all large cities, requires a massive multinational supply chain to keep it functional.  It needs monstrous amounts of food, fuel, and other supplies trucked, floated, and flown in to maintain the lives of the people living there.  The most important of these is fuel because food can be grown in small, low tech chunks in parks, rooftops, and boulevards.  Fuel though, that requires a robust network to get it out of the ground, refine it, and transport it to its destination.  Cities require infrastructure to support them, and that infrastructure requires people.

In this kind of disaster scenario there are some things you never have to think about again, like mattresses.  They don't break down much, there are more of them than you can go through in 100 years, and they are everywhere.  With the population decimated you can safely ignore mattresses for the foreseeable future.  Cars would be in a similar sort of state - while they would run out faster than mattresses there are going to be usable cars that happen to be under shelter and work fine for decades at least.  The problem again is fuel.

Everything in our society runs on a steady supply of fossil fuel energy and that supply requires a huge number of people and lots of organization to be workable.  Even if you ignore the marauding bands of zombies that would make long distance shipping and manufacturing impossible you just don't have enough raw people to make it work.  Our system is designed around a certain scale and when that scale suddenly changes by a couple orders of magnitude nothing works.

When you think about an apocalypse like this you quickly realize just how dependent we are on this extremely fragile system for distributing fossil fuels.  Without that *nothing* works.  We can't get around, we can't build stuff, we can't make stuff.  Everything grinds to a halt immediately and then nearly everyone starves.  Decades from now we may be a lot more able to survive such a disaster, even if it is just an epidemic that kills people but doesn't reanimate them into flesh eating monsters.  If our society is much more dependent on solar power, for example, our ability to get the juice flowing again and make our stuff work would be much greater.  Disaster mitigation may not rank highly on our normal reasons for going solar but I think it is a real benefit, as it reduces our reliance on the global oil infrastructure.

At the end of the book the reason for the war to recapture New York from the zombies is revealed, and it does make a kind of sense.  The reasons may not be good ones, but they are the sorts of reasons that humans sometimes use for stupid things, and it does hold together.

I liked the book, generally speaking, as I mostly like zombie apocalypse fiction and this is a different sort of approach to the genre than is usual.  It doesn't have a happy ending though where attractive scientists find a miraculous cure and the world emerges from disaster stronger than ever... it leans more towards darkness and horror unending.  So if depressing is your thing, go for it.