I heard on NPR, in one of those 150 word capsule stories, that the East Coast was watching carefully to see if a tropical storm was going to grow into a hurricane and found that I didn't really care. I know millions of people may be affected, and I even know some of them personally, but it's sooooo faaaaar awaaaay. At times, California seems like its own country, if not its own world.
I'm in the midst of T.C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth, which isn't exactly his most highly recommended novel but it fits in my habit in the past few years of reading near future partial apocalypse novels, those novels set a few decades hence in which the world maybe has gone to hell but is still recognizable and at least some people are surviving, if not thriving. In 2025 the climate has dramatically shifted about, not hotter but weather patterns have changed and for almost everywhere worsened. California, where it is set, is beset by hurricane-type storms one after the other for months on end, followed by endless drought. Not exactly cheery stuff, but too plausible to put down.
It is a marked contrast to the science fiction I used to hoover up: books of starships and singularities, a thousand years of peace and alien worlds. The near term stuff written post-Philip K. Dick and his generation just doesn't see the same rosy future. It doesn't seek to inspire as much as to warn and to complain. Still, it is thought provoking.
see: World War Z, World Made by Hand, Feed, Rainbows End, Snow Crash(set in LA!), and the still strikingly relevant Neuromancer
If you have recommendations of additional near future semi-apocalyptic science fiction, particularly set in or around LA, please comment below.
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: granola
lunch: thai leftovers
dinner: cheesy pasta
bonus: our neighbors made cupcakes!
This isn't quite what you asked for, but you should look at Max Page's _The City's End_, which is about imagined destructions of New York City.
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