Post-Apocalypse: The land of hairy women.

So, I watch a lot of post-apocalyptic and dystopian TV. I read a lot of fiction. I thoroughly enjoy doing these things.

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The problem is with consuming such a huge amount of one thing is your brain starts to go to strange places, thinking strange things.

This leads to me questioning all sorts of things that are probably supposed to be ignored.

But the main thing that is bugging me at the moment?

How in the hell are these women so fucking hairless?

I mean, I know that smooth legs and underarms are the current beauty standard (though that has not always been the case). And I know that actresses have to stick to these standards even more than the rest of us.

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But this is the post-apocalypse. They’re scarred, covered in mud and blood and wearing filthy, tattered clothes. How come, when they can’t seem to wash their face, do they have enough hot water, soap and razors to shave their legs? Is this really a priority in the post-apocalypse? ‘Oh, I know I’ve got to run from the aliens, just let me wax first.’

Oh, I know. Suspension of disbelief, blah blah blah. I mean, if I can accept that they’re all so pretty and well fed, surely I can expect the preternaturally smooth legs and underarms.

But I can’t. And you know why? Because I am the owner of a female body. I know how fast my leg hair grows, and I know what I look like when I’ve been unbothered for just a week. It utterly stumps me that they are unafraid to let us see their heroines bloodied and ugly crying, but they can’t show ‘em with a tuft of underarm hair.

What do they think? That the viewers, after watching all the death, murder and torment, will draw the line at some hair where hair naturally grows?

We’re all grown ups. We understand that hair grows. And it breaks the illusion (for me) to have these women with their limbs as smooth as dolls.

Tell you one thing. I am not shaving in the post-apocalypse. And if it bothers anyone, if people are genuinely so concerned with my body hair that they’ll forget we’re three meals away from starving to death, they can suffer and die alone in the wastes. Because their priorities are FUCKED.

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Apocalypse by Dean Crawford

A private Learjet filled with scientists travels across the ocean toward Miami. As it passes through the Bermuda Triangle, strange effects disturb the instruments and violent weather envelops the aircraft until it plummets out of control and vanishes without trace.

In Miami, Sheriff Kyle Sears arrives at a murder scene. A woman and her daughter have both been shot through the head. But while Sears is still on the scene he receives a phone call from the woman’s husband. With uncanny accuracy, he predicts the immediate future just as it unfolds around Sears, before revealing that he, too, will be murdered within 24 hours. The man gives him the name of someone he must contact. Ethan Warner.

As Ethan Warner and his partner Nicola Lopez race to investigate, they are thrown into the centre of a mind-boggling plot to blow a hole in the space-time continuum.

I’m not normally that ‘in’ to thrillers, even science based ones where the consequences of failure could mean the end of the world. But I got into this one.

I can’t really give you an intelligent review. I can’t tell you what I liked and what I didn;t and why, because instead of reading this thing critically (like I usually do for reviews) I just devoured it.

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It was pure enjoyment for me – hight staked with interesting characters and some damn good science in the background.

A flaw my intensely feminist upbringing wouldn’t allow me NOT to spot was the constant use of male gaze on all the female characters, but I understand that this is a common device in thrillers.

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I’m just not sure why it’s important that an incredibly competent, driven woman with a well-defined personality is constantly referred to in terms of how ‘hot’ she is.

A flaw my literature-orientated mind wouldn’t allow me to ignore was the way the prose sometimes wandered off the path of ‘competent but nothing special’ and into the thorny brambles of ‘lolwhut?’. But it didn’t do this often enough to ruin my fun, and it’s a pretty chunky book, so no big.

The thing is, that normally these two flaws, especially together, would normally be enough to get my patented ‘really?’ reaction, where I get pulled out of the world of the story and -worst case scenario – start to mock the book. Something similar happened with ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’ when my final review was one dismissive sentence. But nope, not here. The critical part of me (Huge) was overwhelmed by the part of me that just likes to be entertained by a damn good story.

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Four out of five, kiddies. Read this book.

Also, stay tuned for an interview with Dean later today.

Blood Zero Sky by J. Gabriel Gates

A prophetic glimpse into a chilling future dominated by two massive corporations, where systematic greed exploits the credit value of every citizen and endless productivity is the costly price for the lie called freedom. The only hope? A revolution is brewing in the America Division.

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. .

Unprofitables are banished to work camps to pay off their credit. Other tie-men and women look on apathetically. Fair is fair. Everyone knows you shouldn’t use more credit than you are worth to the Company. They turn their attention to the next repackaged but highly coveted N-Corp product on the market, creatively advertised on the imager screens that adorn virtually every available flat surface. All the while, their mandatory cross-implants and wrist-worn “ICs” keep them focused on the endless cycle of work and consumption to which they are enslaved.

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May Fields—the CEO’s daughter—would like to believe she is above all that. Head of N-Corp’s marketing team, the young woman who has almost everything anyone could want spends her days dreaming up ingenious ways to make workers buy more of what they already have and don’t need. Even before May discovers that the Company is headed for its first loss in thirty years, she is feeling the stirrings of dissatisfaction with the system that has given her everything she’s ever wanted .

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. . except the freedom to be herself.

When she is kidnapped by a member of the Protectorate—a secret order dating back to the American Revolution—May is suddenly faced with the frightening truth of what the Company’s greed has done to our most basic human rights. Will she embrace who she is and join the battle to restore America’s democratic freedom, or put her blinders back on and return to her safe and passionless life?

Blood Zero Sky [1. provided free by HCI Books ] Is not an easy read, but it’s a book that should be read.

A powerful criticism of commercialism and coroporation interference in government, Blood Zero Sky  is also a very good read. It drags the reader on a roller-coaster ride, using prose and description effectively to truly bring home the unnatural state of the future.

It’s not perfect. I found it’s focus on America somewhat off-putting and alientating as a Brit – many of the concepts presented within Blood Zero Sky are uniquely American, and many of the things that were supposed to fill me with fear or horrified recognition meant nothing to me – and that lack of aplicability weakens to book.  At times, Blood Zero Sky slips into the didactic and the lecturing, which can be irritating when it gets in the way of the story. Also, I am a bit sick of rape being used as backstory or a plot point in dystopian or apocalyptic fiction, and rape is used that way here. It’s a small point of the narrative, however, and my distaste for it noted, I will leave the analysis of it to other book bloggers who may wish to tackle it, such as Requires Only That You Hate. Even with these flaws, I found the portrayal of a corporation-run future in Blood Zero Sky frightening and believable.

There is every chance that Blood Zero Sky will become a very controversial book. I can see many school districts wanting to ban it, as books like 1984 have been banned before it, although it’s focus on Christian faith may keep it in the good books of some.

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This is exactly why you should read it now.

Long story short, you should read Blood Zero Sky. Despite it’s flaws, it’s not only a well-written and readable book, it’s important. It deserves to sit up there with other great works of dystopian fiction.

[rating:5/5]

Hunger.

Let’s talk about hunger. You probably think you know what it is to be hungry, right?

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Your stomach growls, and you get more and more obsessed with food the longer you are unable to eat. But chances are (if our stats are correct) that you’re a person from a western, industrialised country who has never really expereinced proper hunger. You may have eaten crap for a day or two, or a week or two, or a month or two. You lived on beans while in university. You only have one or two proper meals a day while you’re on the dole. These all suck and leave you hungry.

But the thing is, that’s not proper hunger.

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Thats ‘wealthy, powerful country’ hunger. That’s not the hunger of having NO meals for the last week, of being forced into eating rubbish or rats or weeds from the garden. You’d turn your nose up at those, because even though you may be poor, there is still food available for you that isn’t that awful.

There won’t be when the end happens. Finding food will become more unlikely and fraught. Fussyness will not happen. Thee’ll come a point where you kill a rat and eat it – maybe even raw, because your hunger is now so intense that something that foul doesn’t matter to you.

I don’t say these things to scold or scare you, but to prepare you. Start letting go of your rich-country food prejudices. I’d still say avoid eating dogs and cats, because they’re invaluable for killing vermin and protecting you, but if feral dogs attack you, don’t waste the meat. Most things are edible, even if they taste bad, just remember that. Don’t let hunger drive you to it, accept it early on and it’ll be more easy to deal with.

See, the problem with not knowing what is actually edible and what isn’t, and allowing squeamishness to make your food decisions for you, is that in desperate situations you are then completely ignorant as to waht you can eat or not.

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Hunger my then drive you to poisonous berries and mushrooms, because you don’t know that dandelion leaves are perfectly fine (if bitter).

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It might drive you to eat your shoe leather because you can’t let go of the idea that, psot-apocalypse, your pet bunny is better as a source of meat than as something to cuddle.

Hunger. Don’t let it win.

STUFF redux

So, I have successfully moved house. I now live in a place that with only a small amount of work can become a reasonable fortress. I can even extend said fortressing to the whole neighbourhood.

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Awesome, I’m done.

But I started thinking about stuff. As suggested by my last few posts, I have a metric fuck-ton of STUFF. This isn’t even including the practical STUFF that most humans tend to collect over their life-time.

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I just have… STUFF. Random stuff. Pointless stuff. Stuff that apparently, I cared about enough to fill my house with. I’m a collector. In a chest, I found some schoolwork from when I was seven. Seven! In another box I found stones. Actual stones, because apparently I like to pick up interesting stones and then keep them forever and ever. I understand keeping the whale bone, but did I really need sixteen seperate stones with holes in? I know they’re supposed to be useful for seeing through fairy glamours, but even I think a fairy apocalypse is unlikely. Ah well, this is all silly. Of course I’m not going to get rid of them.

This packrat tendency made moving house horrible, but it will make becoming a nomadic family post-apocalypse FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE. I will have no way of transporting seven van loads of crap through the badger-infested wastes and I know from experience that my hoarding tendencies get worse under stress or when I have any kind of excuse.

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“Oh, I can’t get rid of these six bags of pen lids, we might need the plastic!”

Now, I’m a big believer in being able to turn ANY personality flaw or psychological abnormality into a plus point in a post-apocalyptic world, but even I’m struggling with this one. Sure, collecting things is a part of the human psyche and presumably exists for a good evolutionary reason, but I honestly have no idea how a drive to collect rubber ducks will help me. All I can hope is that the apocalypse is a cosy catastrophe, allowing me to stay in my own home, with my stuff. Perhaps I can throw some of the heavier things at raiders. And the soft toys might keep me warm at night.

And on a plus side, I can always use those 20-odd boxes of books to restart society along the lines of my personal tastes.

STUFF

I’m still moving, and currently wondering how I got so much STUFF.

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I won’t be able to keep so much STUFF with me post-apocalypse, that’s for sure!

Like last week I direct you towards an interesting post-apocalypse thing.

Awesome Zombie Stories.

That should take up an hour or two you should be spending working.

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And hopefully in a week or two I’ll be back to writing proper posts.

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Because of course, your life is bereft without my paranoid rambling.

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Passing down your history.

After the nitty gritty is done, you may want to put a thought to passing down history to your descendants.

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You may want to tell them a few things, including (but not limited to) what happened, how you survived, the way you set up your society, who you are, how to stop it happening again… but there’s a problem with this.

How are you going to make sure it gets down the line unchanged?

Think about the history we know. The further back we go the spottier the evidence and the more specialised knowledge required to understand it. When you’re dealing with oral cultures, it’s even worse. History gets interwoven with myth until the awareness of what actually happened is a foggy mess.

Not only that, but when you take into account human nature – the fact that people will reinterpret or outright make up history in order to suit their own agenda – it starts to seem more trouble than it’s worth.

Still, you have to try. Why? Because every thing human beings do is based on the things that went before. And at the very least, you might want to pass down information about things like electricity, water purification and refined sugar so that these necessities don’t take quite so long to turn up next time.

The best thing to do is to record everything. Keep hold of old fiction and non-fiction books you find, and copy them when they start to fall apart. Carve them into stone if you have to. Write them on parchment made of animal skin and store them CAREFULLY, not just in some musty old cellar somewhere. There’s not much you can do about how much language will change over the decades and centuries. (Seriously, you may think you speak English, but if you were dropped into medieval England you would NOT understand what they were saying) But you can, at least, ensure your documents are safe and intact so that future people translating them don’t have to work so hard.

My mother is a historian, and she says one of the worst things for documents is damp. So a dry place is the most important thing you can do. Perhaps make it law that everyone has to be able to read and write, and that everyone has to copy out an essnetial document once a year so that not only does everyone have access to the information, everyone knows how to read it. If that law sticks, you could have your great grandchildren still understanding how to build a solar power generator – and should the ability to do so ever come around, they’ll be ready.

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Survival isn’t just about your survival, it’s about giving all your descendants a fighting chance.

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Etiquette for an Apocalypse by Anne Mendel

It’s the 2020 Apocalypse and Sophie Cohen, former social worker turned neighborly drug dealer, must keep her family alive amid grueling and sometimes strangely amusing end of the world issues: starvation, earthquakes, plagues, gang violence and alas more starvation. She will be forced to investigate a serial killing and then, as if that isn’t enough, needs to take down the sinister emerging power structure, all-the-while learning to use a pizza box solar oven, bond with her chickens and learn to shoot a Ruger 9MM.

Etiquette for an Apocalypse [1. copy provided free by Bracket Press] is a pretty fun book with an engaging writing style and believable, enoyable characters.

By now, you’ll know I’m a bit sick of the same old apocalypse stories, and am actively looking for something different. I thouhgt I had it in Etiquette for an Apocalypse – the blurb I tracked down suggested it was primarily a murder mystery set in a post-apocalyptic world, which I was really into. However, half way through the book, that ceased to be the focus, and the plot went elsewhere.

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I was sort of disappointed by this – not that the actual plot wasn’t fun and entertaining, because it really, really was, but because I had been hoping for something else. (By the way, someone write a good, well-written and well-characterised post-apocalyptic murder mystery, and I will read the SHIT out of it).

Ok, so that noted, let’s talk about everything else. I loved Etiquette for an Apocalypse. I loved it a lot. I loved it with almost the same intensity I love shoes.

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Everything about it – the humour, the occasional lapses into script-style narrative, the first-person narrator being a middle-aged ex-social worker, her obsession with foods she can never eat again – was wonderful, a fresh attitude to post-apocalyptic writing.

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  Etiquette for an Apocalypse manages to portray the grim realities of life post-apocalypse whilst still being fun to read – and quite funny, too. It’s not going to be for everyone, but in my experience books that try to be for everyone often end up being for no-one. Etiquette for an Apocalypse does some things with narrative structure and voice that a lot of people won’t have seen in this sort of novel before – I think they make the book stronger, but more literarily conservative types could find them off-putting.

There are some minor problems – the first chapters are pretty seriously info-dumpy, and it’s purely because the information is actually interesting that Etiquette for an Apocalypse manages to get away with it. However, overall it’s an innovative, interesting book that deserves to be very successful.

For that reason, it gets the rare….

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[rating:5 out of 5]

'Traditional' Gender roles are a bunch of bullshit post apocalypse.

Most post-apocalyptic media (and a lot of prepper groups) have this weird idea that when the world ends the women will finally get back in the kitchen where they belong. While the post-apocalyptic world may be harsher to those of the female gender than the male in some ways, anyone who things gender is the main thing of importance in deciding who does what is going to find their survival group operating at less than peak efficiency.

For a start, gender doesn’t decide your natural skills.

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It doesn’t decide your intelligence or how capable you are at learning. Gender has a minor impact on certain tendencies, but the truth remains that people are individuals first, gender second.

And then, you have to remember that what we consider ‘traditional’ gender roles are actually a pretty modern invention, at least among the poor. Before the industrial revolution, you couldn’t have members of the family or society not contributing. Women ran bars, shops, worked the farms. One thing they didn’t do was ‘stay in the kitchen’ because the family would have starved to death if they did.

Let’s think of it with a post-apocalyptic practical frame of mind. Say you have a woman in your group who happens to be a crack shot. Are you going to make her take care of the kids because she’s a chick?

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Hope not. Take that to the logical extreme, and it means all people in your group should be offered the same training and found work to do based on what they’re best at, not on what old-fashioned gender ideals state they ‘should’ be good at.  Don’t stick a man who’s an excellent child-care provider on the scavenger lines, and don’t stick a woman who’s a brilliant engineer on clothes-making duty.

It really is that simple.

Are there things that either gender can do that the other can’t?

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Sure. With women, it’s pretty much down to ‘I can squat out a baby’. And that IS something you need to consider – babies are going to be super major important post-apocalypse and so pregnant women need to be protected. Even your crack shot from above needs to be taken off the front lines when she’s up the duff. But the thing is, you’ll need her back.

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So what’s the answer? Have a creche system. After weaning, all the children are taken over by dedicated child-minders, male and female.

But if you let modern-day gender binary colour your assumptions so much you end up with the person who could fix up electricity for you stuck to breeding and rearing, don’t blame me when you suffer.