Recently I went to the Museum of Pop Culture, formerly the EMP. It currently is hosting exhibits on StarTrek, Fantasy, Horror, and video games in addition to its normal music fare. In the StarTrek exhibit there is a video talking about all of the ways the StarTrek influenced invention and design. It went so far as to say, writing it down in a great story literally caused the future to come into being! Pretty heavy. I thought back to all of the great science fiction I have read and fantasized about all the cool shit that was going to get invented because of Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, Lucas, and yes Rodenberry. I have been riding this high for a month now!
Today that high came crashing down. What about all that post apocalyptic SciFi, does writing that down cause *that* future to come into being? I thought of Alas Babylon, The White Plague, The Road…
One post apocalyptic series is literally coming into being today, Wool. Read this book. It clearly lays out Steve Bannon’s vision for our future.
Wool is a story about people living in an underground silo following a nuclear war. The silo is big, more than 100 stories below ground. People are governed by “laws” set out in a book and these strict laws allow the population to avoid killing each other throughout the long wait. At the top of the silo there is a television screen that looks out over the “country side” a desolate landscape, frozen in a nuclear winter. Of course given the years on end spent living in the silo the camera showing the population if it is safe to exit the silo gets dirty and must be cleaned. This is the punishment for breaking “laws”, don a radiation suit, exit the air lock, and clean the camera lens with a piece of Wool then you are free to go wherever you will. Everyone cleans the camera, no one makes it past the visual range of the camera before dying of radiation poisoning.
The book is full of ironic twists and turns which I will not spoil for you but suffice to say as of 2 weeks ago you will feel like you are reading Time magazine not SciFi from an, until recently, unknown, self-published, independent writer. (If you read/saw the Martian you know there are some amazing self-published authors out there!)
Want some clues as to what happens in Wool? Pay attention to Steve Bannon news. Steve believes every 80-100 years the US goes through a major upheaval that moves us critically forward in our evolution as a country. We are 80 years since the last upheaval, the great depression and Steve sees the war with ISIS, really Islam, as the upheaval that has already started. He wants to use this as a catalyst for broad scale war allowing the United States to emerge as a true global leader again, stronger than ever before. How might that work? Bannon was involved in Bio-Sphere 2 project so better understand how humanity could survive a total biological melt-down from global warming. Could he have been investigating how we could survive a nuclear holocaust too?
As if you are not scared enough at this point, Kellyanne Conway says he will even stage a coup to see his vision through. You have doubts? Check out his book club, I think he intentionally left Wool off the list. He is worried it might tip you off.
The Tao of Todd 