We live in a world that takes a great many things for granted.  Every day we use all sorts of goods and services upon which our very lives depend, but we never give a second's thought as to how they work or where they come from.  Where does the water come from?  The tap.  Where does the electricity come from?  The mains.  Where does food come from?  The supermarket.  Where does television programming come from?  Insane asylums packed with nihilistic, sex-crazed, Guardian-reading chimpanzees. 

The only time we really think about those sort of things is when they go wrong.  That's why Windows is such an abundant topic of conversation.  We don't really care about how the national grid works until a transformer blows out and we get plunged into darkness with nothing to do except think dark thoughts about smug, paranoid bastards like myself who installed emergency back-up lighting systems. 

But what happens if something we take for granted suddenly goes away and never comes back?  Usually, according to some writers, civilisation collapses and we end up looking pretty silly.  

One of the more obvious examples of this is food, which John Christopher covered in Death of Grass, but human history has seen enough scarcity of foods and fuels that worlds faced with famines and energy shortages aren't that hard to imagine.  But what about the ones that aren't as obvious, but just as devastating?

Let's take a common material like iron.  Beginning in the September 1932 issue of Wonder Stories, S. S. Held's story Death of Iron told the tale of a world where all the iron in the world disintegrated, leaving civilisation without motor cars, generators, ships, trains, and just about every accoutrement of technology since the days of Alexander the Great right down to belt buckles and kitchen knives-- not that anyone noticed straight away, because they were too busy dealing with skyscrapers suddenly devoid of steel girders.  The combination of showers of concrete and people running away with their trousers around their ankles can only be imagined.

Even then, iron is something that people realise that they're going to have a tough time without if it vanishes.  When you look out of windows and see giant suspension bridges made out of steel you have a clue that it's pretty important stuff.  The real shocker is when something vanishes that has crept into our lives so slowly that we haven't realised how ubiquitous it is until it's snatched away from us. 

In 1971, the writing team of Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis presented their novel Mutant 59: the Plastic Eaters.  In this, a genetically engineered bacteria that eats plastic gets loose in central London and begins to cause havoc as people learn that plastic is used for more than drinks bottles and trendy raincoats.  It's also used in things like pipes, gas seals, computers, and electrical insulation.  The last is a particularly hard lesson for Londoners as the bacteria eats through the cladding on high-voltages cables in the Underground and triggers massive gas explosions.   Gleefully throwing all laws of biology to the winds, the authors have the bacteria breeding and adapting at an impossible rate; destroying plastics right and left until the heart of London is left in ruins.  And this was in 1971 when plastics weren't near as common as they are today. 

The book is at its most frightening in its climactic scene when the bacteria infects the cabin of a transatlantic jetliner.   It's a amazing how many people don't realise until you point it out that practically the entire interior of a passenger plane is made out of plastics of one sort or another, and messieurs Pedler and Davis paint a frightening picture of a hundred people trapped inside a plastic tube that is rapidly changing to foul-smelling, highly-inflammable goo until two bare wires in the cockpit touch.

On the plus side, belt buckles were largely unaffected.

Go to End of the World

Tales of Future Past | Ephemeral Isle | Freelance Writing | Radio Plays | Shop