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 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.
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