Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
Is it just me or is this the first chapter of a novel about the Apocaplypse? Personally, this is how I always thought it would start, with little cracks in the structure of things: little cracks that would get bigger and bigger and bigger...
Recommended reading on this topic would have to be John Brunner's 1972 novel The Sheep Look Up, with Philip Wylie's posthumous The End of the Dream from 1973 running a close second.* Both books detail the end of the world as the result of a thousand little synergies between environmental damage, viral mutation, lowered immunity, lack of resources, collapse of services, civil unrest, and so on that eventually domino into complete catastrophe. The Sheep Look Up is particularly grim, and paints a far too plausible picture of a disaster which takes place so gradually that most people don't even realize it's happening.
Somebody hold me - I'm scared....
- Sid
* Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang takes the bronze - an
excellent book, but the apocalypse is secondary to the theme of
individuality.
