"Alas, Brave New Babylon" new fiction by Matt Bracken

Western Rifle Shooters Association ^ | August 26, 2013 | Matthew Bracken

[aragorn]

Thanks Travis.

A chilling, entirely plausible look into what may await us.

[Responsibility2nd]

Great writing, sir.

I've mentioned it before, but I'll mention it again. I have this bookmarked and refer myself and others to it often.

 

When The Music Stops – How America’s Cities May Explode In Violence
Western Rifle Shooters Association ^ | September 4, 2012 | Matt Bracken
 

Posted on Tuesday, September 04, 2012 7:37:03 AM by Travis McGee

[wildbill]

I reviewed Matt’s first book and could tell his action thrillers with a conservative viewpoint were going to appeal to a lot of us on FR as well as horrify the gun=hating libs.

His username of Travis McGee is taken from a highly popular book series by John D. McDonald that celebrated an iconoclastic hero.

Good stuff!

[Marcella]

ping

[Marcella]

“You can stack tires and grow potatoes that way, it might increase the calories per square foot”

Or, you can plant Sunchoke Sunflowers that make tubers that taste like potatoes and they reproduce on their own. Plant them one time, and they make others underground with those tubers. Leave a few tubers the first time, and they will reproduce like crazy.

The problem with regular potatoes is, you need potato slips every year to grow more potatoes. In a SHTF situation, you can't buy or order more slips, so you have no more potatoes. The potato like Sunflower tubers, keep growing forever. Use the tubers exactly like a potato.

[who knows what evil?]

The problem with regular potatoes is, you need potato slips every year to grow more potatoes.

Not true...you can save potato seed to grow out the following year.

[Marcella]

“you can save potato seed to grow out the following year.”

I’ve never seen a potato seed - what do they look like?

[The Shrew]

Well, so much for getting the twenty-seven projects I had in mind to accomplish today. Now, I'm bordering on pro-active energy to ensure my family is not enslaved and/or feasted upon in the coming darkness and being depressed about the plausibility of what you have written.

Great job Matt, as always. I'll do my best to push it out.

Regards,

TS

[Marcella]

“you can save potato seed to grow out the following year.”

If you are talking about saving part of a potato, how do you preserve it until the next year?

[who knows what evil?]

My familiarity with the region you have based this story in caught my attention, and wouldn’t let it go. Still shaking off the goosebumps...will have my wife read this when she gets home.

[MHGinTN]

Thank you for the ping, m’Lady.

[who knows what evil?]

No, I am talking about growing it from potato seed. Check out this intriguing video from Tom Wagner here. Mr. Wagner offers several dozen varieties of potato seed, and shows you how to harvest and save it.

[MHGinTN]

Appreciate the ping ... I live in the area where the character starts his exodus toward the seashore. Out my front door I can see a ridge named ‘Indian Ridge’ which was an Indian highway along which tribal travelers would traverse from the lower Appalachian chain to the more Norther sections for great gatherings. Boone and others used these same ridges for their travels afoot.

[reformedliberal]

No one I know who has tried to eat Sunchokes tried them more than twice: once boiled and once fried. Even the cows won’t eat them.

In my area, they have become a wild invasive species. Anyone who wants them can find them from Spring to Fall by the leaves and flowers. I never have seen them dug up, anywhere, in over 30 years.

detailed instructions with pics for storing seed potatoes

http://alpinegarden.blogspot.com/2010/03/sprouting-potatoes-what-to-do.html

photo of potato berries. These are produced on the top of the stalks at the end of the season. The seeds are inside the berry. Potatoes and tomatoes are related.

http://www.backyarddiva.ca/are-my-potatoes-growing-tomatoes/

Mature potato seeds and a place to buy them

http://www.doublehelixfarms.com/true-potato-seed-TPS

[Billthedrill]

Great read - snuck enough time to finish it. Between this and something else you wrote I'm getting the sense that being caught in a city will get incredibly nasty within perhaps a week, and that's not enough time to prepare an exit. If you're ready, maybe a 50/50 chance of getting out. Brr.

Civilizations have fallen this hard before, naturally, including Babylon itself a couple of times. One of the reasons entire populations are put to the sword is that there isn't anything else to do with them. Assyria collapsed into its two principal cities which themselves fell and what was left was a bunch of Mesopotamian farmers looking over their shoulders for raiders and starving when the crops failed. Knossos never did bounce back.

But the tower of Babel was a nearly perfect metaphor for a society dedicated to a utopian aim that collapsed under its own weight when that aim proved to be illusory. Our own progressive aims are grander, taller, and their fall is likely to be even more catastrophic. You captured this nicely. Well done.

[Travis McGee]

I just noticed that Kipling’s “Copybook” contains the phrase brave new world. I wonder if it came before or after Huxley?

[Marcella]

The first thing I read is potato berries themselves can’t be eaten as they may be poisonous. I’ll have to study all that information and get back to you privately.

The Sunflower tuber I’m speaking of is the white tuber that looks like a Russet potato - not the kind with all the bumps on it. The bumpy ones are common but not the white variety. The white variety is grown for food.

[Travis McGee]

Can you imagine teenagers the day after SHTF. Life with no TV or internet or cell phone or stupid music. Knowing that most of their favored celebrities are probably starving too. Forced to help mom and dad dig up the backyard to raise a garden, go hunting and fishing with dad, help mom can the veggies etc

I think most of them would go into shock and paralysis, waiting for govt rescue until they starved to death.

[ryan71]

I enjoyed it. I only wish more people would read this and seriously consider it. Unfortunatately, most don't care.

[Black Agnes]

The bridge overpass in New Orleans a couple days after Katrina springs to mind.

Waiting there. Just waiting. Help has always come before. It’ll come now.

We just need to wait for it...