Horizon

I tried to read that one a while ago and gave it up in boredom. There's a fair amount of pseudo-Darwinian chest-pounding, isn't there? My only strong memory from it has to do with the idea that the Hetch Hetchy water supply would just keep on flowing from Yosemite down to San Francisco on plain gravity power long after the rest of the infrastructure gave out. I imagine the writer is probably wrong about that -- would think there'd be too many pumping stations and such along the way -- but it's a memorable eerie image. Fresh clean water flowing into a city where almost no one is waiting to drink it. We did think about such futures during the Cold War, didn't we.

It is fairly tiresome -- in particular the pointless efforts of Ish to pass along civilization to The Tribe's children, which are supposed to be poignant, but are really just frustrating. The thing is, the description of the world changing after the collapse is actually pretty interesting, with the technological artifacts yielding to nature at uneven rates, as you say. It's just the experience of the protagonist and his group that's dull.

One Amazon reviewer pointed out that the good bits of exposition are all sprinkled through the book in italics, enabling an easy skim of the book in a few minutes.

Had forgotten the character was named Ish. I suppose that would have been intended as a nod to Ishi, which is sad considering that Ishi was not a chest-pounder, only a survivor of massacres and greedy misunderstandings.

You may know that after he was forced to leave the woods below Mt. Lassen, Ishi became a janitor, craft demonstrator, and exhibit at a museum in San Francisco. With surprisingly few objections, considering. He died of tuberculosis after a few years on the job.

There is still a substantial retail district on Irving Street below the UCSF-Parnassus campus where the museum was. When I'm over there I like to imagine Ishi doing his shopping. He disliked gravy, preferring stews with simmered clear broth not brought to a boil.

Got a link on this Ishi? I've never heard of him.

Certainly the main character of the book is no chest-pounder. Like a surprising number of post-apocalyptic sci-fi protagonists, he's a graduate student who's just trying to muddle along.

I'd assumed that Ish and his wife Em (Isherwood and Emma) were some semi-cryptic reference to Adam and Eve, given the Hebrew "man" and "mother." But I was never interested enough even to go look up "Em" to make sure I'd guessed correctly.