Not How Botany Works

[flick]

I'm reading The Boy On The Bridge, which is the written-afterwards prequel-to the very good The Girl With All The Gifts by MR Carey. It's not as good as the first one, because the first one pretty well spoilers the whole of the prequel, but it's not bad. However.

It's set in a post-apocalyptic UK.

It's ten years since the effective end of civilisation. No apparent climate change to affect weather patterns.

The characters are in the centre of Luton; twelve months previously, the vegetation in an overgrown town-square-type area was razed to the ground and a bright orange container placed on it. It is now completely hidden by an impenetrable thicket of brambles. (I paraphrase, having read that bit yesterday.)

Later, in Wales, a character muses that the Great Wall Of China used to be visible from space, and that later on "Cities and towns would have been big grey areas [...] Only now they're not [...] The forests have gone in and taken over again. [...] London would just be more jungle."

Ten years. Not terribly likely. (Also, now I think of it, contradicting the Big Thing at the end of the first book, which is set later in time, features no jungle in London, and involves a Thing Likely To Be Visible From Space.)

Also, ten years: why have all the satellites vanished? ("Most of the satellites fell out of the sky long ago.") There was no Epic War where they got shot down. Why don't they have at least some GPS?

Hmph. I do recommend the first book, but don't dive into the second thinking it's a sequel.

Merry Christmas, though!

Comments

[dalmeny]

There are commercial satellite with resolutions below 0.5 m. Most things are now visible from space.

I found the prose style of The Girl with All the Gifts annoying, so I'll certainly give this one a miss.


And Merry Christmas.

[flick]

Having been vaguely irritated with the last third or so of the book, I did actually like the very end of it, so there is that!

Merry Christmas!

[vicarage]

One year thickets - I've known some bramble patches like that. I did 2 tours of my nature reserves this week, noting all the places I'd worked, and in plane crash meadow the brambles we'd nuked had got 3' high in the year.

While most satellites can't be steered, they'd not cope well with extended periods without contact with a ground station. Even with careful handing their in-orbit life is about 15-20 years, so I could imagine 10 years after the event you'd not have enough to run a GPS system unless launching had resumed, so it all depends how wide the collapse is.

[armiphlage]

My landlord stopped doing maintenance several years ago after a fire destroyed two-thirds of my apartment complex. In the autumn, leaves blew in from neighbouring trees, and accumulated on the concrete walkways and asphalt driveways. There is now a thin mat of dirt covering them, with grass and weeds growing waist-high. Not a jungle or forest yet, that will probably take centuries before there is enough soil to support trees that would hide the buildings themselves.

[rinioth]

GPS sats need a controlling ground station to keep them operational, if they lose the ground control signal they assume they have an on-board problem and they shut down to avoid causing problems to the remaining working sats.

Sats are of two main types, Geostationary (a very high orbit) which have a long life and LEO (Low Earth orbit) which have a short life unless they have on-board fuel to overcome atmospheric drag (yes there is still some air at LEO altitudes). Broadcast sats are Geostationary but GPS ones (and the ISS) are LEO. [This info for Flick's readers since as someone who has studied Physics she already knows] :)

[armiphlage]

Also, the older GPS satellites are basically just MP3 players broadcasting a signal calculated on the ground and periodically burst-transmitted. Once the stored data file is used up, they would just sit there idly.

I suppose some satellites could be programmed so that, after X days of losing ground contact, they would assume they had suffered hardware failure and automatically fire deorbiting rockets, so their owners would not be fined for leaving debris in orbit.

[del]

Shona Burns' poem "Maquis" uses poetic licence. From memory:


(a profile picture on the left is going to wreck the left justification on that blockquote, sorry)

Behind the hoardings ragwort daisies stand,
Sentinels of some primeval land,
[...]
That's after two years; give it twenty, even ten,
And through the concrete would erupt again
The forest that was London
[...]