Snow... I hate Snow

 Readings in the Genre - Week 12 – Snow

No, I don’t mean the book… I mean snow in general.  I’ve got to say at this point a lot of this is getting rather repetitive.  Isolated community: check.  Evil monstrous threat: check.  Aliens: check.  Guess what we’ve got an invasion of the body snatchers story taken to its more horrific extremes and playing up that angle.

The element of the story that really caught my attention this time wasn’t the monster… no, it was one thing the monster did that could have made a post-apocalyptic novel by itself, the destruction of electronics.

Just how dependent we have become on electronics is something that I think most of us are not that aware of, but consider how many things you use every day in your home that use an electronic component (microchip) that would get fried by any number of possible causes (DEMP from a terrorist bomb has been done to death, but I like continuous global geomagnetic storms caused by a magnetic polar reversal personally).

Now imagine all the control circuits for everything that comes into your home being fried, the computers that run the power-plant, pumps the gas-lines, manages the water system… I think you get the picture.  You have no utilities, the super-market has at best a three day supply of stock, and if you don’t stuff your mattress with cash and instead use a bank… sorry, all your bank account information was stored electronically so… it has ceased to exist.

Damn, why the heck doesn’t anyone run with this?  The whole polar reversal bit gives cool secondary effects like constant auroras, compasses going wild, and a spike in ambient radiation (some scientists suggest this effect is the cause for the punctuated nature of evolution… but whatever).

Oh well… maybe I’ll get started on it.  Let’s see:

Beneath a Dancing Sky…