Please leave the moon alone.

I recently finished The Dead and the Gone, the cheery sequel to Life As We Knew It. Both are stories of What Happens After catastrophic climate change caused by an asteroid crashing into the moon and altering its orbit. With the increased gravitational pull from the moon being closer to Earth, enormous tides flood coastal areas, volcanoes erupt, ash causes mass crop failure ... and then to top it off there is a flu epidemic.

the dead and the gone
the dead and the gone
Susan Beth Pfeffer
What I took away from this is that my emergency box is WAY understocked (in both books the entire second half
Exodus
Exodus
is essentially rationing canned goods gotten through smart planning or corpse robbing) and that -- again -- I am total zombie fodder. I thought it was both wise and maybe cowardly to make the environmental disaster something external and both unlikely and unavoidable (an asteroid) instead of the much more likely global warming scenario (a la another YA disaster novel where the flood is totally man-made). But then these would have been different, more political novels, instead of survival tales. And please! Nothing is going to crash into the moon any time soon, so we're fine, right?

Wait, what's this I hear from NASA? They are planning to crash a huge satellite into the moon? And "the resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles"?

Well then. Looks like I'd better find my can opener.


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Kirsten
I can't read books like this--am getting stomach-achey just thinking about it. I live in California (earthquake central) and yet I can't seem to get myself to put my emergency box together either. I even have the Red Cross list. Am in denial. Ah well, Nigel has us well-provisioned with Lipton tea, jars of peanut butter, and cans of chicken broth, so we'll be living large for a little while.
Corndog Queen
I had a big old plastic jug of water, until it burst and flooded the side of my garage. So, well, I guess my emergency plan now is to drive to Fresno and live off of the largess of your home. I will bring grasshopper brownies, if at all possible. You know, I want to contribute, too...

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