Product Description
This tale began in 2006 as the autobiography of my fictional great-grandson, Sam, yet-to-be-born in 2015.
Sam would live through the greatest cultural transition ever experienced by the human race. I encased his memoirs in a short story telling of an expedition of Neu-human archeologists from a thousand years in the future, 3100 A.D., who return to the Pacific Coast searching for their roots. They find Sam's recorded life story and hear a first-hand account of the “Great Collapse” of human society as they had come to call it.
Sam Hardy's life begins at the peak of the tremendous spurt of technology and social advance in the second decade of the 21st century, powered by what many still thought at the time would be an infinite supply of energy and a stable world of commerce and trade. Sam writes the history of humanity's course through the transitions that result from expected natural disasters, resource depletion, climate change, over-population, and economic and cultural failure as his family and tribe struggle to learn to live in a new world of limited resources and crashing dreams.
There are many possible worlds our progeny could face, but in my mind the world described here unfortunately seems to be one of the more probable. My goal is to tell of some of the changes that can be expected as our society searches for its future, and as those technologies and resources on which our civilization depend fall away.
This is a tale of retrospection, as seen through the eyes of someone who lives through it and remembers that there Was a Time When things were so different. And yet, in Sam's final words, there is still hope:
“So this is goodbye. Maybe I have been wrong in my pessimism and damnation of humanity, and there really is a future for mankind on this planet. At least I have joined a group that is beginning the steps to future recovery. God willing, I will have the chance to watch that future blossom. I pray this band I join will build the roots of a better civilization than what my peers built for the last one.”
Sam would live through the greatest cultural transition ever experienced by the human race. I encased his memoirs in a short story telling of an expedition of Neu-human archeologists from a thousand years in the future, 3100 A.D., who return to the Pacific Coast searching for their roots. They find Sam's recorded life story and hear a first-hand account of the “Great Collapse” of human society as they had come to call it.
Sam Hardy's life begins at the peak of the tremendous spurt of technology and social advance in the second decade of the 21st century, powered by what many still thought at the time would be an infinite supply of energy and a stable world of commerce and trade. Sam writes the history of humanity's course through the transitions that result from expected natural disasters, resource depletion, climate change, over-population, and economic and cultural failure as his family and tribe struggle to learn to live in a new world of limited resources and crashing dreams.
There are many possible worlds our progeny could face, but in my mind the world described here unfortunately seems to be one of the more probable. My goal is to tell of some of the changes that can be expected as our society searches for its future, and as those technologies and resources on which our civilization depend fall away.
This is a tale of retrospection, as seen through the eyes of someone who lives through it and remembers that there Was a Time When things were so different. And yet, in Sam's final words, there is still hope:
“So this is goodbye. Maybe I have been wrong in my pessimism and damnation of humanity, and there really is a future for mankind on this planet. At least I have joined a group that is beginning the steps to future recovery. God willing, I will have the chance to watch that future blossom. I pray this band I join will build the roots of a better civilization than what my peers built for the last one.”
About the Author
Sam Penny's avocation is to research a scientific scenarios of a large catastrophe that affects humankind and to tell people of what to expect using fiction, writing novels that describe what people who live through such events will see and feel. Born on a farm in Oklahoma before WWII, Penny entered the University of Oklahoma at the age of 17 and graduated with a BS degree in Engineering Physics. He went to the University of Illinois to earn a MS degree in Physics in 1960. He accepted a position at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley as a computer systems programmer, working in the Luis Alvarez Physics group. Alvarez won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1968. In 1970 Penny and a fellow physicist/programmer formed a "start-up business" in the computer software industry. Penny was the CEO of the partnership as it grew and moved into the micro-computer hardware business. In 1981 the group merged with SBE, Inc. to go public. Penny left to try other business ventures and joined Exploration Logging, Inc in Sacramento to manage their software development of systems for logging oil and gas well drilling. He returned to SBE in 1992 in product development and marketing. Penny retired as the VP Engineering from SBE in 1998. He and his wife began tour the USA full-time in a Portable Home (PH), also know as an RV. In our case, this is a fifth-wheel trailer. This offered a means for doing on-site research for the 7.9 Scenario, a story about what would it be like if the same earthquake that struck the New Madrid Fault under the Mississippi River in 1811 struck in today's world. Two novels resulted from that research, Memphis 7.9 (revised) and Broken River, both of which have been successful sellers on Amazon since 2005. Penny became interested in the impacts of climate change, resource limitations, and population overshoot and did considerable research on possible scenarios. His latest literary effort is a new novel, Was a Time When, that tells of the western USA during the remainder of the 21st century. Penny's current efforts will be focused upon the effort to market his new book. He is looking into what his next research project will be. There is more to write.
