Seven Plot-Friendly Ways to Spur Societal Collapse - Reactor

I’ve recently gone down a rabbit hole, obsessively reading and watching works about the Late Bronze Age Collapse: a time when civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East suffered a near simultaneous implosion. Governments fell, trade networks collapsed, and some cultures lost writing¹. Why did this happen? Ask that and you may go down the rabbit hole too.

Historian and archaeologist Eric H. Cline thinks he knows why this happened, and also how to avoid it. In a recent video, “1177 BC: The vanishing of the first globalized world,” he lists seven pointers for cultures who want to avoid social collapse. I guess that’s fine for people who have become accustomed to enjoying regular meals, living in unburned homes, and not being stabbed to death by rampaging Sea People. You know, squares.

But if you’re an author, you may look at that list and wonder if it could be a plot generator. Societal collapse can make for interesting reading! Aren’t we here for that?

All we need to do is imagine societies that do the exact opposite of the strategies Cline suggests. You might not get a full-blown apocalypse—life might even improve, at least for some—but the results cannot help but be entertaining.

Cline’s list:

1. Have multiple contingency plans
2. Cultivate resilience to invasion
3. Be self-sufficient without alienating allies
4. Be innovative and inventive
5. Prepare for extreme weather
6. Have a secure water supply
7. Keep the working class happy

The AntiCline list is the above, with the word “Don’t” appended to the beginning of each sentence. It’s astonishingly easy to come up with examples for each².

DON’T have multiple contingency plans

One fictional example of a society that needed at least one more contingency plan than it actually had is the America of Michael Swanwick’s In the Drift. The Three Mile Island event spreads radioactive fallout across the Eastern Seaboard. Cities are abandoned and the US fragments. Recovery takes decades. Not fun, but very plot-friendly.

DON’T cultivate resilience to invasion

The nations of the world are understandably ill-prepared to resist aerial invasions in H.G. Wells’ The War in the Air, since aeronautical warfare is an entirely novel development. To make matters far worse, in the course of the novel it turns out that air forces are easy to produce and impossible to defend against… with the unpleasant catch that air forces cannot occupy, only destroy. Result: the end of civilization as we know it.

DON’T be self-sufficient without alienating allies

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, interstellar travel is dependent on Spice, a drug with a single known source, the planet Arrakis. As one does when supply disruptions could kneecap the galactic civilization, the empire has not only not developed substitutes for Spice, they’ve spent centuries brutalizing Arrakis’ Fremen, laying the foundation for some suitably charismatic visionary to use imperial dependence on Spice against the empire.

DON’T be innovative and inventive

In H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, only Styphon’s priests know how to make black gunpowder. They’ve used this closely guarded secret to make themselves the power brokers of an alternate North America. Efforts to reverse engineer gunpowder are presumably strongly discouraged. This very sensible approach has at least one significant flaw, which is that as soon as someone—a cunning alchemist, a disgruntled priest, a Pennsylvania cop accidentally dragged across timelines—reveals the secret, Styphon’s international order rapidly implodes³.

DON’T prepare for extreme weather

Kate Wilhelm’s Juniper Time is shaped by a development for which no government appears to have made sufficient plans. The entire planet is gripped by massive drought. The cause is unclear but no nation escapes the disruptive effects: famine, mass migration, societal disruption, and collapse (at least on local levels).

DON’T Have a secure water supply

In Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the Earth is (rather implausibly) dependent on lunar farms, which are in turn dependent on lunar ice mines. The problem is lunar ice is very much a non-renewable resource whose limits are fast being reached. The solution on which those running the Moon have landed is to ignore the problem. Result: the collapse of the old lunar order as desperate Lunarians finally rise up.

DON’T keep the working class happy

African American slaves in Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain are unpaid, abused, and terrorized. The slavers’ intent is to keep slaves too cowed to object. The result is a population highly motivated to rise up and drive out their oppressors, should the opportunity ever present itself. Thanks to Harriet Tubman⁴, the successful raid on Harper’s Ferry provides that opportunity. Result: not only does independent Nova Africa replace the slave states, and not only is the USA itself ultimately overthrown, but the imperialist world order itself collapses in the aftermath.

Admittedly, all that is good for the people at the bottom, which is to say the vast majority of the human species, but I imagine people like Cecil Rhodes, Lorrin A. Thurston, and King Leopold II died angry. …Also a good result.

The above seven are just a few of the possibilities offered by cultural AntiClines⁵. SFF abounds with examples I could have used. The odds are very good that I’ve missed your favourites. Comments are below.

1. Writing would have been practiced largely by castes of scribes, castes dependent on government and commercial support. ↩︎
2. The obvious option is to list five works set during the Late Bronze Age Collapse. There are least two very famous works, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Even with a very generous definition of five, two is not five. So I think I’ll go with seven current examples. How hard could that be? Later: not hard. ↩︎
3. “But surely removing priestly boots from the necks of violent, highly competitive aristocrats is a good thing?” you ask. Styphon was motivated to keep conflicts going to ensure demand for gunpowder. At the same time, they needed to keep conflicts low-level, as apocalypse tends to undermine demand. How sure can we be that what followed the fall of Styphon’s international order wasn’t a recapitulation of the Thirty Years War? ↩︎
4. “But what of John Brown?” you ask. He gets a lot of credit for what is actually Tubman’s strategic and tactical insight. The lesson here is ambitious men should be mindful for opportunities to upstage brilliant women. ↩︎
5. Remember to CamelCase or geologists will get confused. ↩︎