"Alas, Brave New Babylon" new fiction by Matt Bracken

Western Rifle Shooters Association ^ | August 26, 2013 | Matthew Bracken

[Kartographer]

Preppers’ PING!!

[real saxophonist]

bump

[LucianOfSamasota]

I like it!

Thanks!

[Starstruck]

Have your other books on Kindle. Thanks for this.

[verga]

Might be good for the Preper list

[CodeToad]

Bumpitty bump bump!

Good job!

[Ghost of SVR4]

I enjoyed the read, thanks for posting.

[Blueflag]

Thanks Kart - read it on Saturday ;-)

I put a review/comment of it on The Western Rifle site.

[Ghost of SVR4]

You can do a LOT more with potatoes if you go vertical.
Try this out some time. The neat part about it is you can peel away the base and start eating ‘taters while the top wrungs are still growing.

http://lifehacker.com/5202849/grow-100-lbs-of-potatoes-in-4-square-feet

[Bon of Babble]

I’m at work now and only got to read the first part, unfortunately — it’s really good!! Well-written, scary but believable and most likely exactly what will happen when the economy crashes.

Will read the rest when I get home later and pass it along.

[zeugma]

Thanks for posting. Bump for later.

[Mother Mary]

WOW!!!

Excellent story. THANK YOU. I will share with others.

[golux]

Awesome! Bump for later read. (At some point I’d love to know the wheres, whats, and whys of that tower...)

[LucyT]

Alas, Brave New Babylon” new fiction by Matt Bracken

"When the ad hoc “town council” voted that cannibalism would not be considered a crime if the body was already dead when found, I took it as my cue to leave for deeper in the mountains.

"How had it happened so fast?"

Powerful story. Check it out.

Thanks, Travis McGee

-

[Also see #13.]

[shalom aleichem]

A.B. -

Thought you should see this

Shalom

[GeronL]

You can stack tires and grow potatoes that way, it might increase the calories per square foot

[MHGinTN]

It is my personal opinion that great writing has passages which leap out at your mind when you reach them. Here a few from which I got a sharp mental slap!

Billions of people believed that Homo sapiens had achieved a permanent higher station since the retreat of the last great ice age.

In the end, we smote ourselves with our hubris, believing that we were replacing God’s wisdom with our own.

We believed that we had created a Brave New World, where candy-cane lies and Santa Claus promises could trump hard reality at the election booth every two years. But if all good things must come to an end, how much sooner must the corrupt and the unreal collapse into rubble and tears? Imbalances so great, in a machine running at such a high speed, could only result in calamity when the connecting struts gave way and the beast flew apart.

The new Babylon was where mankind gorged its morbidly obese body and deconstructed spirit on endless food and limitless pleasure, grew like a maggot fattening upon the bloating corpse of Western Civilization, and then burst and devoured itself in a final death-feast.

The primary lesson I have learned over the past three years is that it is much harder to build and sustain a stable and functioning civilization (even an admittedly imperfect one) than it is to destroy a pretty damn good civilization in the name of establishing utopian perfection by government decree.

In my humble opinion, Matt, you are indeed a great writer, developing. At my age, it has been a great pleasure to watch your writing become all the more expressive and spot on with our epoch. Would that our fellow Americans could absorb the nuggets you offer to us so freely.

[Hop A Long Cassidy]

Great story! I’ll be looking for your others later today.

[Norm Lenhart]

Awesome story Matt/Travis ;)

Pretty much how it will happen. Now watch it get around and the ‘oh no thats just a redneck fantasy’ crowd try to pooh pooh it off.

Except if anyone thinks about it for more than 2 min, there’s not one thing in there that wouldn’t happen exactly as described.

[Billthedrill]

McGee BTT, as always.