James Howard Kunstler's New Novel: World Made by Hand

Orion magazine has a review by John Galvin of James Howard Kunstler's new novel, World Made by Hand.  An excerpt:

Islamic Fundamentalists have blown up Los Angeles and DC. That puts the global economy into a smoking tailspin. A flu pandemic has wiped out a good third of the population, maybe more. Oil, or access to what’s left of it anyway, is as good as gone. The Chinese have reportedly landed a man on the moon, but that’s probably more legend than fact in these paranoid times. The federal government has retreated to Minnesota, of all places (because who would attack them up there?), and with resources limited, race wars have erupted across the South. The globe is no longer flat (sorry, Tom Friedman!). It’s as round and as large as it’s ever been.

Such is the fictionalized world envisioned by James Howard Kunstler in his new book, World Made by Hand. This isn’t a sci-fi view into a future one hundred or fifty years away. It’s anti–sci-fi, set maybe ten to twenty years out.

Link: World Made by Hand.

Kunstler is best known for his non-fiction.  His most recent is The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.