Then a religious cult comes marching into town. There's a wealthy landowner setting himself up as a benevolent (for now) feudal lord, and meanwhile trade down the Hudson is becoming harder and more dangerous every year.

Most of the conflicts are social the people of Union Grove have been getting by all right, but there's a colony of bikers and trailer trash down by the dump and general store, ruled by the sort of violent psychopath who always ends up being the Big Bad in these scenarios. But this isn't a survivalist story or an ode to preppers. Set in Union Grove, New York, after bombs have destroyed most American cities and the government, the theme of World Made By Hand is how people would have to return to pre-modern methods of survival and relearn the skills that most modern people don't have in the event of a post-oil world. A powerful tale of love, loss, violence, and desperation, World Made by Hand is also lyrical and tender, a surprising story of a new America struggling to be born - a story more relevant now than ever. This is the story of Robert Earle and his fellow townspeople and what happens to them one summer in a country that has changed profoundly. The townspeople's challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers, no longer polluted, and replenished with fish.

There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren't sure. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown.

In Union Grove, a little town in upstate New York, the future is nothing like people thought it would be. In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge. In The Long Emergency, celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production combined with climate change had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business.

A world made by hand