I liked the book but I had a bit of a problem with the basis for the plot which I will explain after the review.
David Graham's Down to a Sunless Sea explores the issues involved in a world without energy, gone mad, that crosses the line into nuclear holocaust.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The story is told in the first person singular by Jonah Scott, a British pilot who has arrived in New York on his regular flight from London. The United States has collapsed into the equivalent of a bankrupt third-world country, the reason being that the U.S. used up all of its oil reserves - including the Strategic Petroleum Reserve - and became unable to buy more oil. Britain has held onto its oil and as a result that country is more-or-less "normal", i.e. civilized.
Jonah has to negotiate with a taxicab driver to take him and his girlfriend Kate, one of the stewardesses, into a secured apartment that a friend of his allows him to use when he's in New York, rather than even think of attempting to walk through New York City. The city has essentially descended into the status of a bombed-out London or Berlin during World War II or Saigon after South Vietnam fell, as warring gangs fight for turf in a city without energy or fuel.
At the apartment, Jonah cooks dinner for himself and Kate with food he brought with him all the way from London, which is ridiculously normal in comparison to this place of horror. Two men, pretending to be police, attempt to break in to steal food, and as one of them is about to kill the security guard and maintenance man who was called when they arrived (and killed the other fake police officer before he could kill Jonah), Jonah kills the remaining one.
Jonah's co-pilot later arrives with his girlfriend, a resident of New York, having gotten the cab driver that brought Jonah earlier to take him there. Jonah and the co-pilot decide, despite the extreme penalties involved, to sneak the co-pilot's lady and the superintendent who saved Jonah's life, on the plane with them and take them along to London, rather than have them continue to stay in the hellhole of New York. They are aided by a military man at the airport who is grateful for a favor Jonah did for him earlier.
The book then shows the desperation and fear of the world as global politics change with the U.S. essentially out of the picture. The use by Israel of a nuclear weapon upon an Arab country in retailation for its poisoning of Israel's water supply, triggers a worldwide nuclear holocaust while the plane is en route to London. Unable to go on to Europe due to the fallout from the bombs that have just fallen, it also is unable to go back to the United States as New York City has also been nuked. The crew desperately attempt to find a place to land their plane of what may be the last surviving people on earth.
The title of the book is from one of the lines of the poem "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Coleridge.
Here is a discussion I had:
"I thought it was good but I felt the idea for the plot was a bit thin, that Great Britain would hold onto its oil, while the U.S. ran out of all of its and as a result the country collapsed. It showed how the U.S. would look as society disintegrated into the equivalent of a bankrupt third-world country. A well-written book and an excellent plot device, but probably unlikely."
"I thought it was a very plausible scenario, Paul, why do you think it was unlikely?"
"The U.S. was, at the time the book was written, importing more than half its oil anyway. And Japan imports 90% of its oil; neither country has problems buying it. It's something like what Robert Heinlein said once, if the price of hamburger goes from $1.50 a pound to $5.00 a pound overnight, it's an inconvenience. If you can't get hamburger at all, then it's a disaster. If the price of oil goes up, it drives out those who can't afford it and the supply equalizes."
"But what if you had a major dry up in supply, as the story said?"
"Estimates are that Saudi Arabia alone has over 100 years of supply. And we keep finding new ways to get oil out of wells that are marginal. As the supply started to run low - and remember, the system that is used to ship oil has a six-week backlog, it takes six weeks from the time any oil supply is reduced (or increased) - before it shows up, there's time to raise prices and drive out marginal customers who can't afford it. That then encourages opening of wells too expensive to operate at the previous low price. That's why when OPEC severely raised oil prices it eventually caused a glut on the market because it encouraged exploration now that oil was more valuable, it encouraged more oil drilling and uncapping of wells that were more expensive to operate, but were now affordable at the higher price for crude.
"We had gas lines because of government distribution mandates and price controls. When both conditions ceased, even extreme fluctuations in price did not cause shortages because refiners were free to raise (or lower) prices to match competitors and to make money, plus they could distribute fuel where it was needed most, not where government orders said it had to go or what price they could charge.
"If you have a free market in energy, supplies will meet demand. Even the book mentioned attempts to use coal as a substitute although the effort was going to take a long time. It's only when someone tries to put their thumb on the scale and artificially change things that you have a problem, either because someone tries to corner the market - which almost never works - or because the government steps in and either nationalizes the system, which eliminates competitive forces because it becomes politically unacceptable for a government agency to allow prices to rise (or it encourages corruption by allowing the government ministers who operate it to use a lucrative system to line their own pockets which means prices won't fall, either), or the government imposes price controls on private companies, which does the same thing, cuts off supply.
"If the price of something goes up radically, it's usually temporary until the market corrects the problem, if it is possible by new suppliers stepping in, then the price usually comes down and stabilizes. There are almost always other choices. Maybe they'll develop an alcohol type fuel from crops, and something to inexpensively convert gasoline engines to use it. A high price is only an inconvenience, it may mean some people have to do without something else or use less in the interim. It's only if you can't buy oil at all (or the market isn't allowed to correct itself) that it's a real problem. And Desert Storm showed what the U.S. could do to any country that might threaten world oil supplies. Of course, the author couldn't know that at the time, even I didn't expect the world's military to cooperate so much or do that well, and he had to have the U.S. collapse in order to make the story work.
"That's why I said, it was an excellent plot device and a well-written book but as it was I saw the scenario unlikely."
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