At the Walls of the Last City
Madeleine Robins September 9th, 2006
One of the world-building games I play with myself (and played with my class of 8th graders when I taught world building) involves asking a deceptively simple question: In an “after the apocalypse” scenario, you come to the walled city where the last vestiges of civilization have gathered. You have to persuade them to let you in. What skills or talents can you offer to convince them to admit you?
The rules are:
1) you need to know something about what the city is like, so that you know what they need (and no tailoring the city to skills you already have).
2) you can only offer skills or talents or knowledge that you actually have (in other words, if you don’t know how to perform a field amputation, you can’t say that you do).
Some valuable questions to ask yourself:
* How long since the Dire Event are you showing up at the wall asking for entry?
* Have most perishable stores–by which I don’t just mean canned peaches and gasoline, but manufactured goods like shoes and socks–been used up?
* Are source materials available? by which I mean, for example, cloth, yarn, leather for shoes, wood for building, etc.
* where is this walled city? What sort of wildlife, both aquatic and land-dwelling, might be available for food or resources?
* what level of technology remains viable? This ties into the first question; if it’s three months since Dire Event, maybe your city has enough solar power to keep refrigeration going–but they sure could use engineers who know how to keep the solar cells working.
* what is the world outside the walls like? is it utterly blasted, or is agriculture possible?
Once I decide what kind of world, and what kind of walled city, I’m positing, I can think about what skills I can offer. My list usually includes the following:
* cooking
* baking
* sewing
* pattern-making
* knitting
* laying a hardwood floor
* making herbal liniments, etc. (see cooking, above)
* weaving
* stringing a four-hettle loom
* basic carpentry
* organization
I could probably come up with more. The question is: what’s your walled city like? and what’s on your list?
writing fiction - Hell, no, that’s useless. Clear away from the gate or we open fire!
Lois, don’t make me come over there…
What’s so special about this gated community that I want in anyway? I’m perfectly happy living in my hut with my mutated cats.
I can take care of small children without murdering them. I think that’s a big point in my favor.
As for other skills, I think it depends on who is in the city and who isn’t as to how valuable they would find me. If I’m fortunate, I would have had time to grab a couple of the cookbooks from my family’s shelves and a cartload of padded chests containing canning jars and lids and kettles, and associated paraphenalia.
Food preservation is going to be a very valuable skill in that situation. Woe betide someone who breaks an irreplacable glass jar, too!
There is so much we take for granted as cheap, easily obtainable, basic stuff that would suddenly be very hard to find.
Fascinating exercise, Mad! The kids must have loved it when you used it in class.
Canning and food preservation! I forgot to add them to my list.
People who can do pottery well would be useful too, to replace those Mason jars that will, inevitably, break.
Kit, some of the kids loved it. Some of them were irked when I insisted that they actually think about the consequences of their choices. Which was the object of the exercise.
Mad, that’s a whole topic in itself!
However, I would have loved having a teacher like you in high school. Sounds like a fun exercise.
It’s sad that my number one skill isn’t on the list! I’m a people person. I know how to get people excited about ideas and how to get them to work together toward a common goal. And (I know this sounds odd), but I know how to get people to like and trust me, especially the difficult types.
Otherwise, I am pretty useless. I can be easily outdone as a cook, a carpenter, a gardener, etc. The most likely situation is that I would gather all of the other people who were outside the wall and we’d go build our own city. Does that count?
I like the mutated cats. Although naturally being me I would want mutated dogs instead of cats, but the feeling is the same.
I also think the ability to get people to work together is a crucial skill.
Oh, organization and people management is an absolutely crucial skill. It’s one of mine, too–I tend to call it stage management. The only rub would be whether the people inside the city would get how important a skill that is.
Mutated cats sound okay. Also mutated dogs. But what do we eat?
Well, Erin, I think your skill would be greatly useful. Effective leaders and motivators are always in short supply.
There are a lot of scenarios to consider, depending on how long it’s been since The Dire Event took place. If it’s been only a few days, this could be a place where the survivors are still so deeply in shock that no one is doing anything - bringing in some leadership to get them moving would be ideal. If it’s been a little while since D-Day and people are starting to shake off the shock, there may be several factions vying to decide who is in charge and which direction the colony will go - you could use your talents on behalf of whichever faction suits you (or compensates you) best. If the colony is established enough to have a government, you could very well go into it and become an advocate for (or against) the people.
You could offer to help organize a wide variety of initiatives - relief efforts, housing projects, restoration plans for destroyed buildings, preservation tasks for the things that weren’t destroyed, like books or music or art.
Now, if only I had a useful skill to pass on. Uh, I got to level 70 in EverQuest… does that count? (Hey, if nothing else, I’m prime breeding stock!)
Depending on the location of the city, probably mutated corn or wheat. I’m guessing a grain of some kind, assuming the ecosystem isn’t too stressed, will be a staple.
As for what skills I might have to offer, I’ve been a professonal organizer for a while now, so I’d join the leadership council that seems to be forming. (Assuming they’ll have me.)
Scarily enough, in terms of pragmatic skills, I have very basic security skills. They are a result of a long ago dabbling in Japanese and Chinese martial arts. That includes a basic sense for tactics and strategy. Hopefully the city won’t be facing a barbarian horde any time soon though…
Someone has to dig latrines, I guess….
As impractical as it sounds, every civilization needs/wants entertainers, jugglers, artists, musicians, actors, storytellers, etc. Even the denizens of the last city on Earth need to blow off a little steam now and again.
I would also guess that the city would want a historian and/or a scribe to track what’s gone before so that the law makers and leaders can avoid remaking past mistakes. I’m quite good at taking notes because I have a pretty shoddy memory. But I don’t have any clue how to make paper or ink.
I can make gunpowder and supervise the building of a trebuchet.
Since I can’t do all of the other really useful survival skills, at least I can help protect those who do have them — and perhaps they will feed me in return.
I know some Japanese. When all the useful equipment starts breaking down and all they have are manuals in Japanese, they’ll be wanting me!
The strongest skills that I could offer are the ability to organize information so that it’s easily accessible, and a skill that I call “herding cats” or the ability to get a lot of reluctant people to get off their asses and do what’s needed.
Other than that, a fairly standard set of skills:
sewing, cooking, cleaning, labor, basic carpentry, some animal husbandry, basic gardening… Like that.
Change “Mutated cats sound okay. Also mutated dogs. But what do we eat?”
to “But what do we eat? Mutated cats sound okay. Also mutated dogs.”
…
Ewww, gross. And that’s my skill: taking perfectly innocent words and phrases and taking them the wrong way. Not terribly useful.
Let’s see, what else can I do? Hmm…O.K., none of my skills would be useful in a post-apocalyptic world. (”Hey, anybody need someone to calculate the surface area of an object created by rotating a curve around an axis?” Er, no, not really.) I could be the person who helps keep alive the useless knowledge and teaches future generations so that the world doesn’t have to start from scratch. Very very useful, in the long run, but in the short run: I’d be considered a source of meat when the cityfolk run out of mutant (ex-)pets.
Actually, being able to do that sort of math might be very useful for building and engineering stuff. I can do rough design/invention of things, but my math skills are truly lousy. You and I together make a complete inventor of sorts.
One point of this exercise is to make you recast what you know of yourself in a different way. You gotta believe that the Hordes of Darkness are going to get you if you can’t sweet talk your way in. You’ll note that, while proof-reading and teaching are skills I possess, they aren’t skills I listed. But if your Walled City is past the point of rebuilding and needs jugglers and copyeditors, that’s fair.
I do know how to make a backstrap loom, and I can find dye plants and use a couple of basic mordants — assuming we have any salt around in large quantities. What I don’t know in the cloth-making department is how to spin fiber into yarn.
I wonder how long it would take for “those who can organize others” to turn into a ruling class, particularly with an alliance with “those who can provide security” ?
Found this today and it reminded me of this conversation. Might be useful to others.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,351113,00.jpg