Why is Big Sky Country the location for my novel, Big Sky Falling? The short answer is, “Why not?” The longer answer has to do with odds of survival if it all comes crashing down.
In an earlier post, I wrote about the list of who I would want with me in a collapse. That brought me to the question of where I would want to be when it happened.
No hope for city slickers
My novel (I’ve included a very brief plot teaser elsewhere on my website) deals with a societal collapse brought on by a simultaneous economic crash and pandemic flu. In such a situation, the odds of survival are inversely proportional to population density—the more people around you when the manure hits the oscillating air circulator, the greater the odds of you assuming room temperature.
Almost everyone living in a major metropolitan area will be exquisitely screwed in a rapidly developing collapse—in the scenario laid out in my novel, if the mobs don’t get you, the person who sneezes in your face will. People living within several hundred miles of the cities won’t fare much better when the survivors come streaming out like the Mongol hordes.
Long story short, I didn’t want to write a book about people scrounging scraping by in the ruins of a big city. Hollywood and other novelists have done that scenario to death. That leaves the country.
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside
I’m sure you’ve seen the NASA pictures of what the US looks like from space at night. If everything goes to hell, the safest places will be in the dark places. Montana, as you’ll notice on the map, is nice and dark and far away from major population centers.
What’s more, it’s abundant in resources and sparsely populated. How sparse, you ask? Montana is slightly larger than Germany, but has slightly more than one million residents. Put another way, it is larger than Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana combined, with the population of Chicago’s two northernmost collar counties. Put yet another way, there are about two head of cattle for every one human being.
And last but not least, I set my novel in Montana because it’s one hell of a lot more picturesque than where I live now.
What about you? Where would you want to bug out to if civilization crashes down?