Read the details of a scenario describing a possible Great Collapse of the 21st Century civilization: when all of advanced technology breaks down, when starvation and pandemics decimate the population, when vital fuel and mineral resources disappear, when the human race almost becomes extinct. Read about how there Was a Time When things were better. Author Sam Penny (aka the Prudent RVer) has written a series of disaster scenario novels telling of possible worlds facing humanity in the future. His first two novels of the 7.9 scenario, Memphis 7.9 (Revised) and Broken River, described the effects of an earthquake that could happen today with the magnitude of the seismic disaster that struck the New Madrid Fault Zone on December 16, 1811. His latest work tells of young archeologists from the 31st Century who find the recorded memoirs of Sam Hardy. Hardy and his family are among the few who survived the Great Collapse of civilization in the 21st Century. As the archeologists search for more artifacts from that period, they listen to Hardy's memoirs and compare their lives with those of the previous millenium. They hear of the time when all advanced technology broke down, pandemics and starvation decimated the population, vital fuel and mineral resources disappeared, and the human race almost became extinct. Hardy's memoirs are based upon one possible scenario of what might happen to the world we live in. It is a cautionary tale, a warning of what could be the fate of the human race if it does not awaken from its self-destructive behavior that is destroying the environment and begin to think rationally about how to create a new world that can survive the trials ahead of us. The book is an invitation to join the discussion of how to survive in the evolving world of the 21st Century and how to make our future better than how bad it could be.
About the Author: Sam Penny's avocation is to research a scientific scenarios of a large catastrophe that affects humankind and to tell people of what to expect using fiction, writing novels that describe what people who live through such events will see and feel. Born on a farm in Oklahoma before WWII, Penny entered the University of Oklahoma at the age of 17 and graduated with a BS degree in Engineering Physics. He went to the University of Illinois to earn a MS degree in Physics in 1960. He accepted a position at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at UC Berkeley as a computer systems programmer, working in the Luis Alvarez Physics group. Alvarez won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1968. In 1970 Penny and a fellow physicist/programmer formed a "start-up business" in the computer software industry. Penny was the CEO of the partnership as it grew and moved into the micro-computer hardware business. In 1981 the group merged with SBE, Inc. to go public. Penny left to try other business ventures and joined Exploration Logging, Inc in Sacramento to manage their software development of systems for logging oil and gas well drilling. He returned to SBE in 1992 in product development and marketing. Penny retired as the VP Engineering from SBE in 1998. He and his wife began tour the USA full-time in a Portable Home (PH), also know as an RV. In our case, this is a fifth-wheel trailer. This offered a means for doing on-site research for the 7.9 Scenario, a story about what would it be like if the same earthquake that struck the New Madrid Fault under the Mississippi River in 1811 struck in today's world. Two novels resulted from that research, Memphis 7.9 (revised) and Broken River, both of which have been successful sellers on Amazon since 2005. Penny became interested in the impacts of climate change, resource limitations, and population overshoot and did considerable research on possible scenarios. His latest literary effort is a new novel, Was a Time When, that tells of the western USA during the remainder of the 21st century. Penny's current efforts will be focused upon the effort to market his new book. He is looking into what his next research project will be. There is more to write.