UNWINNABLE WEEKLY ISSUE FORTY-FOUR I’m just here for the gasoline. Copyright © 2015 by Unwinnable LLC All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Unwinnable LLC does not claim copyright of the screenshots and promotional imagery herein. Copyright of all screenshots within this publication are owned by their respective companies Unwinnable 820 Chestnut Street Kearny, NJ 07032 www.unwinnable.com For more information, email [email protected] Editor in Chief Stu Horvath Managing Editor Owen R. Smith Senior Editor Steve Haske Design Stu Horvath UNWINNABLE WEEKLY ISSUE FORTY-FOUR Contributors Joe DeMartino Michael Edwards Stu Horvath Kenneth Lucas Ed Coleman CONTENTS From the Desk of the EIC Bad Shit by Joe DeMartino Mad Max, Now More Than Ever by Michael Edwards Eschatology by Stu Horvath A Brief Apocalyptic Bibliography Riding in the Wasteland by Ken Lucas Surviving the Apocalypse? Fuck that Shit! by Ed Coleman Biographies and Illustrations From the Desk of the Editor in Chief Hi there, I have been trying (ow) to write this (ow) for hours, but carpal tunnel or writer’s cramp or arthritis or some jerk with a voodoo doll is (OW) making it difficult. One more example of why I wouldn’t last ten minutes in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, I guess. I suppose this means I have to keep it brief. As has happened a few times in the past, we wound up with an accidental theme issue this week. Within, we discuss the horrors and hilarity and romance of the end of the world, just in time for the release of Mad Max: Fury Road, a film that by nearly all accounts revolutionizes the action movie and leaves other post-apocalyptic stories in the irradiated dust. First up, Joe DeMartino gives us nightmares by running down some truly awful ways the world could end without us having a hope of stopping it. Michael Edwards explains why the release of Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t just good, it is necessary. I pick at the reasons the apocalypse hold such appeal in popular culture (and provide a lengthy apocalyptic bibliography). Kenneth Lucas gets amped for cars, Fury Road and the forthcoming Mad Max videogame game. Finally, Ed Coleman leaves us (literally?) on a weirdly positive note, explaining why he wouldn’t want survive the end of the world. Special thanks to Aaron Lee Hawn for providing all the art for this issue. His desert landscapes are really something else. Make sure to check out his work (links in the credits at the end of the issue). (ow) That’s it for me. Try to survive the weekend without setting off a nuke, OK? Send your letters to [email protected] - I want to know how you like Fury Road. I’ll print the best of them. Stu Horvath, Jersey City (ow), New Jersey May 14, 2015 Bad Shit By Joe DeMartino ost post-apocalyptic stories are, at their core, somewhat optimistic. The Mnukes have fallen, the zombies are rampaging and popular fashion tastes are trending toward skull necklaces and assless chaps, but somehow, life still exists – and may even be flourishing. A nuclear war doesn’t prevent humanity from returning to the stars in A Canticle for Liebowitz, nor does it stop nation-states from reforming in Fallout. Even the Mad Max films feature towns and the trappings of cultural development. If a little bit of life survives, they contend, it’ll only be a matter of time before we continue our grand march of progress. The following scenarios do not allow for such a rosy outlook: RELATIVISTIC KILL VEHICLES “The more efficient a reaction drive, the more effective a weapon it makes.” - “The Warriors,” by Larry Niven Most every story involving an alien invasion or war in space has, in large part, lied to you. Something as complex as an Independence Day-level invasion or a Death Star is not necessary if your goal is to simply erase a particular planet from the star map. Civilizations capable of engaging in interstellar travel would need to be able to harness enormous amounts of energy, and with that ability comes the possibility of using said energy as a weapon. In short, if you’re able to move a ship at the speed of light, you’re able to move a missile at the speed of light, and anything moving at the speed of light is going to apply rather a lot of force to whatever it strikes. Even the word “missile” here is misleading – the ideal relativistic kill vehicle, as such a nightmare weapon would be called, could be something as simple as a small asteroid. Say a particularly nasty alien race decided that they’d rather not see what happens when a species as vicious as humanity takes to the stars. All they’d really need to do is strap a big enough engine to a big enough rock, point that rock at Earth (or where Earth will be when it arrives), turn it on, and then basically forget about it. Moving at the speed of light, something the size of, say, a tub of ice cream would be more than enough to wipe out a major city and cause devastating environmental damage. Scale it up to a car to wipe out a country, a city to make the planet totally unusable, and a state to crack it in half like a walnut. Even worse, since our theoretical killer rock is moving at the speed of light, you literally cannot see it coming. As soon as your eyes are able to perceive it, it’s already there. Barring technology far beyond what we’ve been able to reasonably conceive, there would be no way to stop it. GAMMA RAY BURSTS I should specify that the chances of this actually happening are super, super small, but: we could be entirely obliterated any second now with no warning or chance of prevention by a giant death ray from a star thousands of light years away. Sorry. That’s called a gamma ray burst, and it’s not the super cool kind that gave the Hulk his powers of super anger. This is the kind that occurs when a super-massive star collapses, or is swallowed by a black hole. Imagine a beam of intensely radioactive particles emanating from the star’s poles, pointed directly at Earth. We’ve actually been hit by a few before, but we’ve been lucky in that they were smaller ones. A large enough burst – and remember, this is an incredibly rare event that would have to be pointed straight at us – would blow the ozone layer off the planet and give a lethal dose of radiation to everyone in its path. That’s the good news. If the blast is close enough – say, 1,000 light years or so – it’d set our atmosphere ablaze as a nice side benefit. GREY GOO Imagine a robot – a tiny robot too small to be seen with the naked eye. That’s called a nanobot, and the potential benefits of something like that are actually somewhat extensive. Swarms of nanobots could undertake construction tasks, repair damaged arteries and heart valves, and just generally go places we can’t. You might not think that something that small would be that dangerous, but consider the following scenario: a nanobot with an instruction to create exact copies of itself, with no command to stop. Say it takes an hour to make another nanobot – now there are two of them, with instructions to make more copies. An hour later, four. Then eight, sixteen, 32, 64, and so on. Within a day, there’d be over sixteen million nanobots, each of them continuing to make copies and copies and copies out of any matter they can find -- metal, rock, even flesh. Within the year, the whole Earth would be a pulsating mass of nanobots, desperately searching for more material. The only recourse would be some kind of large-scale nuclear strike on the center of the mass, before it got too large. Of course, you’d have to make sure you got literally every single one – miss even a single nanobot, and the whole thing starts all over again. Grey goo nanobots would also work very well as a weapon if you don’t happen to be on the same planet at the time, or you lack access to a big asteroid and a big engine, or if you’re like a huge jerk. THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER ACCIDENTALLY CREATING A BLACK HOLE THAT SUCKS IN THE EARTH Actually this is almost definitely not going to happen. See? A bit of good news. U Mad Max, Now More Than Ever By Michael Edwards o one could have predicted how badly the world would need a new Mad Max film Nin 2015. There’s a point in the lives of those passionate about pop culture when it all clicks, when the urge to seek things out becomes an obsession. The door opens and inside is a feast laid out on a table. Some things agree with you and you want to consume more. Sometimes it’s delicious pizza from that fancy little spot downtown and sometimes it’s crap from Domino’s. Doesn’t matter. You still want more. It was in the late 80s when my interests moved beyond Star Wars, cartoons and G.I. Joe comic books.