SFF ideas I love: When technology stops working

There are plenty of fantastic post-apocalyptic sci-fi books out there, like David Brin’s The Postman or Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz. But usually these apocalypses are caused by something like a nuclear war, where society could at least theoretically come back from it. But what about an apocalypse where technology itself stops working?

The first time I ran into this idea was in Fred Saberhagen’s classic book Empire of the East. Sometime in a cold-war future, a nuclear war begins. Both sides try to prevent a holocaust by propagating “the Change”, which is meant to temporarily modify the laws of physics so nuclear explosions won’t work. But an unexpected side-effect of both sides doing it at once is that the Change becomes permanent, leaving the whole world stuck without technology.

S. M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire gets to a similar place, but it a different way. In that book, the Change just spontaneously happens, and the resulting loss of all high-energy-density technology (gunpowder, internal combustion, nuclear energy, even steam engines) causes a mass die-off and social upheaval that destroys modern civilization. The people who survive are those who just happen to be in the right places with the right resources at hand when things go sideways.

I love this idea because it gives the reader so much extra to worry about. In a war-apocalypse like the one in David Brin’s The Postman, all your technology might be destroyed for the moment, but you can always just build it back later if you manage to survive. But in a tech-stops-working-apocalypse, even if you initially avoid getting killed, you still have to figure out what happens to your civilization in the long term, since it can never go back to how it was before.

Interestingly, both Empire of the East and Dies the Fire have magic that begins to appear after technology goes away. I didn’t think of this while I was reading the books, but maybe it’s because the authors felt like if you ditch technology, you need to add in magic, or else the book jumps entirely out of the SFF genre and all the readers will bail on you? Whatever the reason, I thought it worked in both cases, though the magic was a little less explicit in Dies the Fire.

It’s also intriguing that both books called it “the Change.” They’re copyrighted twenty-five years apart, but surely Stirling must have read Saberhagen. So maybe it’s an homage? Or it could just be that “the Change” is already the best name anyone can come up with for the idea, and anything else wouldn’t sound as good.