World-Building the Real World

Last week there was a brief flurry of interest in a 'NASA study' that predicted the collapse of civilization. The study turned out not to be by NASA and to be founded on eight equations. This sort of thing makes soothsaying look solid.
A global industrial civilization has never existed before, and while highly interdependent it seems to contain enough redundant links to make it resilient. A lot of horrible things could happen, but it would go on. Some civilizations do go on for thousands of years. China and Egypt spring to mind, but even Europeans could just about get away with claiming that the Roman Empire is still around, and they're living in it. That said, there are imaginable if unlikely events that could knock over civilization across a wide area or even the world without necessarily wiping everyone out. A limited nuclear war or an unstoppable plague or an asteroid impact or a big coronal mass ejection could kill billions and still leave millions of survivors struggling to cope.
Most of them wouldn't have a clue what to do. A precondition of an advanced industrial civilization is a very fine-grained division of labour. This makes astonishing achievements routine, but necessarily leaves everyone involved a little vague about the details of what everyone else does. The premise of Lewis Dartnell’s new book, The Knowledge, is that it’s a manual for the survivors of a disaster that wiped out 90% of humanity but left the infrastructure basically intact. What would they need to know in order to survive and start again?
Dartnell starts his thought experiment with ‘the grace period’ in which there are still useful supplies to be got from the cities, and goes on through rebooting agriculture, food and clothing, medicine, mining, manufacturing, transport, electricity, communications, chemistry … and so on, all the way to ‘the greatest invention’: science itself. At each step, he uses his attention-grabbing premise to make the mundane details of how to make everything from bread to soap to cement to steel interesting and interconnected. I didn’t know that a lathe is a sort of von Neumann machine, or that retrieving at least one long-threaded screw from the ruins is crucial. The conclusion is inspiring, the guide to further reading gives due recognition to post-apocalyptic SF, and the bibliography can keep you reading until the asteroid comes.
I can see this book becoming a manual for writers of post-apocalyptic SF and historical fiction, steampunk and the like, but far more important is its relevance to the rest of us in understanding how the world we live in actually works.
I was sent an advance proof for comment, and I’ve just received a fine hardback with my quote on the back: ‘This is the book we all wish we’d been given at school: the knowledge that makes everything else make sense.’ True to my word, that copy’s going to the nearest high school library. But I’ll buy the paperback and keep it in easy reach, and in a safe place.