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In 2005 James Howard Kunstler published The Long Emergency; in this non-fiction book he considers the likely near future of humanity and the Earth. He considers the consequences of such factors as the end of cheap energy, climate change, food and water shortages, failing ability to control disease and uncontrolled economic growth. From these factors he develops and describes the likely characteristics of our future world.

Kunstler's 2008 book World Made by Hand is a novel written into the setting defined and described in The Long Emergency. The location for the story is the north-eastern United States; although, the United States, as a national entity no longer truly exists. Oil, at any price, is no longer available, the wars in the Middle East to secure oil have resulted in successful nuclear terrorist attacks in the United States, disease has killed a large proportion of the population, and social order has broken down, especially on the large scale. Climate change is occurring, causing difficulty in food production, although humanity's reduced pressure on natural systems is allowing the natural world to begin to return to the productivity of hundreds of years ago.

Kunstler has described the society that lives on this future Earth carefully and with great detail.

That society is running on the dregs of its past society: our world. The landscape is scoured for useful remnants of our world, all the now useless cars have long before been melted down to provide the steel that can no longer be mined, the inaccessible (because there are no cars or fuel, and few people can get horses) and unsupportable empty houses of suburbia are being demolished and mined for useful material.

Some useful skills, mostly skills that predate our world and which have hung over from the 19th century, are remembered and practiced, but many others have been lost and, although it is not discussed in the book, many of these useful skills will obviously be lost as there is little time in this world for training others. There is a doctor and dentist in the group but they are too busy trying to keep up to the demand for their work, using the fast dwindling medical supplies that have been raided from abandoned hospitals and pharmacies, to consider training others to a practical extent in their complex fields.

Four main social models have evolved, occurring in close proximity in the part of this society that this book examines. One is the remains of a country village that has evolved directly from the past society. Another is a Christian commune that has taken over the disused high school buildings of the village, another is a feudal fiefdom ruled by a benevolent but autocratic long-term land holder. The fourth group lives in an old trailer park (caravan park) near the town dump, which has now become a major source of materials. This group is coarse, uncultivated and ruled by violence; it has evolved from the bikie gangs, petrol-heads and drug dealers of the past. Despite the very clearly expressed unpleasantness of this group they perform an important function in the society, as they are the group that demolishes the old houses of suburbia and sells and barters what they obtain, along with the materials that they scavenge from the dump, to the members of the other groups.

As you soak into the story, you can't help but fall into the feeling that World Made by Hand is set in the nineteenth century; however, Kunstler constantly reminds the reader that it is set in our immediate future. An interesting example is a description of riding out of town on a horse drawn sulky, described as an open cart with two wooden-spoked, iron rimmed wheels. This mental picture of the nineteenth century is shattered by the observations made while riding past a derelict Toyota dealership. The primary character reminisces about the Land Cruisers and Priuses that used to be displayed there; bringing to mind the diametrically opposed philosophies of those two vehicles, from the same manufacturer, both of which came to nothing in the end – both are gone and neither is useful in this world or stopped this world from becoming what it has become.

World Made by Hand is written to give Kunstler a vehicle to carefully and thoroughly flesh out the landscape, the people, and the society of the existence that he sees us heading towards. However, this doesn't mean that Kunstler hasn't given importance to the plot. The story of World Made by Hand is strong and exiting, with fully-dimensioned characters and complex interplay of events and characters that are fitted perfectly into the setting that he has created.

Kunstler has chosen to add a touch of the paranormal to the story, which adds a twist to it; however this moves the story off-centre from dystopian realism towards fantasy, which somewhat degrades the quality of the statement it makes about the future that it depicts.

World Made by Hand is an enjoyable fictional exploration of the world and society that we could well soon face as a consequence of our commitment to endless economic growth and the consequent population growth and resource depletion, and of our insistence in continuing to use resources such as fossil fuels as though they are in infinite supply. This world is made more meaningful by the knowledge that the author has made a thorough factual assessment of the consequence of these factors in his previous work, The Long Emergency.

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