Survivor communities outside the known world

[Fauna]

Minna explicitly confirmed that "sea beasts" are a thing, and that there are Norwegian hunter squads going after them. No clear statement which marine mammals are affected, though.

Norweighan sailing crews hunting gigantic zombie whales with crap technology? 8D Yes please.

[JoB]

Norweighan sailing crews hunting gigantic zombie whales with crap technology? 8D Yes please.

The Norwegians are pronounced the master shipwrights of the post-Rash world and the creators of this crappy dinghy. Their drakkens may be using sails because there isn't crude oil anymore, but seeing that the cleansers can afford demolishing old buildings wholesale, I wouldn't bet on their weaponry being crap.

(Depth charges have been recommended repeatedly in the Disqus comments, and I wouldn't wonder about explosive harpoons or even guided torpedos.)

[ButterflyWings]

We are talking about a narrow band of human sustainable regions actually. It needs to be cold enough to keep the trolls at bay, but not cold enough during the summer months that you can't harvest crops or hunt during the fall.

On the reverse with hot areas, it needs to be hot enough to keep trolls away, but not too hot that it's not sustainable.

This also means that survivor communities by nature are small as they need to sustain themselves from the land within a days walk radius.  Larger communities can only survive if they are supplied by smaller communities.

Most of these communities will be spending a large amount of time surviving. Malnutrition, starvation, and medical complications are more likely to be a greater issue than troll attacks.

[Vafhudr]

Since Inuits and Canada have been popping up, instead of rewriting what I have already typed, I have dug up what I wrote on the subject in the past.

Spoiler: show

So. I saw a few posts on the topic of survivability in Canada. Some of these posts were very well done, and I thought I might as well pitch in. For reference, my experience is with Quebec, Nunavut, Ontario, the Northwest Territories, and British Columbia. I can't really speak for much else, but I thought I might as well share some of the stuff I think and daydream about.

The major issue for Canada is that most of its production capacity, agricultural capacity, and population are all jammed in narrow corridors of arable, high-pop density land. Cascadia (The Victoria-Vancouver-Seattle triangle), Upper and Lower Canada (Roughly from Quebec to Toronto - largely flat-land, very arable, very open - the center of Canadian trade for a reason), the Red River Settlement area (old Manitoba), and the Calgary-Edmonton corridor, as well as largely island of civilization in that sea of geography we call our country. These are all maximum overdead. They are all modern cities - flat, grid-like, largely unholdable and extremely porous. Quebec City is the only exception, but being the last fortified city in North America will do little against the infection. So the Woodlands of Southern Ontario and Quebec, as well as the open plains of the prairies and the valleys of British Columbia are screwed.

This leaves basically all settlements entrenched in the, in context, apply-named Canadian Shield. The problem with the Canadian Shield is that it's roughly 8 000 000 square kms of garbage - for civilization as we know it. It's extremely rugged, marshy, and comes with two seasonal settings - Cold and Mosquitoes. Most major settlements and aboriginal reservations situated within the Canadian Shield are not self-sufficient in the matters of most staples and food.

For instance, I work at a major grocery store in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. We receive major shipments of food from Edmonton, and in turn we supply the smaller communities. Collapse of the south means collapse of food stock. Almost immediately. A lot of people adopt a survivalist mindset up in the North. After all - you just need a bad blizzard or a very bad forest fire season and all communication of the south can be cut for a few days or even a week. Many people will have cache. But those will be spent sooner than later and should not be accounted seriously. Some agriculture is possible. Kale, potatoes, cabbage, rhubarb - those can grow very well during the very short but luminously intense summer season.

A return to the land won't be easy either. Needless to say that the average Canadian is not much of a survivalist, even less a hunter-gatherer, though a lot of us do supplement the usual supermarket fare with some game. Even aboriginals will have a hard time -a lot of traditional knowledge has been lost and eroded in just the last 100 years. Inuit kids of my generations will not know how to hunt without a skidoo or a gun, if they will know how to live off the land at all. The land may be harsh enough to stem the beasts and trolls, and the likelihood of giants is more or less nil, but that goes both ways - the land will kill us too, if we aren't careful.

So survival, to use the model proposed by user Hrolfr - I think a lot of Northern Canada, while isolated and should be able to resist phase 1 well enough, will stumble pretty hard by phase II - actually handling the apocalypse.

In the Northwest Territories, if civilization survives at all, it will be concentrated around Yellowknife and the Great Slave lake. In summer and winter the lake can be used to connect with other communities around it (the lake is massive) by boating and sledding. Hay River could be a small agricultural hub. The culture would be largely Dene with some European, Philipino and Vietnamese touches, if the current demographics are anything to go by.

Population: 15 000. Maybe. If they have recovered. If they can get something stable going, they will not have to fear much, beside the night, a sudden outbreak among the bisons or the cariboos, or the arrival of some kind of monster in the region. Due to a return to largely pre-industrial living conditions, in a harsh land, reproduction rate will remain low. High child mortality, not to mention the odd case of Rash, combined with the looming threat of starvation and the fact that they are only one bad harvest or infected herd away from being snuffed out, another light going out in the dark.

Nunavut and Nunavik, and everyone living around the Hudson's bay, will probably go down to 2-3000 souls. At most. No cities can be sustained without intervention from the south. They would have to revert to traditional hunting and survival techniques. The problem with this is that they relied heavily on sea mammals - especially seal, and to an extent, whales. If infection levels are low, they can thrive, if they are not, I can't imagine the horror of paddling a kayak out there with a leviathan lurking below. 1000 at most or nil/displaced and the frozen wasteland they call home is abandoned.

Now Quebec provides a few interesting opportunities.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/124103985@N06/14943835818/

This image, provided to us by user ruth is solid - and I would just make some additional suggestions:

- I think I case could be made for the inclusion of Sept-Iles as a major surviving settlements. With it's eponymous islands, it could set up a system similar to Mora. Plus, its access to aluminium, ores, and electricity would be invaluable to the technological efforts of the New Canada.

- The Saguenay River, as well as some of the major settlements on it such as Saguenay, could still be intact and probably the core of the Quebec economic engine. The high population density makes it unlikely, but I would make the argument that considering that it's probably on the cusp and cutting line between isolated/hospitable to agricultural civilization, that it would probably have been a major effort from Canadian/or even Quebec Forces - to make their stand there. Saguenay is the Reykjavík/Mora (outside of St.John) that civilization in Canada would need to be able to re-assert itself and at least keep the Silent World at bay. But this is about as far down as it is possible to do so.
So, again, I follow Hroflr on this.

Another cool thing is that it would probably be the hub of something else - relations with the Cree nations. Their territories lie mostly in sparsely populated land and connect themselves upward through most of the Canadian shield. You could, in fact, travel your way through Cree territory up to the Northwest territory. The pocket of civilization I described in the Northwest Territory could, in theory, be connected to the rest of Canada through the Cree-controlled river systems of the CS. A French-Canadian/Cree Alliance would not be surprising, nor would be a Newfoundland/Inuit alliance.

Just like post-apocalyptic Norway saw the rise of a sort of neo-Viking culture, post-apocalyptic northern Quebec could see the return of the voyageurs. Whereas the Newfies will be the masters of the sea, the Canadiens and their Cree allies will be masters of the land, capable of traveling through the complicated and hazardous river system that makes up the true and alternative circulatory system of Canada, connecting pockets of civilization within the Shield, trading for the various staples these communities would be generating for the sake of sustaining human life a bit longer. The voyageur, no longer carrying pelts and pemmican, but spare parts and mail and other necessities, little flickers of light in the deep darkness of the Canadian night.

- The Cree nations would in fact become a serious player, being the most populous first-nation group in Canada and largely located well within the "safe-zone". The Canadian Shield is their turf.

- it's rather generous to give St. Pierre and Miquelon their own part of the alliance. They would probably fall under the dominion of the french Canadians.

Other cool things to consider is also some thematic connections these lands have with the SSSS setting. Newfoundland itself was famously discovered by Norse explorers - Vinland and all that. A lot of French-Canadians come from northern France/Bretagne, which was famously colonized by Norse raiders (hence the Normans). A mix of Norse, Celtic (French populations have the famous Gauls to boast about, while the Newfies have a sizeable heritage of Irish ancestors), and aboriginal religion could be fostered. Anticousti would not be so much a settlement as much as a sanctuary with a sizeable, intact herd of deers and other mammals. A mix between a holy sanctuary and Svalbard. Maybe Newfoundland could be renamed Vinland and Quebec will revert to Canada. I mean, there is no point in calling it Quebec if the rest of Canada does not exist anymore. The Newfies will get to keep their Grade A War Dogs, to boot. Invaluable while out in the literal sea of monsters that will be the Gulf.

Total population - between 70 to 150 000 for Neo-Canada, including Crees.

- On the topic of BC, I think Deadlander's analysis is dead-on and very cool.

One day I will write this fan side-adventure. Canada has a bunch of untapped folklore and imagery that could lend itself nicely to a story and setting like SSSS.

So yeah. Food for thoughts, I suppose.

TLDR. Inuits are dependent on sea mammals. If sea mammals are compromised, they are done for.
And I think that sea mammals are very much affected by the rash disease. There is no clear way how the disease would have jumped from humans to whales, and yet it did. I don't see why it wouldn't jump to walruses, seals, narwhals, or caribous.

[BarbaryLion22]

I just had a thought. What about Socotra, off the coast of Yemen? It's "one of the most isolated landforms on Earth of continental origin" according to Wikipedia.
 It's 150 miles to the closest large landmass (the Horn of Africa), is relatively hot, and has comparatively little rainfall. It also has a small mammalian population, and a relatively small human population.

[Void Slayer]

I just had a thought. What about Socotra, off the coast of Yemen? It's "one of the most isolated landforms on Earth of continental origin" according to Wikipedia.
 It's 150 miles to the closest large landmass (the Horn of Africa), is relatively hot, and has comparatively little rainfall. It also has a small mammalian population, and a relatively small human population.

I think if a naval carrier firebombed the entire island first in the first 1-2 years of the rash.  In any hot climate you would need to destroy all human and mammal populations in an area before it is inhabitable.  The Nordic regions get away with it due to the cold.

There are many isolated or isolatable areas that might possibly be safe at a stretch, assuming luck and good planning, if you want them to be for the sake of a story.

I had an idea for 'nomads' groups of US and other military naval vessels that function for transpacific trade between a handful of surviving communities (Japan, New Zealand, Falklands, Alaska for example).  Formed out of a US carrier group that isolated Guam and performed some heavy handed quarantine and bombings.  Guam was lost in Y40 from an attack by leviathans and the ships now function as a civilian-military merchant swarm.

[BarbaryLion22]

I think if a naval carrier firebombed the entire island first in the first 1-2 years of the rash.  In any hot climate you would need to destroy all human and mammal populations in an area before it is inhabitable.  The Nordic regions get away with it due to the cold.

There are many isolated or isolatable areas that might possibly be safe at a stretch, assuming luck and good planning, if you want them to be for the sake of a story.

I had an idea for 'nomads' groups of US and other military naval vessels that function for transpacific trade between a handful of surviving communities (Japan, New Zealand, Falklands, Alaska for example).  Formed out of a US carrier group that isolated Guam and performed some heavy handed quarantine and bombings.  Guam was lost in Y40 from an attack by leviathans and the ships now function as a civilian-military merchant swarm.

But, but, the dragon blood trees? Noooh, don't firebomb the weird plants...
As for ships, that's an idea that's been played on before, I think, but not as a sort of trade route...thingy. That's an interesting idea. And being in contact with other survivor communities would negate the two big detractors to the boat idea, which I think would be supplies and maintenance of the ships.

Also, the firebombing would only be necessary given the assumption that extreme cold is the only detractor to the trolls, which hasn't been confirmed or denied as of yet. I don't think we came to a consensus regarding that.

[Ragnarok]

Woot woot here's a poll.

[Noodles]

But there are probably some people alive, just most of the middle latitudes are silent.

[Róisín]

I'd bet on the wet tropics being mostly seething unlife fighting it out with vegetation and insects, deserts and subarctic regions being in the same position as Scandinavia, some islands of linked ships hanging on out at sea. And who knows what else, we're bound to be surprised!

[theamynator]

I think there are probably a few places like the Nordic countries. But probably not all that many. I really like the idea of nomadic groups of people just barely clinging to civilization.

[Aierdome]

I'd guess on some Scandinavia-like islands of mankind as well. It would be fun to see Our Heroes visit one, and they may form some basis for recreation of human civilization on Earth.

[Emil]

I'd prefer if the thread title was a bit more descriptive than whatever this is...

[Troposphère]

Yes…

I replied "Plenty of places like Scandinavia, but isolated", but I would say that they are not so common and most of the world is just the silent world.

It has probably discussed in length before, but a population needed drastic immigration control (like we have seen in Iceland in the prologue) to prevent the spread of the disease.

I think there are probably a few places like the Nordic countries. But probably not all that many. I really like the idea of nomadic groups of people just barely clinging to civilization.

Yes exactly, groups that are never been in contact with infected people because they had very few contatcs with the rest of the world. Maybe some people in rainforests who are not even aware of what happened?

[Ragnarok]

Umm....haven't read the rest of this thread, but got a theory:

Canada. I just have this weird mental image of a bunch of Y90-era Mounties killing trolls with flamethrowers and stereotypically apologizing the entire time.