Currency, Commodities, and Value Theme Analysis

The start of the book, which occurs before the asteroid strike, portrays “life as we knew it,” and what is seen as valuable seems familiar and normal to the average American reader. Most obviously, money is used as currency—and even in the days just after the disaster, cash is the only thing people will accept. Meanwhile, Miranda, the teenage girl protagonist, values school, grades, friends, boys, and ice skating. After the disaster, however, things change drastically, and what is seen as valuable and viewed as a commodity shifts as well. Cash quickly becomes useless, and people start to trade, steal, or hoard wood, gasoline, and food. Schooling becomes less important—districts are consolidated and very few students or teachers show up—while other kinds of knowledge become more valuable. With radio, TV, and the internet becoming unreliable and then failing entirely, new of the outside world becomes precious. Practice knowledge, such as Peter’s medical knowledge but also Laura’s gardening hobby, ability to cook, and the family’s skiing skills, all become suddenly lifesaving. In comparison, the intellectual professions that Laura and Miranda’s father Hal had pursued before the disaster—as an author and college professor—are no longer as useful.

As the impact of the disaster continues and deepens, it’s not only the value of skills and goods that are reassessed, but also relationships and, even more fundamentally, the basic value of other people. In the beginning of the book, Miranda is focused on friendships and prom dates, but as the book progresses her social circle constricts dramatically. When she does enter into a brief romantic relationship, both she and the boy, Dan, realize that they cannot have a future—as feelings for each other would endanger their own survival. For instance, at one point Miranda leaves a food distribution line to try to find Dan to tell him him about the food being provided, and almost misses out on getting food for her family. In the evaluation of family vs. friends vs. neighbors, then, it quickly becomes clear that the key to survival for the characters is to only focus on immediate family. Every other relationship becomes devalued and a potential liability. Miranda’s friend Sammi, meanwhile, gives up on her typical teenage values and begins a relationship with a forty-year-old man who has the connections to ensure her survival and comfort in the changed world. As the dire situation worsens and the chances of survival begin to be a zero sum game in which one person getting resources means another person not getting them, characters start to constantly assess other character’s worthiness of receiving resources and, by extension, of continuing to live.

Essentially, the arc of the novel is about stripping things down to what is truly valuable—and to reveal that what is valuable is very dependent on the nature of one’s situation. Pfeffer’s exploration of what becomes valuable or is considered a “commodity” in different situations, then, encourages readers to consider what is truly valuable in their own lives, what is truly valuable in the civilization that we take for granted but is in fact just “life as we know it,” and how those priorities might change in a disaster situation.