The Human War is set in Youngstown, Ohio, where you also live. What is it like?
You have the feeling that you don’t matter. Youngstown was once a much larger city, it had steel mills where thousands worked. Now the steel mills are closed, but they are still there rotting. There aren’t even roads to get to some of them anymore. There are ruins of a past civilization everywhere. We have old buildings like New York City, but yours have been polished up every thirty years. Ours have been left to rot. There are whole streets with abandoned houses. There is even a whole neighborhood on the south side of Youngstown that has been completely abandoned. Forty houses grouped together in front of an abandoned steel mill with not a person in sight, garbage everywhere, shingles and gutters falling off the houses, cracked concrete, the grass three feet high. There isn’t any real possibility of making more than 40,000 a year. Most of the population lives paycheck by paycheck, we survive by working together. This is not a place where you can go it alone, you need to have friends a
