The Dystopians.(writer James Howard Kunstler's views on the United States economy)

A year and a half ago, with real-estate prices falling, Dmitry Orlov, a forty-six-year-old software engineer from Leningrad, sold his apartment in the Brighton section of Boston, along with most of its contents, and bought a sailboat--an old sharpie made from Douglas-fir marine plywood, on which he and his wife, Natasha, a literary translator, now live, debt-free. They rent a slip at the Constitution Marina, near the Boston Naval Shipyard, and he walks to work at a nearby advertising agency. For errands, Orlov rides a bicycle, which he sometimes parks on deck. It's been a long time since he owned either a car or a television ("When I'm in front of one for five minutes, I think it's lying to me and I want to take wire cutters and clip the power cord"). He has outfitted the boat, which is named Hogfish, with solar panels and six months' worth of propane, and figures he can store an equivalent supply of rice and beans down below. "It's basically a survival capsule," he said recently.

Orlov moved to the United States when he was twelve, and returned to the Soviet Union for the first time in 1989, shortly after his uncle, a political prisoner under the Andropov regime, was released. During his second trip back, in 1990, the country was suffering from a fuel shortage, and he financed a road trip to the medieval towns of Pskov and Novgorod with a trunk full of vodka, trading half-litre bottles for ten litres of gasoline from black-marketeers along the way. (This was just after Gorbachev's anti-alcoholism campaign, and Orlov capitalized on a death in the family by redeeming a funeral's worth of vodka coupons.) The only comparable resource seemed to be bluejeans, of which he'd brought only one pair. No one wanted rubles. He internalized the lesson for future reference: "When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money."

Over the course of several visits, Orlov observed the social effects of the Soviet breakdown and concluded that there were some peculiar advantages to his home country's dysfunctionality. Bloated bureaucracies move slowly, and are therefore slow to die. Long breadlines force people to consider backup plans, like kitchen gardens. Orlov's 2008 book, "Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects," identifies the ingredients of what he calls "superpower collapse soup"--a severe shortfall in the production of crude oil, a worsening foreign-trade deficit, an oversized military budget, and crippling foreign debt--and argues that his adopted country, with its "American-style Potemkin villages" and "highly compensated senior lunch-eaters," is not only vulnerable but likely to fare worse. ("Make no mistake about it: this soup will be served, and it will not be tasty!") "Now we're in hospice care," he told me. "The bailouts you see can be viewed as ever bigger doses of morphine for a patient that's not long for this world."

In 2006, Orlov published an online manifesto, "The New Age of Sail," in which he extolled the virtues of what might be called bourgeois survivalism. "She must look like a proper yacht, and not a shanty boat or a barge, because she must give coastal property owners no reason to complain to the harbormaster about the ugly thing spoiling their precious view," he wrote. "She should give the impression that she is sailed by people of obvious quality and distinction, of the sort that snooty coastal property owners might want to invite over for gin-and-tonics and to catch up on the goings on in San Tropez." Life on a boat has the additional benefit, he wrote, of providing "isometric exercise similar to a Pilates workout," because of the constant jostling of the sea. "People who live aboard are rarely overweight."

Hogfish, whose hull is trimmed red and gray, looks the bourgeois part; aside from the solar panels and bicycles, it is indistinguishable from the weekend yachts cruising in and out of Boston Harbor throughout the warmer months. Regarding the domestic considerations of the transition to aquatic sustainability, Orlov said, "I think my wife is very realistic, but I can't say that she's all that in favor of it. We're doing it in stages." For now, he keeps a ten-horsepower Yamaha outboard motor handy, in case of emergency or faint breeze, and just before Thanksgiving he installed an on-demand hot-water system to take the bite out of a coastal New England winter. He plans, meanwhile, to establish a trading network along Lake Champlain for transporting Vermont apples and maple syrup to farmers' markets in New York City, and hopes to be able to undercut diesel trucks on price when the oil market resumes its upward swing. "We don't have a long wait before sail-based transport is the only option," he said, anticipating more dire environmental conditions. (From the manifesto: "In the future, I expect coastal property owners to get downright excited when they see any sailboat, whether it looks fashionable or not, paddle out their leaky canoes, and try to barter jewelry, silver cutlery or pretty seashells for the things they desperately need.") Should the trading not suffice, and the need to raise chickens arise, they'll set sail and relocate to a more rural base of operations, where Hogfish, which has a flat bottom, can double as a trailer home.

Until recently, Orlov identified the readers of his book, and of a blog that he maintains, Club Orlov, as belonging to three basic cultural categories: "back-to-the-land types," united in their opposition to industrial agriculture; "peak oilers," who worry about the shock effects on energy markets of reaching the maximum global crude-extraction rate; and all-around Cassandras, or "people who sometimes derisively are called doomers." (The doomers are currently enjoying a little less derision, which is a mixed blessing, because it is axiomatic among true believers that mainstream respect means that it is too late for anything to be done.) But in the past few months, judging from the e-mails he receives, Orlov has acquired a fourth audience, composed of financial professionals, who have been, as he said, "bolstering my gut feeling that the United States is bankrupt." A number of them have placed orders for multiple copies of his book, and he took some pleasure in imagining them passing it on to their friends and families this past holiday season as a grim kind of stocking stuffer.

One of Orlov's greatest fans is the author James Howard Kunstler, whose 1993 book about suburban sprawl, "The Geography of Nowhere," is a staple of collegiate urban-studies curricula, and whose weekly blog column, Clusterfuck Nation, can be read as a sustained critique of the cheerful globalism championed by Thomas Friedman. His latest contribution to the doomersphere is an engaging novel, "World Made by Hand," set in the post-collapse future, and while it's not apocalyptic by the standards of, say, Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," it is comprehensive in its imagination of the disasters that await us: dirty bombs and race wars and dengue fever and flu epidemics and forced shavings by religious fanatics and hurricanes in New England in June. (Kunstler resists the doomer label--"I've never been a complete collapsitarian," he says--but the fact that one of his bombs detonates in Washington on "twelve twenty-one" is likely to please superstitious adherents of the Maya calendar, which concludes its first cycle on what is now the Internet's most popular day of reckoning: December 21, 2012.) "World Made by Hand" is set in a small town north of Albany, where the residents have no oil, no coffee, no spices, no mail delivery, and only sporadic electricity, but marijuana cultivation is booming and they're growing "buds the size of plums." Capitalism and human ingenuity persist; it's only the economic incentives that change. "The action is going to be in smaller towns in the years ahead, because the cities are going to be so problematic," he told me.