Food for Thought (4 Book Reviews)

Here are three very well-written post-apocalyptic novels I've read recently.  None of us wants to think about the End of the World, but in this modern world we find ourselves living in, nuclear and/or biological warfare is an all-too-real possibility.

ONE SECOND AFTER - William R. Forstchen (350)
© 2009 The plot reads like a typical Disaster-of-the-Week movie. The guy, a widower with two young daughters, tries to keep his family safe when society breaks down after an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) nuclear attack on the U.S. The small North Carolina mountain town where he lives bands together to try to survive under martial law.
          This is a horror story that’s well-written, heart-breaking, and eerily prophetic. What raises this novel above your typical end-of-the-world scenarios is the fact that this isn’t science fiction, it’s science fact. The weapons are out there, ready for use at any time.
          The science behind the EMP: A nuclear warhead is detonated miles above the earth’s atmosphere, and it causes intense electro-magnetic energy that fries everything electrical. The genius of this weapon is that there’s no radioactive fall-out, since the bomb was blown above earth’s atmosphere. It affects a limited area, according to the size and altitude of the detonation. And it doesn’t physically harm living organisms. It just obliterates electronics and plunges our modern technological society into primitive barbarism.
          I’ve always wondered, “what if?” I think the book does a real good job explaining the extreme hardships we would face if our nation lost its power-grid infrastructure. Scary stuff!

WAR DAY- Whitley Strieber & James Kunetka (515 pages)

© 1984  This, in my opinion, is the quintessential doomsday book, and I’ve read a lot in this genre. Like ONE SECOND AFTER, it gives a gripping, realistic look at what our country would be like in the aftermath of nuclear war.

          SCENARIO: The U.S. and the [former] U.S.S.R. have had a limited exchange of nuclear weapons in the fall of 1988, a 36-minute war that destroyed both countries as we know them. Moscow, Stalingrad, New York City, Washington DC, and San Antonio were obliterated in the blasts.

          It’s five years later, and the authors embark on a brave road trip to assess the living conditions in various parts of the country in order to write a book about it.

          Although it is great post-apocalyptic fiction, it reads like a fascinating non-fiction documentary of what the authors encounter as they travel around the country by train, interviewing various survivors. Interviews with government officials give an idea of what exactly happened to cause the sudden war, how the country is dealing with reconstruction, and how the world is going on without the two Super-Powers. Interviews with medical and relief personnel show the suffering being endured by the survivors of not only radioactive fall-out, but also devastating new diseases that ravage those who weren’t lucky enough to be killed in the actual blasts. Interviews with ordinary people on the street reveal a tattered remnant that’s determined to begin a new and better society.

          Since it was written in the early 80s, the book is now somewhat dated --- but that doesn’t detract from the historical aspect of what life was like in the 1980s, compared to our technology today. Particularly poignant was the part of the book where they interviewed a “salvor,” a person whose job it is to go into devastated areas and salvage whatever they can to use in the rebuilding of other places. This man was in charge of a crew removing miles and miles of copper wiring/tubing from the World Trade Center.

          It was a long book, but I’m surprised how quickly I read it, since it delved into just about every aspect of life after the Big One.  Probably the most important point that can be made from this book is that we’re no better prepared now for a devastating nuclear exchange, any more than we would have been back in 1988.

EARTH ABIDES - George R. Stewart (373 pages)

© 1949  In this philosophical, post-apocalyptic novel, a young man named Isherwood Williams returns home to San Francisco after a wilderness camping trip to find that humankind has been killed off by some kind of global pandemic. Desperate to find survivors, he takes off on a grueling trip across country, but returns in despair. He’d only found a few suffering people during his trip to New York and back, so he settles into his parents' home to figure things out. Soon he finds another survivor, a black woman named Em, who becomes Eve to his Adam in this “brave new world.” Eventually several other survivors turn up and they come together as a tribe and begin the work of a new civilization. As the years pass, and children are born to the tribe, it looks like they’ll be successful, if they only start developing survival skills.

           At first electricity continues on automatic operation and water still flows through the pipes from the reservoir.  They survive by scavenging everything they need from the deserted stores around them. Brief sections in italics are scattered throughout the book, telling how things start deteriorating in the absence of mankind --- very much like the History Channel series "Life After People", only on a much less technological scale because this book was written in 1949. These italicized sections tell how the  inventions of man (cities, buildings, power grids, roads, water systems etc.) eventually break down once man is no longer around to tend them.

           Will they go on to build a new world or will mankind die with whimper? The main characters are well-depicted and their struggle to survive is very descriptive, with an engaging story line. Because this was very early post-apocalyptic fiction, you get the feeling that they have a better chance of making it than we would in our overly-technological world today.  I found the book fascinating and recommend it, even to those who think they don’t like this genre. A lot of food for thought here. 

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Lastly, below is a Young Adult novel I DO NOT recommend because it's naively absurd and simplistic:

LIFE AS WE KNEW IT - Susan Beth Pfeffer (352 pages, CDBK)
©2006  First of all, I have to admit that I enjoyed Emily Bauer’s reading of this book. She made a very convincing 16-year-old Miranda. Had I been reading the book, instead, I probably wouldn’t have finished it.

          This is an end-of-the-world scenario in which an asteroid crashes into the moon, knocking it into an orbit closer to the earth, wrecking havoc on our environment. Giant tsunamis wipe out coastal populations, followed by the eruption of numerous volcanoes world-wide, which plunge the globe into a prolonged “nuclear winter.”

          Maybe I just read too much non-fiction, but I think if you’re going to be a writer, you should at least know your subject. There is very little science in this book, which is probably okay, since it’s a book for kids (keep it simple, right?), and the central theme is how a teenage girl would react to a catastrophic global event that destroys all sense of normalcy in her life and threatens her and her family’s survival.

          To begin with, the time to prepare for “the end of the world” or any other major catastrophe that’s going to shut down “life as we know it” is before that event ever happens. The author would have us believe that the next day after the apocalyptic asteroid-lunar crash, we’d be able to simply go to the bank, draw out all our money, and go on a crazy shopping spree to buy up all the food and supplies we’d need to tide us over until things get back to normal. In reality, after such an event, the banks wouldn’t be open the next day (or anytime soon) and money would be worthless anyway. Stores would have already been looted and total chaos would reign. In this story, stores remain open until they run out of goods. There’s only a hint of some stealing and rumors of gang activity. In this area of contemporary Pennsylvania anyway, nobody bothers you if they see smoke coming from your chimney. Only houses that are apparently abandoned are broken into. Huh? That just seems totally unrealistic to me!

          It’s possible that the author intentionally toned down certain aspects of the utter chaos, violence, and anarchy that would immediately result, should such an astronomic event ever occur. But there were so many glaring goofs, that I quickly came to the conclusion that the author hadn’t done enough research to write convincingly on this subject.

          In the days immediately following the moon’s mishap, the town still has electricity, though sometimes sporadically. So the family still has water. But when the power eventually goes off-line permanently, the family’s not worried because they have an old well in their yard. Obviously the author doesn’t know that to get water out of a well, you either have to have an electric pump or an old-fashioned hand pump. They had neither. They just kept turning on the faucets, and water flowed magically, until the well ran dry.

          These are just a couple of examples of the un-realism of this story. But I read over 200 reviews on Shelfari, mostly from teens, and by and large, they loved this book. So it’s entertaining, if not very plausible.

         This sugar-coated and sanitized survival story could hardly be called science fiction, although it could be regarded as fantasy, I guess. There are several sequels to this book, but I won’t be reading them or anything else by this author.