Book Review: Going Home

I’ve always been a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, both in print and on film. I especially love the bloopers, the way even people who are happily predicting the end of the world as we know it still take for granted the technology with which we live. You know, someone scavenging through the pantry in a house that’s been abandoned for 10 or 20 years and finding canned goods that are still safe to eat – a scenario that’s particularly amusing when the setting is in a region that experiences extreme cold in the winter (home canned or commercial; freezing is going to destroy the seal) – or hopping into a car that was left by the side of the road a couple years previously but fires right up when the hero turns the key.

Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be that far into the future. Sometimes all it takes is a widespread power outage that’s lasting for weeks but mysteriously doesn’t stop the pumps or cash registers at a truck stop from working. Or turning on a faucet in a house that depends on a municipal water system and being able to fill a coffee pot or take a cold shower. Civilization has come to a crashing halt except at the local city park where the bubblers are still working. Right.

Granted, the water system is one thing that will keep working longer even if there is no power to run the pumps and filters at the plant – gravity will ensure that water pressure in the system won’t drop to zero as soon as the lights go out – but once the humongous tanks on hilltops and towers run dry they’re going to stay dry until the power comes back.

My latest dip into post-apocalyptic fiction was particularly amusing because it was Part One in a series written by a genuine prepper. You know, one of those paranoid loons who’s busy filling 5-gallon pails with ammunition and worrying about where he can bury his secret stashes of emergency supplies. Going Home was penned by A. American, a nom de plume that I find moderately annoying (“A” is the wrong article to use with American; it should be “an,” but maybe the publisher wouldn’t go for letting the dude be A. N. American. . . or maybe the author is just an ass) but it didn’t stop me from checking the book out from the library. The author’s bio at the back of the book describes him as a survivalist, someone who’s prepping for real and not just in print. Here’s hoping he’s doing a better job of it in real life than he did in print.

The protagonist in Going Home is a military veteran of some sort (as far as I can recall he never specifies his branch of service or his MOS [Army speak for Military Occupational Specialty; the other services have different terms]). Whatever he did, it was a while back. Now he’s a happily married man with three kids (all girls) living in southern Florida. He works with high tech, electronic stuff, and is fortunate enough to be able to do a lot of it from home. When the book opens, however, he’s not home. He’s up north, not far from the state line on I-75, returning from a day or two he had to spend at his employer’s headquarters. He’s about 200 miles from home when he hears the emergency alert tone on the car radio. Then the radio goes silent, the car dies. So does his cell phone.

My first thought was, okay, the author is about to do something similar to S. M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire which mixes in fantasy to explain why the fundamental laws of physics change in odd ways. But no, American is doing more straight-forward science fiction/end of life as we know (at least for a while). Electronics are fried; everything else (like guns) still work just fine. The combination of the recent model vehicle and his phone dying suggests to Our Hero that the planet (or at least his part of it) just got zapped by either an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) or a doozy of a solar flare, either of which would fry solid state electronics. (Side note: concern about weaponized EMPs were/are one reason the Soviet military kept using vacuum tubes in aircraft long after the United States had gone totally transistorized. The Soviets/Russians were/are big believers in redundancy – backup systems that are immune to various threats, which is why they’ve do a lot of their secret internal communications the old-fashioned way: on paper using typewriters. You can’t hack a typewriter.)

Our Hero knows his SUV is not going to run again without a total replacement of its onboard computers. Similarly, his phone is now effectively a paperweight. If he wants to get home, he’s going to have to do it on foot.

Being a prepper, he has a bug out bag with him. A bug out bag contains emergency supplies sufficient to last a person for several days (e.g., MREs, energy bars, basic camping gear like a survival blanket and a fire starter) as well as a weapon or two for protection. The one thing the paranoid preppers get right is that if there was a major system collapse, some people would quickly lose whatever civilized veneer they once had. Looting would happen, so would settling old scores and sexual assaults. The majority of people are decent human beings, but we all know at least one asshole where you’re pretty sure the only thing that’s preventing him or her from going on a psychotic rampage is fear of prison showers.

The fact Our Hero is a prepper isn’t apparent immediately. The book cover does note it’s Book One in The Survivalist series but it takes a couple paragraphs to make clear that the protagonist does indeed have a sort-of bunker set up back home – or at least a workshop behind his house full of canned goods and ammunition.

Our Hero figures out what he really needs to take with him, loads a backpack, and starts walking. He’s not too worried about the wife and kids because he’s got their place set up to go off grid (solar power, among other things), they’ve been stockpiling canned goods, and he actually trusts most of his neighbors. Nonetheless, he knows he should get moving ASAP. It might take awhile for other stranded motorists to figure out rescue isn’t going to come rolling down the road any time soon, but eventually they will. He wants to get as far as possible and off the Interstate before being forced to share the resources he has.

Suffice to say Our Hero has various predictable adventures along the way south. He defends himself from a group of lowlifes who mistakenly assume a 40-ish white guy traveling alone would be an easy target, he rescues a woman being assaulted by a local sleaze who had had the hots for her for awhile and decided she’d now be an easy target, he joins up with a couple other people who are walking home, and he encounters a group whose worst fears have been realized: the entire episode, the EMP attack, was a false flag operation spearheaded by the liberals in government who wanted an excuse to declare martial law and confiscate everyone’s guns. Naturally, he’s in agreement with them. After all, look at who’s in the White House? (Note: The book was published in 2016. I’m guessing A. American is another middle-aged white dude who’s terrified people of the wrong color may actually be gaining some political power.)

Our Hero declines the offer of some weed when he meets a group of hippies camping in the National Forest, but I got the distinct impression the author was not so shy. Just how ripped on drugs do you have to be to think that leftists/progressives/those damn socialists could ever cooperate long enough to plan a false flag operation, let alone actually pull one off? There are plot lines that make sense, and then there are plot lines that are laughable. Going Home wanders into the latter category. You can’t get a group of liberals to agree on who’s bringing which jello salad to a potluck; if it was possible to produce a leftist nanny-state administration bent on confiscating guns, it would have happened already. When you poll the public on various social welfare questions (paid family leave, Medicare for all, a higher minimum wage, a woman’s right to choose, cheaper college costs) most people agree with the “liberal” position as long as it’s not labeled as being something espoused by any particular political party or candidate. Label any idea either Democrat or Republican and it’s a different story, of course.

In addition to ascribing to the leftist liberal commie pinko types way more powers than they’d ever have a prayer of acquiring the author also falls into taking technology so much for granted that he black boxes too much of it. At one point, the power grid is still down, chaos reigns, but a character who found a truck old enough not to have electronic components pulls into a gas station and barters a fifth of vodka to get the tank filled. Okay. The coolers in the store are inoperable, but the electric-powered gas pumps are still working? Our Hero is real proud that his family is going to be able to cook without electricity, but what’s his solution? A stove that uses kerosene as a fuel. Good luck with that one unless you’ve got quite a few gallons stockpiled.

I am also amused by the survivalists who stockpile buckets and buckets of ammunition while giving no thought whatsoever to what’s going to happen when it runs out. I know some people are avid reloaders, but how many of them also know how to make decent gun powder? More of them should take a lesson or two from the characters in The Walking Dead. A crossbow may be slower than a rifle or hand gun, but you can recycle the bolts just by cleaning them. It’s also quiet.

I did, however, find it totally believable that many people working for Homeland Security would turn into total thugs as soon as they were given the green light to do so by their supervisors. We’ve got the stellar example of ICE having no qualms whatsoever now about putting babies in cages and terrorizing pregnant women and handicapped children.

So what’s the bottom line on this book? It’s readable. Stupid in places, but readable. It actually would have been a better book if the author had ditched the us-true-patriots vs. the-evil-liberal-government and kept it as more of a pure aftermath of a disaster. He could have still included the thuggish DHS types – we all know the most dreaded phrase in the English language is “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you” – without indulging in extreme right wing fantasies. Will I read the next book in the series if I stumble across it? Maybe. The author did include a cliff hanger at the end of this book so I might be curious enough to see where he goes with that.

The Mother of All Yankee Candle Stores

Okay, I know I've grumbled about this before, but why can't the authors, scriptwriters, filmmakers, and anyone else who dabbles in post-apocalyptic fiction get it right? I think the last book I read that was reasonably accurate in its descriptions of Life After Armageddon (aka Life After the Grid Collapses) was Alas, Babylon, which was published in 1959. In that novel, things did fall apart fast once electricity vanished, right down to (if I recall correctly) the main characters noting that the pace of life changed dramatically without electric lights: they muse about the fact that now when the sun goes down, they go to bed. There was none of that sitting around the living room while burning the equivalent of a Party Lites dealer's entire stock of decorative candles.

What brings on this morning's grumblings, you ask? Last night the S.O. and I began watching The Walking Dead on Netflix. Yes, I know we're late to the party. The series is now into (or perhaps past) its third season. However, when it first premiered, we were still living in Atlanta, which is where the series was being filmed. I didn't need to watch a television show to know that Atlanta was a shit hole full of the walking dead. I worked with them. I was also stuck in traffic with them on a regular basis. You think that scene of the Interstate with the outbound lanes totally full of immobile cars is a bit of creative fiction? Ha. That's I-85, I-75, or I-20 leading out of town on any Friday afternoon.

But that wasn't what inspired this morning's mutterings. Nope, it was the three survivors, two adult men and a  little boy, sitting around the living room after sundown with the room lit up like a 19th century German Christmas tree. Not content to have candles burning on every conceivable surface, the set dressers also had 2, count 'em, 2 gas Coleman lanterns blazing away. Once again I ask, what did they do - find the Mother of All Yankee Candle stores to raid? Just how frigging bright do these filmmakers and tv series producers think people need to have a room in order to see to have a simple conversation? I know it is possible, through the magic of filters, specialized lighting, and various technical tricks, to film people in rooms lit with as little as one candle, so why don't these post-apocalyptic series ever do that? Instead they do set dressing that makes it look as though the characters can just stroll down to the mall (or call the Party Lite dealer) to restock anytime. And that b.s. with the two Coleman lanterns was just overkill. One Coleman lantern would be the equivalent of a good table or ceiling light. In lumens, a Coleman set on high is brighter than a 75-watt incandescent bulb, so there's no way a person would need two of them plus several dozen candles just to sit around the living room chatting about the how and when of the Zombie Apocalypse.

Which, of course, leads to a variation on my Mother of All Yankee Candles rant: just where the heck did they find 2 Coleman gas lanterns and the fuel for them? You can find candles in any neighborhood Family Dollar store, but Coleman lamps and the white gas they burn are a little more specialized.

I'm not even going to get into the idiocy of the cop deciding to take a horse from the farm instead of looking for either a fuel barrel (if you've got a farm, odds are you've got a fuel drum somewhere full of gas for the tractor) or something to use to make a siphon hose. Instead he takes the horse and heads into downtown Atlanta. The S.O. looked at the street scene and speculated that he was heading for IKEA, god knows why (maybe he thought he could pick up some Swedish meatballs for lunch). If he was a Georgia sheriff's deputy and came down I-85, he had to know he'd passed the exits for the Centers for Disease Control (site of the supposed refugee camp) six or seven miles back.

And, yes, we're going to keep watching. If nothing else, the ensuing episodes should fuel lots more rants about people who write post-apocalyptic fiction being buried so deep in the device paradigm of modern technology that they can't effectively imagine life without it. 

Clarke was wrong

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke, 1961

Clarke was wrong, at least in part. If you've never seen a technology before, maybe it's magic. If you've lived with it your entire life, it's invisible. It's become as natural and immutable as the air you breathe or the ground you walk on. It's been black boxed and is ubiquitous to the point where you can't imagine living without it. You don't think at all about what's involved in making a device or what it takes to keep it running -- it's just there, always has been, always will be. You also become incapable of imagining alternatives.

I've been thinking about technology more than usual this weekend. I just finished reading a post-apocalyptic novel in which the author failed to escape the device paradigm, and a fair number of the talking heads on television kept falling back on that same paradigm coupled with technological optimism -- the idea that if we've got a problem, we can always solve it with technological innovations. Can't win the war in Afghanistan? Build more drones. Gas prices too high? We'll just start sucking oil out of shale. What we have is what we have to have, and there's no sense trying to escape that paradigm . . . or so the mindset seems to be.

It's not just novelists and pundits that are so thoroughly embedded in 21st century technology they can't see it anymore. So are survivalists and various back to the land types. I read various survivalist blogs for the fun of it -- some of them can provide a lot of laughs. It's amazing how many people are out there who fear a coming apocalypse, life in a Mad Max- or The Postman-type world, but seem to think "living off the grid" consists of buying a generator, as if there's always going to be a service station where they can go to refill the gas cans.  If they do think about building up their own private stash, I always wonder just how many realize just how quickly petroleum products, particularly gasoline, go bad?

I'm thinking about gasoline in particular this morning thanks in part to The Passage. One of its real howlers, a classic must suspend all disbelief moment, came when the protagonists were salvaging a Humvee from the base at Twenty Nine Palms to use to get to Telluride. Keep in mind those Humvees, their assorted parts, and their fuel have been sitting in a desert for almost 100 years. You know what you call 100-year-old gasoline? Varnish.

Gasoline consists of a mixture of complex hydrocarbons, some of which are highly volatile (which is why gasoline is a fuel, those vaporizing volatiles combust easily). Highly volatile means they evaporate quickly. If the unused gas in your lawn mower goes bad in a few months, what are the odds that the gas in a fuel tank anywhere is still going to be good a century from now? (There is a reason the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a stash of crude oil; as soon as you start refining petroleum, the various products, like gasoline, start breaking down.) One of my favorite laughable moments in post-apocalyptic fiction, both written and on the screen, occurs when Our Hero/Heroine leaps into a derelict car or truck, a vehicle that's been sitting abandoned on a street or in a garage for multiple years, and fires it right up. The scene they never show occurs a few seconds later when the engine seizes from the bad gas and our Hero/Heroine gets eaten by zombies.

With a few rare exceptions, none of these fictionalized futures ever include nonmotorized transportation, e.g., bicycles. (The more serious, reality-based survivalists do think about bikes; there's been a fair amount of discussion on some blogs about the best choices for a bug-out bicycle.) If novelists and script writers do eliminate the cars, they seem to assume the alternative has hooves and eats oats.

Personally, if I were paranoid enough to think like a survivalist, I'd make sure I had a really good bicycle and the gear that went with it (panniers, for example) to use in a bug out situation. It's a lot harder to get trapped in a traffic jam if you're on two wheels weaving between the cars (or, even better, have escaped the jam by doing back roads and side streets on those two wheels). I'd also be learning to work with tools that were low-tech and had as few hard to replace parts as possible. I'd be memorizing episodes of the Woodwright's Workshop and buying all of Roy Underhill's books while practicing food preservation methods popular before canning was invented, e.g., salting, smoking, and drying meats. Instead of worrying about where to stash my hoard of ammo, I'd focus on mastering an atl atl or using a bolo because sooner or later the bullets are going to run out, and, while reloading is theoretically possible, making your own gunpowder isn't as easy as MacGyver made it look.

I'm not sure just what all I'd hoard. I know what I'd pack to survive for a month or two, but forever? Spare ax handles for sure, because they'd be a pain to have to carve;  a lot of kosher salt (good both for preserving food and slaying zombies); zillions of canning jar lids because they're something where once they're gone, they're gone; and a stash of books I always meant to read but just haven't gotten around to yet -- although I'm not sure even an apocalypse would help me read Ulysses.

Book review: The Passage

I was a little late in getting around to reading The Passage. The book was the must-have beach read this past summer, but I'd vowed when we moved to Atlanta that I'd learn to rely on the local public library instead of subsidizing Borders. Which means getting on waiting lists for really popular books and hoping they get to me eventually, and The Passage did. The question is, was it worth the wait?

What I had heard about the book through word of mouth intrigued me. People that I know who never read vampire or science fiction raved about the book. A few reviewers did slam it as "Twilight meets The Stand," but enthusiasts outnumbered the nay-sayers.

Well, I must say the nay-sayers were wrong. It's not Twilight meets The Stand. It's The Stand meets Resident Evil with maybe a little bit of Fire Starter thrown in for good measure. Cronin does a really, really nice job of channeling Stephen King and video games. Had this novel been published by a more obviously genre publisher like TOR or DAW instead of Ballantine, the reaction would have been a tad more muted, i.e., "competent reworking of an old theme" or "formulaic post-apocalyptic potboiler." As it was, the author's previous works had not been trapped in the speculative fiction ghetto; they'd been mainstream, so this novel was treated as Serious Writing for Adults.

Pshaw. The Passage is not serious writing, at least not in the sense of mainstream novel writing. It's well-written, it's fun, it's escapist, but it's also derivative, formulaic, and contains its fair share of howlers, like the usual finding gasoline that's decades old and having it still be usable.* Cronin's work is a lot closer to Michael Crichton in spirit and execution than it is to anything by writers such as Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie. Cronin treads paths that have been traveled so many times before that they've become metaphorical expressways: the killer virus that escapes the lab, the evil military-industrial complex that wants to weaponize an idealistic scientist's work, the ever-popular "this is what happens when scientists play God" meme, the classic Good defeats Evil (and why does Evil always want to hang out in Las Vegas?). . . I'm not sure just how many authors have mined this particular vein before, but I do know you could fill a pretty goodsized convention hall with them all. It's not a bad book, it's actually quite good if you're looking for escapist reading, some mind candy with which to fritter away some time you would otherwise have spent vacuuming or watching Oprah, but it really did leave me wondering what all the fuss was about.   

Maybe the best way to describe the book would be say that Cronin is good, but he's not great. He's competent, he can string words together in a way that makes sense and flows smoothly, but he lacks the artistry of writers such as Rushdie. Maybe he'll grow into it -- or maybe he'll figure out he's created the ultimate retirement plan, a best-selling novel that's part of a trilogy (guaranteed sales for the sequels) and is also on its way to becoming a movie (supposedly being directed by the guy who directed "Cloverfield," which does not raise much hope for it being any good), so he can say goodbye to teaching snot-nosed undergraduates and kick back by a pool in Santa Barbara. 

[*I loved the sweet little old lady making paper by mixing sawdust and water. I couldn't help wondering just where the heck had she been getting sawdust from for 80 years when the settlement is described as not having had any new construction done in decades. Besides, they were still scavenging shopping malls for shoes and clothes; why didn't she just hit a Staples and stock up on notebook paper and 3-ring binders?]

Pulitzer Project: The Road

If you're looking for a book to cheer you up, The Road isn't it. I'm going to make this review short and simple: the writing is superb, the book itself is beyond depressing. Which actually isn't much of a suprise, considering it's by Cormac McCarthy, author of such other cheery works as No Country for Old Men.

I will give McCarthy points for getting one thing right with a post-apocalyptic novel. One of my pet peeves are the authors who seem to think it would be possible to scrounge indefinitely in the ruins of grocery stores and abandoned houses for canned goods and other supplies. McCarthy actually talks about rusting and bulging cans and stuff no longer being usable. It's also a very readable book. I can remember picking up one of McCarthy's earlier novels and never finishing it. That didn't happen this time: The Road sucks you right in, and the next thing you know you've read the whole thing.

The Road is supposedly being released as a movie in October of this year. Considering that the plot makes The Postman and most other post-apocalyptic stories seem like buddy comedies in comparison, I'm not sure who's going to go see it -- especially when the cast list includes such fun roles as Cannibal #1, Baby Eater, and Well-Fed Cannibal -- but maybe casting Viggo Mortenson and Charlize Theron will guarantee enough ticket sales to at least pay production costs.

LegalMist is reading The Road, too, and will be posting a review soon (if it's not up already). I'm curious to see if her response to the novel differs much from mine.

[Would my reaction have been different if I hadn't just come off that week of jury duty on a trial that involved a double homicide? I don't know. I do know I was depressed when that sad affair ended, and The Road did nothing to improve my mood.]

Just wondering

Why don't kids in post-apocalyptic fiction get the measles? A few days ago I finished reading S. M. Stirling's Scourge of God. It's the fifth book in a series, all set in a universe where something really strange happened in 1998 that basically repealed the laws of physics. Electricity stopped working, even gunpowder lost its explosive force.

Naturally, the first book (Dies the Fire) was full of the typical OMG post-apocalyptic coping with disaster without modern technology scenarios: hordes of people dying from starvation, for example, and a few smart people realizing that staying in the middle of a city (Portland, Oregon) that no longer works is not a real good idea and doing the classic bugging out to the boondocks to hunker down until the worst of the chaos has ended. A few people keep their heads to the extent of liberating farm animals (draft horses, cattle) from a living history exhibit. Dies the Fire is obviously heavily influenced by classic science fiction, e.g., Lucifer's Hammer, along with an overt homage to LOTR, and contains the usual obligatory plot elements. There are scavengers who resort to cannibalism and eventually (as the series progresses) form bands referred to as "eaters," for example, and the classic clashes occurring between The Reluctant Ethical Hero and The Sadistic Power-Hungry Tyrant. Stirling ends up having the Reluctant Hero do just about everything except pull a sword from a stone before he and the Tyrant meet in battle.

But none of that is what has me wondering. I know the rules for post-apocalyptic fiction; Stirling follows them all as the series progresses, including channeling some Stephen King ala The Stand and having some unspecified preternatural Ultimate Evil hovering just off-stage and lusting for humanity's soul. He hits all his marks and does so quite deftly. The books are a good read, well-crafted and entertaining. I'm a little annoyed with Stirling for not making the last two books (The Sunrise Lands and Scourge of God) stand alone the way the first three (Dies the Fire, Meeting at Corvallis, and The Protector's War) were, but I enjoyed reading them.

No, what I want to know is why no one gets measles? Or mumps? Or polio? Or maybe even influenza? They started off with stashes of antibiotics, but vaccines never got mentioned. Why aren't women dying in childbirth or from childbed fever? The latest book is set 22 years past-Change; where are the infectious diseases, viral and bacterial? There's a lot of battling going on -- why aren't there a bunch of one-armed or one-legged veterans hobbling around because it was either amputate or lose a limb to gangrene? I want some germs in action, or I want an explanation of how they're managing to manufacture antibiotics using the equivalent of 16th century technology.

Oh well, maybe in the next book Stirling will have someone stumble across a cache of Georgia peanut butter, decide that despite over two decades of sitting in a warehouse it's still edible, and the series will get the bloody flux that's been missing so far.