kw: book reviews, horror, fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction
After finishing the prior book, I spent a couple of hours with Deadline by Mira Grant. That was about all I could take. The book is based on an "explanation" for people becoming brain-eating Zombies because of a virus infection. The other theme is that with everyone staying indoors (or else!), more media entertainment is needed, so zombie fighters wear all sorts of cameras to go out and kill them by the dozens.
I had my fill of gore by about page 20, so I flitted about, reading portions of another several pages, and the conclusion. This being the middle book of a trilogy, it was not surprising that the book ends with a hint that the virus may be one day overcome. I mean, if you aren't going to at least try to "solve the problem", why raise it? Downers don't sell.
Anyway, good writing skills, but the author isn't someone I'd want to hang out with.
Oh, by the way, there is a preview of the third book in the end papers. Somebody gets cloned. I wonder how the clone gets the memories of the original? Not enough that I'd want to read it.
Showing posts with label post-apocalyptic fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-apocalyptic fiction. Show all posts
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Raising the post-apocalyptic bar
kw: book reviews, science fiction, future fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction
If Slow Apocalypse by John Varley were shorter and more technically focused, I suppose it would be called high concept. Certainly the scene setting is simple enough to state, and the author does so in very few pages. In short, a microbe is developed that rapidly converts all the petroleum in an oilfield into something like coal or asphalt, releasing most of the hydrogen in the hydrocarbons, causing enormous explosions and fires. The microbe, engineered to be mobile only in liquids, mutates such that a variety can survive being blown about from oil field to oil field. It doesn't take long—a few months—for all the world's petroleum to be solidified.
This is the starting point. The story Varley tells is the more human story of what people do about it. A Hollywood screenwriter named Dave Marshall gets advance warning during an interview. The following day, not knowing what to believe, he is shown evidence that convinces him. He makes preparations for his family. But there is only so much a fellow can do, living in the Hollywood Hills. He lays in food, water, guns and ammo, and as much gasoline in as many cans as he can buy (the microbe doesn't affect refined products, only crude oil. The story would get too complicated if the author allowed the bug to mutate again!).
A little over half the book takes place mostly in the Marshalls' neighborhood north of the intersection of Doheny Drive and Sunset Blvd, and covers a month or two. At one point, the "big one", a 9+ earthquake occurs, triggered by the disturbances in the oil reservoirs deep beneath the Los Angeles basin. Not long after that, a wildfire comes roaring out of the hills above Doheny Drive, and they load up whatever they can carry and abandon their home, joining another family that has invited them to migrate with them out of the LA area. One of the men has converted two large vehicles to burn wood chips. I presume he also knows how to convert the wood chipper they take along to burn wood chips.
The fire burns about half the whole basin to the ground. Ironically, once the ground cools, the burned-out area is the best place to drive. No (living) humans, though it is hard to tell which street goes where, with all the street signs burned up. Their trek as refugees takes up the rest of the book, up to an Epilog. I have to pick a nit: near Anaheim, they pass by the Watts Towers. Last time I was there, the WT were 25 miles northwest of Anaheim, not within sight as the narrative implies.
Varley has given a lot of thought to the way a continent—or a county—can Balkanize after such a thorough disaster. The full range of human good and evil is on display, and at one point the Marshalls and their fellows are attacked by a gang that numbers 15; road-hardened and ready, they kill most of them. This makes them a lot more welcome in the town downhill of the gang's hideout.
The premise is worth thinking about. Take away petroleum, and what will happen? Can the earth support 7 billions when there is no way to make chemical fertilizers, nor a way to transport them, or the food produced? Prior to the 1880s, a large number of farmers and farm workers supported a much smaller work force of blacksmiths, wagoners, carpenters, millers and others. Such an agrarian economy is the natural state of a petroleum-free planet.
Is there a way to have a high-energy economy without petroleum? There isn't enough wood. Coal (and newly coalified petroleum) will only support a medium-energy economy, and conversion would take a long time. Solar and wind energy are just barely efficient enough that you could use solar energy to produce more solar panels, or wind energy to make more windmills, before the originals break down and have to be replaced with what you just made. You get very little surplus energy out of the process. I call a wind turbine a high-tech way to turn hydro-power into aluminum and then back into about the same amount of electric energy you started with. A truck full of aluminum windmill parts goes by, and I say, "There goes another few million KWh!"
John Varley makes you believe things could really happen this way. Amidst a global tragedy, some will triumph, and not just the most greedy. People will get things going again, as long as there are people. You have to gun down the occasional greedy gang to get there, and good people might have nightmares after doing so, but that won't stop them.
The scale of the aftermath is kept out of view; most likely, fewer than one fifth of the world population would remain after the first year. Varley's focus is narrower than this. LA is truly where the greatest problems would arise, a desert kept green by billions of acre-feet of imported water. In a post-petroleum world, no more than a few thousand people could live there. Los Angeles County, New York City (all 5 boroughs), and all the megalopolises would empty; they would have to. A very thought-provoking book, and we can always use more of those.
If Slow Apocalypse by John Varley were shorter and more technically focused, I suppose it would be called high concept. Certainly the scene setting is simple enough to state, and the author does so in very few pages. In short, a microbe is developed that rapidly converts all the petroleum in an oilfield into something like coal or asphalt, releasing most of the hydrogen in the hydrocarbons, causing enormous explosions and fires. The microbe, engineered to be mobile only in liquids, mutates such that a variety can survive being blown about from oil field to oil field. It doesn't take long—a few months—for all the world's petroleum to be solidified.
This is the starting point. The story Varley tells is the more human story of what people do about it. A Hollywood screenwriter named Dave Marshall gets advance warning during an interview. The following day, not knowing what to believe, he is shown evidence that convinces him. He makes preparations for his family. But there is only so much a fellow can do, living in the Hollywood Hills. He lays in food, water, guns and ammo, and as much gasoline in as many cans as he can buy (the microbe doesn't affect refined products, only crude oil. The story would get too complicated if the author allowed the bug to mutate again!).
A little over half the book takes place mostly in the Marshalls' neighborhood north of the intersection of Doheny Drive and Sunset Blvd, and covers a month or two. At one point, the "big one", a 9+ earthquake occurs, triggered by the disturbances in the oil reservoirs deep beneath the Los Angeles basin. Not long after that, a wildfire comes roaring out of the hills above Doheny Drive, and they load up whatever they can carry and abandon their home, joining another family that has invited them to migrate with them out of the LA area. One of the men has converted two large vehicles to burn wood chips. I presume he also knows how to convert the wood chipper they take along to burn wood chips.
The fire burns about half the whole basin to the ground. Ironically, once the ground cools, the burned-out area is the best place to drive. No (living) humans, though it is hard to tell which street goes where, with all the street signs burned up. Their trek as refugees takes up the rest of the book, up to an Epilog. I have to pick a nit: near Anaheim, they pass by the Watts Towers. Last time I was there, the WT were 25 miles northwest of Anaheim, not within sight as the narrative implies.
Varley has given a lot of thought to the way a continent—or a county—can Balkanize after such a thorough disaster. The full range of human good and evil is on display, and at one point the Marshalls and their fellows are attacked by a gang that numbers 15; road-hardened and ready, they kill most of them. This makes them a lot more welcome in the town downhill of the gang's hideout.
The premise is worth thinking about. Take away petroleum, and what will happen? Can the earth support 7 billions when there is no way to make chemical fertilizers, nor a way to transport them, or the food produced? Prior to the 1880s, a large number of farmers and farm workers supported a much smaller work force of blacksmiths, wagoners, carpenters, millers and others. Such an agrarian economy is the natural state of a petroleum-free planet.
Is there a way to have a high-energy economy without petroleum? There isn't enough wood. Coal (and newly coalified petroleum) will only support a medium-energy economy, and conversion would take a long time. Solar and wind energy are just barely efficient enough that you could use solar energy to produce more solar panels, or wind energy to make more windmills, before the originals break down and have to be replaced with what you just made. You get very little surplus energy out of the process. I call a wind turbine a high-tech way to turn hydro-power into aluminum and then back into about the same amount of electric energy you started with. A truck full of aluminum windmill parts goes by, and I say, "There goes another few million KWh!"
John Varley makes you believe things could really happen this way. Amidst a global tragedy, some will triumph, and not just the most greedy. People will get things going again, as long as there are people. You have to gun down the occasional greedy gang to get there, and good people might have nightmares after doing so, but that won't stop them.
The scale of the aftermath is kept out of view; most likely, fewer than one fifth of the world population would remain after the first year. Varley's focus is narrower than this. LA is truly where the greatest problems would arise, a desert kept green by billions of acre-feet of imported water. In a post-petroleum world, no more than a few thousand people could live there. Los Angeles County, New York City (all 5 boroughs), and all the megalopolises would empty; they would have to. A very thought-provoking book, and we can always use more of those.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Three apocalypses
kw: book reviews, speculative fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction
It took me a while to warm up to Michael Cunningham's writing. His new book Specimen Days is really three related novellas. One takes place about 1900, one about 2020, one about 2150. Each has as its main characters a woman (broadly speaking), a youngish man (sort of...), and a pre-teen boy. The woman's name in each case is a variant of Catherine. The man's is Simon, though in 21-whatever, he is more of an android. The boy's name varies. The novellas are titled "In the Machine," "The Children's Crusade," and "Like Beauty." The stories are linked also by being in, or beginning in, New York City, and by the presence of a rare ceramic bowl.
In the first, Simon is unfaithful, but dies before marrying the woman. The boy, his brother, carries on his job, finds himself hexed by Simon's voice in a stamping machine, and is himself injured by the machine. The woman's life is saved as a result, for when she leaves her workplace to tend to the boy, she isn't present when the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of 1911 takes the lives of 147 seamstresses.
The woman is a forensic pathologist in the second, and Simon her lover. She works a police terrorist hotline (I suspect the job hardly exists at present), taking calls from those who wish to report mayhem before the fact. Two boys in succession call in, then go out to blow someone up. A third boy targets her. Though she talks him out of his pipe bomb, the life she knew ends, nonetheless, though in this case it could be a beginning.
Nobody is really "human" in "Like Beauty". Simon is an android. The woman is an alien refugee, a lizard-shaped mammal from a nearby stellar system. The boy, who appears halfway through, is a precocious survivor who leads them to their destiny with the man who created Simon. This Simon is faithful to the woman, though he finds she is a century older than he.
Cutting away the fluff, they are the same post-apocalyptic story. The Industrial Revolution was an apocalypse for rural families, though it took a few generations to work itself out. The near- and farther-future stories occur during drawn-out apocalypses of their own.
I confess I did not read all of "In the Machine." It is rougher, edgier, with a bit more vulgarity (we're talking more than dirty language here) than I care for. This is ugliness with a purpose, however, just as the ugliness in the political novels of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck were purposeful: the generation needed a thump in the head. So does ours. We are either active agents, or specimens...
It took me a while to warm up to Michael Cunningham's writing. His new book Specimen Days is really three related novellas. One takes place about 1900, one about 2020, one about 2150. Each has as its main characters a woman (broadly speaking), a youngish man (sort of...), and a pre-teen boy. The woman's name in each case is a variant of Catherine. The man's is Simon, though in 21-whatever, he is more of an android. The boy's name varies. The novellas are titled "In the Machine," "The Children's Crusade," and "Like Beauty." The stories are linked also by being in, or beginning in, New York City, and by the presence of a rare ceramic bowl.
In the first, Simon is unfaithful, but dies before marrying the woman. The boy, his brother, carries on his job, finds himself hexed by Simon's voice in a stamping machine, and is himself injured by the machine. The woman's life is saved as a result, for when she leaves her workplace to tend to the boy, she isn't present when the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire of 1911 takes the lives of 147 seamstresses.
The woman is a forensic pathologist in the second, and Simon her lover. She works a police terrorist hotline (I suspect the job hardly exists at present), taking calls from those who wish to report mayhem before the fact. Two boys in succession call in, then go out to blow someone up. A third boy targets her. Though she talks him out of his pipe bomb, the life she knew ends, nonetheless, though in this case it could be a beginning.
Nobody is really "human" in "Like Beauty". Simon is an android. The woman is an alien refugee, a lizard-shaped mammal from a nearby stellar system. The boy, who appears halfway through, is a precocious survivor who leads them to their destiny with the man who created Simon. This Simon is faithful to the woman, though he finds she is a century older than he.
Cutting away the fluff, they are the same post-apocalyptic story. The Industrial Revolution was an apocalypse for rural families, though it took a few generations to work itself out. The near- and farther-future stories occur during drawn-out apocalypses of their own.
I confess I did not read all of "In the Machine." It is rougher, edgier, with a bit more vulgarity (we're talking more than dirty language here) than I care for. This is ugliness with a purpose, however, just as the ugliness in the political novels of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck were purposeful: the generation needed a thump in the head. So does ours. We are either active agents, or specimens...
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