One Second After
Guest post by Rob Drimmie.
Imagine a man, a formerly high-ranking Army Officer who is now a professor at a small christian college in a small North Carolina town. The man is a widow. He has two daughters, one is diabetic and dependant on insulin and the other is starting a relationship with her first serious boyfriend. Now imagine all unshielded electrical devices in North America are destroyed by an EMP and imagine how the next year plays out. All the major plot points you just imagined are touched on in this book, probably in the order you expected with the outcome you imagined.
The story is not bad, or poorly written. It’s just that it is a scenario written to educate and popularize the consequences of an EMP attack against the United States, Japan and Russia and cloaked in narrative-like garb.
In fact, the pacing of the story is great. After a couple of false starts in the first dozen or so pages (which somewhat clumsily set the stage on which the scenario is acted) I ended up reading the entire book in one sitting. Hour after hour ticked by and I was unable to stop because the scenario itself is engaging and the telling was done well. Predictability does not a bad story make.
Our imagined man with the sturdy American name of John Matherson is a fairly well realized character surrounded by a helpful cardboard cut-outs that are placed as required by each scene to tug heartstrings and progress to the next major plot point. Loss and sacrifice in defense of the American Way of Life are the secondary themes of the book as the flood of tertiary characters who you know you’re supposed to feel something for pass in and out of John’s awareness.
The major theme of the book is the motivation behind this book’s existence: America is highly susceptible to an EMP attack. Story, characters and everything else are secondary to the Very Important Message. This is nothing new in Science Fiction, there are hundreds of well-ground axes prepared by the greatest authors of the genre and one of the things the book does well is to create a sympathetic character with whom I would very likely disagree about a great many things if we were to sit down together to talk.
What bothers me about the presence of a political bias that I disagree with isn’t the bias itself but the clumsiness with which it is presented. My favourite, and the most glaring, example of this is a throwaway line featuring a character lamenting the money the government invested in Climate Change research and prevention that should have gone to preparing a defense against an EMP attack.
I’m a long-time fan of post-apocalyptic scenarios and this book is a solid and enjoyable read but doesn’t really tread new ground, even in warning that the United States is highly susceptible to debilitating attack from its enemies. It’s the sort of book that I look to have with me when I want to kill time without having to dedicate a lot of thought to the process – while on an airplane, or at a cottage or a beach somewhere. I can’t imagine forking out the money for a hardcover copy and even $10 for the paperback seems a bit dear but I am somewhat out of touch with book prices having been relying on libraries (and winning internet contests like at wereadscifi.com) for my reading materials of late.
