One Second After
by William R. Forstchen
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Book Reviews of One Second After
Book Review: A frightening piece of fiction about what may be tomorrow's reality
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book the same week that North Korea set off another nuclear weapon and launched several missiles. Iran, as well, launched a missile or two. Washington politicians talked a little more than those in Europe about proliferation, but the reality is that the apocalypse described in "One Second After" is getting closer all the time.
"One Second After" is based upon scientific fact or, at worst in some places, on educated conjecture. The science largely comes from the "Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack". You can find this fascinating, if very depressing, study online.
One moment, Black Mountain, North Carolina is a small, exurban town, host to a college with 600 hundred students, no large businesses, just a pleasant little place gaining favor as summer hideaway for people from the larger cities. Black Mountain is, however, strategically located on the Interstate highway system and provides the water supply to a larger nearby city.
Suddenly, the phones die along with all the electrical appliances. Just a second before, everything worked - and now, one second after, they don't.
John Matherson is a former U. S. Army Colonel who came to this town with his wife, when she was dying of cancer. She had grown up here. Matherson is now a Professor of history at the local college. Widowed father of two daughters, Matherson is respected within the community.
Within hours it becomes clear that the power is off - perhaps forever. Every modern electrical device is dead, fried by a suspected Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack on the United States by, at this time, parties unknown. The United States has, in an instant, been thrown back into the 19th Century.
21st Century people aren't well equipped to live under 19th Century conditions.
Matherson's immediate concern is his 12 year old daughter who has Type 1 diabetes. Without a constant supply of insulin, she will die.
The story shifts quickly to how the community reacts. Matherson is at first a respected outsider, his military experience and standing as Professor and his level headedness appreciated.
First, there are hundreds of people whose cars and trucks simply stopped on the Interstates. They flow into town, some of them being less than wanted. There is an immediate concern about food. How are these several thousand people going to be fed for any appreciable time? No refrigerators or freezers are running; no trucks are bringing in fresh supplies every day.
What about the nursing home in town? The elderly and frail who need refrigerated drugs and constant attendant care?|
There are no radio broadcasts, no television, no internet: no communication with anyone outside the town.
Author Forstchen pulls together the pieces, scaring the reader in the process. This can happen - and, thanks to the our politicians, likely will happen. Forschen resorts to a few plot devices that strain a bit: the fortuitousness of his wife's family being sort of car collectors and having a couple of Fords so old that the EMP didn't affect them: no electronics. A local towny has a vintage airplane that comes in very handy. Again, it is so old that it has no vulnerable electronics.
The human story becomes everything. Without modern utilities and supplies, disease surges. The social order begins to break down. It is too late in the year to plant crops - and, anyway, few people here know how to farm. Skills that haven't been needed in several generations become indispensably vital. The town must organize its young people to defend itself against marauding bands. Choices must be made about who gets how much food - and what people are to be deliberately underfed to the point of starvation.
Forstchen is unsparing: the United States is no longer the land of plenty it once was.
It falls to Matherson and a few others, however, to keep the United States a nation of laws, of individual freedom, individual responsibility and moral decency in the sense of treating people as you would want to be treated,
Amidst the action of a post-apocalypse survival story, Forstchen writes a morality tale as well. Increasingly, Matherson is forced by circumstances to assume a leadership role as the circumstances become more dire.
This is not a happy book. This is not a pleasant book. It is, in fact, a frightening book, one that is calculated to have the reader asking US leaders why we are not doing more to prepare for this attack that will come, while doing our best to defend against it.
For me, this was one of the most frightening books I've read in a long time. It is, unfortunately, prophetic and in the not too distant future - unless the nation takes action - the scenarios described here may well become painfully real. This is a book that concerned citizens should read - and then move on to the "Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack" Executive Summary, 62 pages of data that will have you writing your Congressman.
Jerry
Book Review: Plausible TEOTWAWKI scenario, but badly written
Summary: 2 Stars
TEOTWAWKI (that is, The End Of The World As We Know It) is a popular subject and theme in fiction. Some TEOTWAWKI stories are based on far-fetched or supernatural premises (zombies, monsters, supernatural forces), while others are based on more realistic ones (epidemics, nuclear war, natural disaster.) ONE SECOND AFTER by William Forstchen is based on the plausible premise of an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the United States instantly disabling most electronic devices, and the resulting societal breakdown. It focuses on the small North Carolina mountain town of Black Mountain, and stars an ex-Colonel-turned-history-professor. Post-apocalyptic fiction is one of my favorite fiction subgenres, and with all the attention this book has receieved, I was looking forward to finally reading it. Overall, I ended up disappointed.
On the plus side, it was an interesting and realistic premise, and it seemed that the author had done a lot of research on how things might play out in such a scenario. As a warning of how badly and quickly things could degenerate in the aftermath of an event like an EMP attack, the book largely succeeds.
However, as a novel, it falls short. First, it was full of basic writing errors and style problems that Forstchen, a PhD in history who has written many books, should not have committed. Run-ons were particularly rife, as were word-choice errors. Whoever edited this book was asleep at the switch.
Secondly, the dialogue was weak. The characters simply didn't speak like real people. Often the dialogue degenerated into Atlas Shrugged-esque soliloquies. Also, I was particularly annoyed by the overuse of names in the dialogue. When you're in a conversation with a person, you generally don't keep repeating his name over and over every time you say something to him. This was especially nagging whenever a character was speaking to the main character, whose name was John. "Listen, John. Let me tell you something, John. John, we need to blah blah blah, John. What do you think, John?" When the character has been speaking to John for the last five pages, I think John knows that the character is talking to him!
Speaking of the characters, they were mostly one-dimensional idealizations, particularly any who were military or ex-military. All of the military characters were perfect exemplars of unselfish virtue and bravery. None of them used their training or hardware to take advantage of the societal breakdown. None of them chickened out when the stuff started hitting the fan. The author seems to suffer from the neocon-ish notion that everyone associated with the military is a saintly hero. As someone who has a PhD in military history, you would think he would have a more realistic understanding -- that he would know that military personnel are as varied and imperfect as everyone else.
In addition, for a novel dealing with an entire town and the surrounding region, Forstchen focused far too exclusively on the main protagonist. I understand he's the 'star,' the 'hero,' but I'm pretty sure there is not a single scene in the novel where he is not present, and not a single scene that is even rendered from another character's point of view. This would have been understandable if the novel was written as a first-person narrative, but it's written in the third. Contrast this to how writers such as Stephen King and Tom Clancy (to pick just a couple) shift points of view throughout a novel to keep it interesting and give the reader insight into different characters and different aspects of a situation.
WARNING: A FEW POTENTIAL PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!
The big battle against "the Posse" (a vaguely defined band of barbarian pillagers), which could have been riveting, was not well-depicted at all. The narrative of it was actually set AFTER the battle, with reflections on what had happened. We are given an account that reads like a typical bird's-eye view operational history. While this is somewhat understandable given Forstchen's academic background, this type of narration doesn't work well in a novel. Far better would have been an account from several of the key charcters' points of view as they actually experienced the battle.
"The Posse" itself, especially its leader, was disappointing. The leader was only in the book for a few pages, and made some vague statements about being the servant of Satan. Then he was exected. Forstchen missed a great opportunity to have a compelling villain. It made me nostalgaic for Randall Flagg, or even -- gulp -- The Great Humongous. (TEOTWAWKI fans will recognize those names, I'm sure.)
All in all, ONE SECOND AFTER is a realistic and well-researched idea with a disappointing narrative grafted onto it. If you want to read it as some kind of survival manual, okay, but a great novel this is not. The writing flaws actually made the story seem less plausible to me than other TEOTWAWKI stories that feature supernatural elements. THE STAND, for example, reads as more 'real' to me -- thanks to much better characters and writing -- than ONE SECOND AFTER, despite the latter's much more mundane premise.
Book Review: The same old tired themes
Summary: 3 Stars
[...]
A middle-aged widowed ex-Army college professor, his two daughters, two dogs and mother-in-law must face a devastating nuclear attack. But nothing is blown up, no one dies of fallout poisoning, and no one is killed in the first seconds. The nuclear warheads exploded in the upper atmosphere, its electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) knocking out all electronics and as a result all the electricity in North America. In their small mountain home in Western North Carolina, the impact will be felt almost immediately. But it will come home with savage force as the weeks and months go by.
John Matherson and his family learn quickly when, during his twelve year old diabetic daughter's birthday party everything shuts off. What do you lose when there is no electricity and no one to come to your aid for.. a year? Communications go out. Cars stop running. Medical equipment, like blood glucose monitors, won't work. Refrigerators stop retrograding. And that's just the immediate impact. Unable to function in a new and unknown world, one known well by our ancestors, people eat spoiled meat and die. They run out of medications and die. They get hurt and without antibiotics they die. They start to run out of food and they die. Despair and suicide come next and they die. Maarauders from the urban areas start to show up with guns and many die. They, weakened by hunger, catch diseases from the marauders and die. People have to mobilize to fight off small armies of more ruthless marauders and are killed in the wars.
That's basically the story of this novel. John Matherson, who really is a college history professor in Black Mountain, NC, based his character and town on his real life. With military history as his expertise he is uniquely equipped to understand what is going on. He knows no quick fix will come. It will take weeks, months, maybe longer for the parts of the world still functioning to get aid to the U.S. First, though, everything will run out. Hard choices will have to be made: do we let pets live and consume food we could use or eat them? Do we ration food until people can barely survive on the few hundred calories. Do we execute criminals , and if so, who pulls the trigger?
The ultimate question is: will anyone ever come to save us or is this the end?
The strength of this book is its methodical examination of what we would lose, step by step. It does not shy away from much. The relationships, though clearly from a strictly male point of view and a father's at that, are affecting.
The book has two major flaws, however, ones that are almost unavoidable in apocalyptic fiction. The first is the simple overlooking of simple realities. I know an author can't think of everything, and Forstehen did a good job thinking of things that perhaps other authors would not have, but there are a few glaring omissions. One is radio. In One Second After's world, even where they have old radios not affected by the EMP they hear nothing on the mediumwave (AM) band until the Voice of America comes back on. The truth is that with all electrical interference eliminated you could hear all sorts of stations from quite great distances (DX). Even if a location was just too far from these foreign broadcasters, somebody, a ham radio operator, is going to have an old tube radio. Then shortwave broadcasters and operators would come in strong from Europe, Africa, South America, and anywhere else not hit by the additional nukes. Further these people could transmit like never before, with no interference from lights, appliances, cell phone and microwave towers, computers, you name it. Forstehen wanted to create isolation, but he can't just overlook something that important.
The other flaw is one that we have found in just about every end-of-the-world novel we have read. It's what my husband Jim calls "macho doomer war porn". An effete intellectual male turns into a warrior and the world crumbles into battling fiefs. It's always in order to allow the author, I suspect, to play big butch army guy. Even our favorite doomer novel, Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, is infested with this theme. How refreshing something like The Day After and Testament are.
Other problems include a character mentioned at the beginning, the neighbor who lives without electricity in the pre-EMP world, who never gets mentioned again; thee Edsel ex machina; the lecture at the beginning and end of the book. One thing John says that made us both shake our heads, that we should prepare the way people always are ready for hurricane outages... they are?! Since when? And a warning: the introduction is written by Newt Gingrich, clearly angling for the Presidency.
By the way, Forstehen really is an ex-Army college history professor at the real Presbyterian college in the real town of Black Mountain, NC. I wonder if Asheville has closed its city limits to him, with the hatchet job he did on their rep.
Book Review: Rather bad as a novel with factual errors, but provides some food for thought
Summary: 2 Stars
This book describes one of the worst-case scenarios following an EMP attack on the US, from the point of view of a small rural town. If you have seen the TV series Jericho, you will find a lot of it here (quite possibly it was inspired by this book or vice versa).
Let's start with what is good about this book:
- It serves as a wake up call. It shows you that American society is way too dependent on modern technology, medicine, supply chains, and well-functioning infrastructure. Also, most Americans are not prepared, in terms of skills and supplies, to face and survive a major emergency. An EMP attack has the potential to revert the entire country to 19th century technology, minus the knowledge, skills, and electricity-free infrastructure to support a reasonable quality of life. So the major emergency in the book disrupts the lives of practically all. Famine and disease kill off the weak, the chronically ill, the old and infirm. If you think about Katrina, much of the same happened. Also, famine tends to bring out the worst in people, so serious crime and even large scale paramilitary battles erupt, leading to more deaths and suffering.
What is bad about this book? Here is a list to start:
- Factual errors - EMP is apparently not as destructive as author makes it sound. The preface and afterword of the book refer to a congressional report which can be found if you search online for empcommission. While I did not read every detail of the report, the summary and parts of individual chapters that I read seemed to say that disruption to communications would be temporary (i.e. phone coverage would recover in a matter of days), and most cars including modern ones are immune to EMP, especially if they are not running at the time of the event. Granted, electronics which are running, plugged in, etc may get fried, and there could be significant short term damage. However, the fear that highways will turn into parking lots and life will revert to 19th century - this may be an urban myth. Read the congressional report for yourselves.
- Jingoistic is a bizarre way. "We're Americans, therefore X" comes up a lot. E.g. when someone on the town council proposes that they should eat their dogs since food is seriously running out, the main character counters this with "we're Americans, we don't do that". Here is another pearl of wisdom, p. 337: "Vitamins, John thought. My God, so American. Something good from a small bottle." You get the point?
- Overemphasis on the military motif. The main character is a retired colonel, and everywhere he goes, vets from practically all wars after WW2 come out of the woodwork (often enough to get repetitive). They tend to be the most upstanding citizens ever, and engage in all sorts of overly romanticized heroism.
- Too much dialogue. Seriously, it gets annoying when even the most inane detail that moves the plot forward or explains what is going on is presented via dialogue. A little more narration would have been good.
- Lack of realism based on logic and human nature. The town miraculously feeds thousands of inhabitants through centralized rations for several months, even though the food stores are looted in the first couple of days and there are no further supplies from anywhere. Where does this food come from? Also, somehow they establish a centralized rationing scheme, martial law with quick executions, sort of like in Stalin's Russia in WW2 (there are plenty of direct references in the book). Yes somehow they do not devolve into hard line power politics, armed strongmen occupying all the resources, which is hard to believe. Also, there is some combination of small-town ethics combined with stiff upper lip which I really could not identify with. The father (main character) can't communicate with his daughters (at all), and although some hottie nurse is into him, there is zero romance whatsoever.
- This book does not really teach you anything. It just shows one way things can disintegrate when the electric and transportation grid go down. If you want to learn about survival from a fiction book, try Patriots by James Rawles. It has all of the same flaws as this book, even worse in fact, but you can learn by observing what the characters do to prepare for and cope with their crisis.
Bottom line: I can't recommend this book - too flawed and incomplete.
If you want a well written what-if end-of-the-world scenario, real Lucifer's Hammer. It develops earthquake-thunami-flood scenarios well, across urban and rural areas, shows a wider variety of more realistic human behaviors, and it is just a lot more fun to read.
Book Review: Macho, macho ma-a-a-an...at the end of the world
Summary: 2 Stars
I'm reviewing the book, NOT the idea of whether an EMP is possible, preventable, or survivable. Without a doubt, by reading this book, I was enlightened about pre-emergency survival measures and some possibilities surrounding an event of this nature. Thank you for that. Thus, the 2 stars I awarded.
But as a work of literature/entertainment:
I'm a librarian who learned of this book at a Readers' Advisory event with a room packed full of librarians, one sharing summaries of the latest novels in my FAVORITE genre, post-apoc fiction (Earth Abides being my favorite). This one sounded intriguing, so I put myself on the list. I've just finished it, and am actually surprised that I stuck with it. If you like guns, macho men, bravado, "America"-pumping/grandstanding, poor grammar/punctuation, weak character development, a very boring climactic showdown, and predictable dialogue and plot, THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU!
As a form of warning, the book works - but as a novel, I was rubbed the wrong way so many times. The protagonist was a selfish individual - he wanted all others to follow the law but saw no problem taking as much insulin as he could or hoarding his cigarettes (did you know cigarettes could be bonding devices? - I'm referring to that scene where he and the other big-wigs nearly had the car taken near Asheville and John "gave it" to that one military man, but good, while sharing a smoke with the other and writing a nice letter to his boss), or driving his car endlessly. The car. That really bothered me. John and his family had so many advantages - John could drive around town (why didn't theives ever take his vehicle?) and his family was able to flee when the homes were being raided and set on fire, unlike their neighbors - but no talk at all about gasoline and how easy or difficult it was to obtain or how he did so, till much later. John counted cigarettes endlessly. Too bad there wasn't product placement - the author would have made a fortune for that, each time a cigarette was mentioned. And everytime he shared one, it was as though it was a major sacrifice. HOW ABOUT SHARING SOME INSULIN? He wanted HIS friend (Makala) to stay while being angered that others would allow outsiders admitted. John always expected special treatment, and that was irritating because I think we're supposed to like this guy.
Another thing that truly upset me was the scene where the first persons were executed. They dismissed the importance of having a lawyer on hand, but by all means, they MUST have a clergyman there! So legal rights aren't important - but someone to say a prayer is. Sorry, but legal rights should be AT LEAST as important as prayer is, especially to citizens who supposedly respect rights and the foundation of America. That was very telling to me about the perspective of the author and/or those who might be programmed to love this book, its characters, and their actions.
I thought the treatment of women in this book was mildly offensive as well. I know, some were strong, but the scene where they berate the women militia - c'mon. The eyes up and down Makala. And where the heck was Kate, the mayor, all this time? No, it was the macho men and their weapons that won the day (or did they?). At least the author placed sense in one character (Makala) to have John and the militia stop the killing.
Last but not least, I'm sorry, but this book was WAY TOO SYMPATHETIC to the actually POOR response to Katrina. And the talk about how Guiliani and the President "talked" and made things all better after 9/11. PLEASE. I agree with someone else who said the book would have done better to avoid the politics. Or should I say "would of"?
The author gave me nothing much to like about John and his family, and right there, EMP or not, the book fared poorly as a winning piece of literature. The book wasn't so bad that I had to stop reading, but it was pretty bad. I DO think there's merit in this book in that it allows you to consider what really might happen in such a situation, allows you to ask whether things would unfold the way the author depicts in this fictional account, and in the end, that's what this genre's all about. For those who must read all in this genre, you should probably give this one a try, but being a librarian, I must say: borrow this one.