One Year After

One Year After
© 2015 William Forstchen
304 pages

It's been two years since an EMP blast reduced most of the United States to medieval conditions. After cars and the electrical grid failed, everything went to hell -- complete with hordes of the damned, mobs of men and women given over to madness attacking anything in their path. In the aftermath, starvation and disease again reared their heads, killing millions. Colonel John Matherson was a history professor on the Day of the attack, but in the wake of the chaos became the commander of his community's defensive forces.  He could do nothing against the death of his daughter and other loved ones by disease, but he could fight gangs, and so stand for the rule of law as to prevent his own friends from becoming monsters themselves.  In One Year After, we find Matherson and the town council of Black Mountain attempting to rebuild, nearly on the verge of establishing a electric generator. But beyond the mountains there is a continent of forces fighting for chaos and order, and  the fair city of Black Mountain has caught their eye.  As Matherson attempts to negotiate a peace between his city and a smaller community nearby, the area becomes of interest to a Federal government attempting to reconstitute itself.  Torn between hope that this is a genuine start to national recovery and his fears that the 'federal administrator' isn't on the level,  Matherson and Black Mountain stand cautious, and are ultimately caught up in another life-and-death struggle.

One Second After read like a science-fiction horror story, chronicling a catastrophic breakdown of society; One Year After's story is far less harrowing, being mostly politics and combat as Matherson works with his neighbors and the government in nearby Bluemont that claims to be the legitimate government.  Black Mountain has weathered the worst of the breakdown, but  its neighbors spell trouble. Not only is there constant feuding between mountain clans that frequently bleeds over into his city, but those warring tribes have caught the attention of the Bluemont government. The United States'  overseas meddling has for once paid off;  the troops and equipment stationed outside of the EMP bursts are alive, kicking, and back in the states to restore order.  At the novel's opening, a draft has been imposed on the populations in contact with Bluemont, as it is attempting to create an Army of National Recovery to put an end to the multitude of highwaymen and cults now peppering the landscape.  Faint broadcasts from the BBC hint that interesting goings-on are happening around the globe, dropping secret messages to 'friends in Montreal' or Prauge, and detailing the ongoing failure of Bluemont to  put down a monster ruling in Chicago while the Chinese occupy California.. As the plot of the book unfolds, Matherson increasingly suspects that this new Federal authority isn't one worth of trust, and eventually has to make a decision:  conscience or convenience.   Temptation is an ongoing theme here in his social balancing act;  how easy would it be to say to hell with his raiding mountain neighbors, instead of swallowing pride to make a peace with them; how simple his life would be if he would simply throw his lot in with Bluemont. Time and again Matherson hovers between what he believes is right, and what seems right, with Forstchen using cigarettes as a visual clue.  Accept an offered smoke and enjoy immediate satisfaction...but at the price of reviving a long-beaten addiction.

Although One Year After doesn't  have the immediate punch that One Second After did,  the firefights amid abandoned and repurposed sights of urban decade are well done, especially as they happen alongside Matherson's frequent soul-searching bouts of tough decision making. I appreciated the nuance here; unlike Patriots,  antagonists are redeemable -- even the Feds.

Patriots

Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse
© 1995 James Wesley Rawles
400 pages

So...much...testosterone.

Well, D.C. finally spent itself into oblivion. After decades of deficits and a series of bailouts that do nothing but inflate the problem, the financial sector is hemorrhaging and taking with it the entire American economy.  Few institutions will survive the crash, and now a generation is on its own. Todd Gray isn’t alarmed, though. He smelled the storm coming a long time before it hit; for nine years, ever since  September 11,  he and a group of likeminded friends have prepared for the worst. They’re survivalists, or ‘preppers’:  not only do they maintain extra supplies at home to see them through extended power outages or local disasters, but their group has purchased an expanse of land in rural Idaho to use as a retreat in case something catastrophic happens. From their retreat, this small band of friends will labor to rebuild the Republic.  Patriots follows their trials after the collapse, as they face off against human desperation, disease,  the threat of starvation, and worst of all: the government.

Patriots is a how-and-why argument for prepping in the form of a novel. There are characters and things happen to them, but mostly they’re there to explain what they’re doing to the reader, what they’re doing it with, why one tool or behavior is  better in this or that situation ,and so on. There is action throughout the novel, including car chases, first-fights, pitched brawls between raiders and strongholds, and even a town invasion, and its second half features a looming showdown between cells of free citizens who have survived, and a resurrected Federal government that employs UN soldiers to do its eeevil bidding.  Unlike One Second After or Lucifer’s Hammer, there’s not a great deal of emotional drama, let alone grisly scenes like cannibal hordes.  The book’s characters are preppers, calm in the face of whatever happens. They’ve spent nine years  practicing together, keeping one another’s skills sharp, running through scenarios and improvising solutions. They even purposely recruited members with diverse strengths, so whether they need an arm stitched back together or something welded, they’ve got it covered.

One is almost relieved when a helicopter descends from on high to deposit an overfed bureaucrat announcing that the Federal government is alive and well and on the way to ‘pacifying’ the country. The emergency does require some extraordinary measures on the government’s part, of course – a little suppression of free speech here, a little confiscation of guns there, total wage-and-price controls – nothing to worry over. It reads like a Top Ten List of Evil, and comes off as preposterous given that the United States’ entire civil and economic infrastructure has collapsed. By that point five years have passed, and society has recovered a bit, building around cells of order like the central characters retreat, but this is an armed society with no fond memories of the government, whose gross irresponsibility led to the collapse.  Regardless of the merits of this scenario, including the outlandish invasion of the United States by U.N troops, it at least gives the characters a challenge to overcome.

Whatever else, one must give credit to Rawls for  infusing a massive amount of information into novel form.   His characters’ actions are factual; every book and product they discuss is commercially available. I recognized a fair few of the book titles (The Encyclopedia of Country Living, for instance, and When There Is No Dentist).  Impressive, too, is the range of events he gives information on:  forging IDs, rain cachement, rotation of storage supplies, gun cleaning, home fortification,  and blood transfusions.  The characters are forgettable and the plot weak, but this is a mild kind of wish-fulfillment that combines action and lectures on food storage. It’s a strange kind of fun if you’re into self-reliance, disaster-preparedness, or attacking tanks.

Related:
One Second After, William Forstchen. An EMP attack shuts down most electronics in the United States.  Misery ensues.
Lucifer's Hammer, Larry Niven. Asteroid impact levels most of civilization.
World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler.  Peak oil novel.