Tag: disaster

Permafrost – Alastair Reynolds

Published on by mikebostanLeave a comment

Time wasn’t a river, she said, and it wasn’t a circuit-diagram. Nor was it a tree with multiple branches. It was a block structure, more like a crystal lattice than any of those old dead-end paradigms. It was a lattice that spanned the entire existence of the universe, from beginning to end. There were no alternate histories, no branches where the Roman empire never fell or the dinosaurs were never wiped out. Just that single lattice, a single fixed structure. We were in it, embedded in its matrix.

The novella by the praised Welsh author Alastair Reynolds explores the theme of time traveling, looking at retro-causality (an effect precedes its cause in time) and grandfather paradox (a cause is eliminated by its own effect and so preventing its own cause). The world is on the brink of disaster in 2080, due to a virus that gradually infects different species of insects, killing them. The effect is the fall of crops and collapse of environmental chains. In this life-ending world, humanity desperately tries new, dangerous solutions, the main project being time-traveling. However, the limits of what can be done in the past are well understood and limited by the traveling technology itself.

While only a short story, the book is grappling the reader with its immersive plot and, as usual from Alastair Reynolds, the science is well-researched. There is no magic bullet or perfect protagonist. This makes the story credible, mature and thought-provoking.

Alastair Reynolds is a prodigious author and scientist, with a PhD in astrophysics from the University of St Andrews and worked for the European Space Agency. His books are dealing with science fiction, particularly a branch of the genre called hard scifi, meaning a concern for scientific accuracy and logic.

The title of the book is slightly misleading in my opinion, as the concepts explored in the book are not really dealing with a world of ice, but with time traveling, forced as a potential solution by an ecological disaster.

Nevertheless, overall, a good, thoughtful, grappling short book by a master of hard scifi.

Adrian’s Undead Diary: Dark Recollections – Chris Philbrook

Published on by mikebostanLeave a comment

I hit play on the CD player to fully set my trap, and Lady Gaga burst forth. A little bit of me died right then. I’m not saying she sucks or anything, I just think she’s a tad bit overplayed. Flavor of the month if you will. That’s not a pun regarding her likely fate as zombie food somewhere out there either.

Dark Recollections is the first book in a zombie series, following the adventures of the protagonist, Adrian, after a zombie apocalypse. The first book is a survivalist story, where Adrian, a former soldier, manages to escape the zombie rage and fortify a school campus as a strongpoint and safe house against zombies. He is alone, but has plans to contact other survivors, story that follows in the next book.

The volume reads as a journal, where Adrian presents the events or recalls how he got into and cleared the campus of zombies. The action sequences are beautifully paced, with several chapters presenting the view of other characters as well.

Journal of a survivor during a zombie apocalypse

The survival of Adrian is based on planning, luck, pragmatism and optimism. In the immediate aftermath, many people commit suicide in the face of a crumbling world and civilization. Adrian’s first kill was his mother, so the need to quickly adapt to the new reality was a prerequisite for survival from the beginning. Adrian also conscientiously decides to go alone for a while, with no other people in his compound; he would have accepted friends or acquaintances, but no newly-met people.

The drawbacks of the book is that the plot is quite straight-forward: in essence, a positive story during a catastrophe, where the protagonist survives almost unscathed to everything and has virtually perfect conditions, including physicality, to survive. He even has the prescience to buy guns in the same day as the zombie outbreak. No one invades his campus while he is away. The book is quite immersive, with detailed presentations of the world after the zombie apocalypse, but it could go even further, for example, what happened to the governmental structure, such as the army. Also, the protagonist has no hard moral decisions, except one: not looking for his girlfriend, but even there, there are arguments for his decision. Finally, there is no hard science. While, indeed, a zombie-based story is a quite a stretch of imagination, more detailed data on the aftermath, like One second after, could have brought greater depth to the book.

Overall, an entertaining book for those evenings when the reader wants a relaxing time. For the fans of the genre, one of the best zombie books after World World Z.

One Second After – William R. Forstchen

Published on by mikebostanLeave a comment

She’d always talk about how great Gandhi was. I’d tell her the only reason Gandhi survived after his first protest was that he was dealing with the Brits. If Stalin had been running India, he’d been dead in a second, his name forgotten.

Have you wondered what will happen if electricity suddenly stops coming? This book replies exactly at that questions, under a fictional story following an ex-military history professor, in a small town in the mountains in the United States.

Loss of electricity (not a blackout, in a blackout you kind of expect electricity to return) can have several reasons. In this book, there is an electromagnetic pulse that fries the grid and everything electric (circuitry). This threat is actually possible, and the guy in the US Army looking at this problem (asymmetrical threats) was an advisor for the book.

In case electricity stops coming, the very fiber of society disintegrates: no communications (no phones, television, internet, newspapers), no commerce (no card readers, only cash for a while, then only barter), no food (no refrigeration, no trucks to bring food to supermarkets, no machinery to harvest, no trucks to bring food from silos to animal farms), government loses the monopoly of violence (how can you announce the police of a robbery, crime, rape, if communications are down?), no medicines for the needy (diabetics and others). Also, no hygiene products for women.

Without electricity

Electricity allows to increase tremendously the efficiency of agriculture and food production. Therefore, as soon as it disappears, human population reduces to the efficiency of food production before electricity. This means mass starvation, which the book painfully describes.

The story takes place in the United States, in a mountain town. Hence, some features are present, which might be specific to the country, such as : numerous people have guns that can hunt with and many citizens have military experience. This comes as an advantage, because, as society breaks, individuals usually kept in check by police, re-surge as organized bands, taking food by force and killing. Police can’t quickly intervene, without the instant communications.  Also, many officers and hospital staff might be wanting to return home, at their loved ones, until some form of community protection is realized.

William R. Forstchen is asking many interesting, deep questions about the vulnerabilities of our society. The literary value of the book is quite low, writing is ok, fluid, but not fantastic; however, the strength of the book is coming from the really good questions that it asks. This is kind of hard fiction, from politically conservative perspective.

There are many low chance, high threat events that could destroy civilization. Supervolcanoes, meteorites, robots, plagues, but it is not a lot you can do if a meteorite comes. On the other hand, just blowing a nuclear bomb at high-altitude, for example 50 km up over a continent, the US Army colonel specialized in this issue argues, is enough to destroy a country. In the book, they don’t even know who launched the nuclear bomb. All that they know was that the launch was from a freighter out in the sea and they speculate that maybe a terrorist group or a country not friendly to US or even a large power that covered their tracks really well.

A report from nine scientists was published, unluckily in the day of the 9/11 attacks and, seemingly, a US Congress inquiry was made over this, but overridden by the terrorists attacks.

Overall, a must-read book for the interesting questions it asks.

 

[Picture from http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/Strommast-Current-Pylon-Steel-High-Voltage-Sunset-520008%5D

World War Z – Max Brooks

Published on by mikebostanLeave a comment
The swarm continued among the cars, literally eating its way up the stalled lines, all those poor bastards just trying to get away. And that’s what haunts me most about it, they weren’t headed anywhere. This was the 1-80, a strip of highway between Lincoln and North Platte. Both places were heavily infested, as well as all those little towns in between. What did they think they were doing? Who organized this exodus? Did anyone? Did people see a line of cars and join them without asking? I tried to imagine what it must have been like, stuck bum per to bumper, crying kids, barking dog, knowing what was coming just a few miles back, and hoping, praying that someone up ahead knows where he’s going.
You ever hear about that experiment an American journalist did in Moscow in the 1970s? He just lined up at some building, nothing special about it, just a random door. Sure enough, someone got in line behind him, then a couple more, and before you knew it, they were backed up around the block. No one asked what the line was for. They just assumed it was worth it. I can’t say if that story was true. Maybe it’s an urban legend, or a cold war myth. Who knows?
The book is a collection of reports that present a zombie apocalypse. Max Brooks is fantastic in the way he presents the apocalypse, not in a single description, but through a myriad of small puzzles divided between the reports and interviews.
The stories are so varied and imaginative that you just can’t leave the book out of your hand. The third person narrators range from India to China and the US, from military personnel to ordinary refugees, all bringing a new angle, a new experience, a new sentiment, a new tragedy to the picture.

Zombilica
Why some people have this incredible fascination with zombies, I can’t understand. But the book is good.

There is no single narrative line, but you are gradually made understating how the apocalypse unfolds. There is no classic protagonist, following the zombies; the protagonist is the zombies themselves, through their overwhelming and disrupting, horrifying presence. Or maybe the protagonist is humanity itself, through its many voices that is presented. The narrative is truly a masterpiece.

There is also a movie with the same title, but it has nothing in common with the book. Read the book, it is fascinating even if you are not fans of the genre. Zombies could be replaced by aliens, volcanoes or rabid animals. What really stands out is the human story and how it is narrated.

The 5th Wave – Rick Yancey

Published on by mikebostanLeave a comment

Lately I am sliding towards sci-fi, so I quickly finished the first book of the Fifth Wave trilogy by Rick Yancey. The 5thwaveWhilst I am not totally convinced to buy the rest, I liked the story, the plot twists, the protagonists. A bit focused towards adolescents, which I found an unnecessary addition to the overall believable and well-thought scenario.