Possibly, but prejudices are a social reality that the characters in the book endure at that time, so they’re relevant.
A post apocalyptic hellscape changes everything, and an author that misses the big changes in the social fabric make Earth Abides a bad guess.
According to George R. Stewart:
Southern African Americans would drop their farming equipment and follow a white man if they were told to do so. Are you kidding? In the 40’s I’m willing to bet every Southern Black could look back on a life time of abuse and humiliation at the hands of white men. That dude was lucky he didn’t get pitch forked.
Women can do nothing survival related without a man, even in a post apocalyptic hellscape they are home makers and even decades later that is all they are capable of.
People will live for decades on canned food and will not see the need for alternate food sources. What? One week on canned beef stew and I’d be learning how to make rabbit snares.
Sheep are stupid and will all die off.
Having been domesticated for far too long most dogs will die off without man, house cats having just recently been domesticated will be fine.
Human kind will see no need to preserve in anyway the knowledge so far gained. Oh, except for one guy who is not shy about reminding the reader how unique his incredible intelligence is.
It’s pretty good at laying out the environmental changes of the fall of man, but falls dead flat describing what people would really be like.
Like I said, there must be something better out there.
Dies the Fire was very interesting. Very. I’d read it just for that, but I wouldn’t say it was realistic in the least bit.
I’ve tried to read Earth Abides but I put it down half-way through the book. I realized I didn’t care what happened to any of the characters. They could have all died and I wouldn’t have cared.
I also didn’t like The Road. I couldn’t get past the writing style of it.
I just read One Second After by William R. Forstchen and found it to be pretty realistic. It was also written in the last decade so it has contemporary thinking and technology in it.
I hated Earth Abides and gave up on it about 200 pages in. The main character did not behave like any human being I have ever encountered and was a complete cipher. His reaction to seeing 99% of the population gone was like, “Welp. At least I have my books,” and he adjusted to it in about a page. Even the most solipsistic or even mentally ill, schizoid person would have more of a reaction to that, if only because so much of our technology and society (even in the 1940s) depends on having other people around to get things done. It would at least be a hassle to be all alone, if nothing else.
Then he reacts to meeting a black family as if he were encountering a pack of animals that he could enslave if he were that kind of a guy.
Then some woman talks him into getting her pregnant by saying it’s okay that we are completely alone and there is no medical help of any kind and you don’t have any medical knowledge, here are some books you can read on the subject and by the way, I’ve had two kids – it’s not a big deal.
WHAT.
This is not realistic. I don’t care about the rest of the book; I gave up here because these people do not behave like real people, which is the bare minimum requirement I have of any book in any genre.
I think a good way to elliminate the unrealistic novels is to immediately disregard any where the main character is wandering alone from one place to another. Almost all post-apocalyptic novels have the same three sets of characters found in many Westerns: Settlers, brigands and a lone rover. The rover (hero) inevitably ends up saving the settlers from the brigands. This scenerio hardly seems very realistic. The rover is a myth that is just as unlikely in the future as it was in the old west.
A realistic (and probably less exciting) post-apocalyptic novel would (like 99.9% of the human survivors) confine itself to a single isolated community succeeding or failing on the basis of their ability to work together to solve problems. As soon as Mel Gibson or Chuck Heston show up to save the day, it’s no longer a serious speculation on a post-apocalyptic world.
The problem with Dies the Fire is that it requires an intelligent intervention - Electricy fails, but lightning doesn’t? Physical properties of gasses Change at the same time? The set-up premise was so over-the-top that the rest failed to impress me as plausible post-apacolypse storytelling. Too many hoope jumped thourgh to produce the kind of situation that Stirling wanted, in order to build his story.
Still a good read, though.
Another plug for Alas, Baylon and Lucefer’s Hammer.
Secondary good choices include Red Storm Rising and less readable, but more plausible, the books The Third World War and The Third World War: The Untold Story by General Sir John Hackett. Hackett’s work is rather more down-beat, but is all the more plausible for being based on actual NATO war-games analysis.
Yeah…it seems to end rather abruptly, and a little off, based on the good events of the last chapter. Maybe it’s supposed to illustrate how good they have it, but how bad the rest of the country is?
I dunno, but if there was ever a book I wanted 8 more sequels too, it’s that one.
I’m just about finished reading this book at the moment, and I agree. Being Canadian, I especially enjoyed the scene with the Canadian banker in the book, who was very bitter about how the US managed to almost get Canada destroyed as well with the United States’ war with the Russians (which, as far as I’m concerned, was a very realistic idea and attitude), and how the Americans hadn’t spared a single thought for what they had done to Canada.
Another PA book I read recently that I thought was quite realistic was based on oil being the key to the downfall - “Last Light” by Alex Scarrow. A consortium of questionable people manage to take down the key lynchpins that keep oil and gas flowing around the world; the book looks at how quickly our modern western society breaks down after we lose access to cheap oil and gas.
Not ALL ALONE, though. These people were ALL ALONE, and had been raised with modern (1940s) medicine, so were not used to coping with pregnancy and labor with absolutely no one around to help them should anything go wrong. And any woman who had had two children would know that there are like a thousand things that could go wrong at any point during a pregnancy and labor, so to be all “it’s not a big deal” showed me the author knew fuck all about pregnancy, or women.
Another vote for the Dies the Fire series. Sure, it’s got some fantastic aspects to it (all advanced technology simply stops working), but based on that initial premise I think that the way the disaster plays out is pretty close to what would happen in a major catastrophe…most people would die, and die badly. Reading the books game me a chill inside thinking about what would happen to the world if anything like that ever happened.
David Brin’s The Postman was pretty good. It describes how a post-apocalyptic drifter stumbles upon a Postman’s uniform and arrives in isolated communities with the spurious offer of communication with the rest of the “Restored United States” . This offer is eagerly taken up and he finds himself unwillingly but effectively starting an information and ultimately political network in the region.
I liked the novel “The Postman,” too (the movie was not as good). I recently read World War Z by Max Brooks, and I found that fairly realistic, too. I was also pleasantly surprised by how engaging the story was, in spite of being a series of interviews (much like “Warday”).
So if, for some reason, we lose all electricity and gas laws the world will degenerate into a neo-feudal society, people will wholesale convert to paganism while people receive visions from their totemgod or whatever?
Dies the Fire is strictly a fantasy book. Entertaining, but not realistic in the least bit.
I think “Lights Out” by David Crawford is a realistic take on an EMP strike. The world doesn’t quickly end. Roving band of cannibalistic druggies don’t start attacking, etc.
When Juniper took over Sumtertown or whatever it was called the entire town converted to Paganism. In fact, she even wondered how was she going to put an entire town through the initiation rights or whatever they have to do. Havel’s faction modeled themselves after England while Artminger’s was after the Norman period, which he was a professor in.
I’ve read all the book except for this last one. I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
As you say, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. But you missed a lot if that’s what you think was going on or why people did what they did…and you missed a lot if you can’t see that what one group did doesn’t equal whatever everyone in the world did.
