The entire series is “what would happen if North America was back in the middle ages” and the Change was just the catalysis to make it happen.
We must have read completely different books is all I can say.
-XT
Sorry for the hijack everyone. But yeah, it’s a very entertaining read but once you get into the 2-3rd books and especially 4+ you’re leaving post apocalyptic and going directly into fantasy.
I’m sorry as well. And I haven’t enjoyed the second series nearly as much, since it DOES get into all that fantasy stuff you mentioned.
-XT
I stopped reading after The Sword and the Lady because it was just too much for me.
Although it was published in 1957, I would have to nominate On The Beach.
The novel by Nevil Shute was subsequently made into a very good movie starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. A chilling account of how the world is slowly polluted by the fallout from nuclear conflict. The film seems to have more impact from being in black and white.
How realistic is this portrayal of the aftermath of a nuclear war ? I don’t know but the book and the film both make you hope it never happens.
I’m assuming you’ve read the book and is this is not uniformed drive-by snark.
Therefore, I’d ask you why you think the female characters in this novel acted appropriately for the scenario. Specific instances would be appreciated.
Two of my favorites already mentioned; one not.
War Day by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, a travelogue about the aftermath of a limited nuclear war between the US and USSR; The Last Ship by William Brinkley, about the sole surviving US Navy warship after a fullscale WWIII and the new society its crew struggles to create; and, of course, the classic On the Beach by Nevil Shute, about the slow dwindling of humanity as postwar radiation covers the globe.
All very different; all very good.
I have read the book, but many years ago. Perhaps you’d like to explain in more detail how her actions were inappropriate.
Do you think it’s inappropriate to get pregnant without a doctor in the house?
Adam meet Eve. Eve, Adam.
How do you expect Earth to get repopulated if they have to wait for a doctor or midwife?
Whats wrong with the book and at odds with reality is that all the women in this post apocalypse went berserk or continued to play Donna Reed. The world changed significantly, but no character in that book did. That in essence is my criticism of this failure of literature.
No, but fucking that pretentious ass shows a serious lack of judgement notwithstanding.
Most likely the author just isn’t good with character development and dialogue, he certainly put in the time researching the facts of a 1940’s world with no humans. So again, there must be better books more worthwhile.
Well. This is a thread for “the most realistic” novels, right? I’m saying, the main character did not behave like a real person to me at any point of the first ~120 pages of the story (not 200 as I had reported, sorry), hence this novel is taken out of the running for this thread.
Then, to further compound the issue, another character that the main character encounters also does not behave like a real person. If they had had a plausible-sounding conversation about repopulating the earth, where they laid out the risks to the mother and decided to take their chances, I would be okay with it. This woman said, literally (verbatim quote – I saved it in a blog post): “I’ve been through it twice before, you know. It wasn’t bad.” That was her argument.
This is not a realistic reaction from any woman, especially a woman who has had children already.
I didn’t read beyond this point, because it seemed to me the author wasn’t capable of crafting a character who was recognizably human and not a plot device. So I don’t think the book counts as “the most realistic post-apocalyptic novel.”
If you do, godspeed.
Alas, Babylon and Lucifer’s Hammer. Earth Abides sucks. The Postman (book) is pretty good, although the movie reeked.
This doesn’t quite fulfill the conditions of the OP, as it’s a book of (connected) short stories, but Orson Scott Card’s Folk of the Fringe does do this (though somewhat tangentially – he is more concerned with the relationships between characters and the community than with survival per se). And I love the book, which was written before Card went off the deep end and is some of his best work.
There is a rover character, but he only ends up saving a small (clueless) group that is trying to escape and join up with the main community (and so does the rover, who isn’t Gibson by a long shot).
Actually, I’m more than a little paranoid of having a baby myself, and the quoted text is pretty spot on to what more than a few older women have said to me, to encourage me to get knocked up. And, yes, before you ask, these were (in most cases) home-birth people with no pain meds, and just a midwife (and in one case, just her husband, because the baby wasn’t waiting.)
So, I know you may not believe it, but for some women, birth isn’t actually that god-awful, and if a woman’s already had two easy labors, it’s not so unrealistic for her to assume she’ll continue in that pattern.
In addition, if she knows there’s no doctor/midwife available, it could be that she’s purposefully downplaying her concern so that she can get the man to get her preggers.
I haven’t read this, so I don’t know, but if you’re basing your entire judgement of a book on one character having easy labors, I think you ought to know that it is possible.
It has been a while since I read it, but I remember M John Harrison’s The Committed Men as being rather good.
Why the fuck do people always say this? I don’t understand it. What is so bad about the movie? Did you know that David Brin actually loved the movie and thought it was an excellent adaptation of his idea?
I found the movie to be much better than the book, in fact.
I rarely like Kevin Costner as an actor, and this wasn’t one of the times that I did. However, I agree that the movie was a very good adaptation of, and even improvement on, the book. Remember, the leader of the bad guys in the book was an “augment,” some sort of near Terminator-ish cyborg, who ended up in a final battle with the “hippy augment”, who was some sort of Apache/Zen-master/Ninja super-soldier. In the movie, the baddy leader was a copier repairman, prior to the downfall, who finally found his niche in a world that lacked rules. Lots of folks who didn’t make much of themselves in a functional society have gone on to bigger (although not always better) things in times of discord.
On the other hand, I did like the scientists playing Oracle with the busted supercomputer. That was also the basis of a Twilight Zone episode, IIRC.
I haven’t read the book yet but the film was pretty crap. I sorta enjoyed it but it was badly put together in numerous ways.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I liked what the novel did with the PA genre, and I didn’t like what the movie did with it.