Book Punks on BookLikes

This was an excellent book, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I had expected. The writing is solid, as is the story. And it is all quite literary. But as a post apocalypse story fan, I tend toward books a bit more about survival than this one. Here you have madness, on a par with Heart of Darkness, but set in the creepily flooded remnants of London. It makes for a deliciously spooky set, but was not so much about surviving an apocalypse (the society left after most of the world is flooded due to irregularities in the sun seem to be doing just fine, thanks) as it was about a strange neurological time travel that began when people lived in a place so Triassic in nature.

Cute but distinctly lacking in the magic of the HP series.

A short, helpful guide to getting started with teaching your baby sign language when you don't know any sign yourself. Also includes a long index of oft-used signs.

Vonnegut is a master, but being a huge fan of metafiction, this is one of my favorites. I found the style disturbingly choppy at first, but there is so much wit and wisdom in it, that I eventually stopped caring. A plus.

People have been recommending Jeanette Winterson's work to me for quite a while now, and this was my first read. Excellent story! Excellent writing!

What a series. Sometime during book two (The Protector's War) I became totally obsessed. The writing is a bit sloppy (he tends to cut off in the middle of action and jump to a scene after its all finished, relating how the last scene ended through inferences) in places, but I really love the universe that Stirling has created. And I can't help but imagine him sitting around at the pub with George R.R. Martin discussing their books. (They are apparently friends.) I would recommend the series to anyone with a penchant for post-apocalypse books, though if you are a lit snob (as I am on some level) it can sometimes be hard to swallow. I can't wait to start the six-book series that takes place in the same world a generation later.

I really REALLY enjoyed this book, though there were certainly some issues with the way he dealt with chronology in the telling. He's a fantastic storyteller, Stirling, though I wouldn't call him a fantastic writer. I am addicted to the characters and when I finish writing this, am going to go start the third book in the trilogy.

I'm on a Vonnegut bender, so I can't read any of his novels without comparing them to the last five I've read. This one is pretty good, but not as good as Cat's Cradle or Hocus Pocus, but better than Player Piano. Another faked biography, Vonnegut picks of the pen hand of a failed expressionist painter. The author professes that he isn't a great writer, would rather paint something than describe it, and yet the novle shines as Vonnegut's writing always does. A failure on the part of creating the character? Perhaps. But a very enjoyable, rewarding read all the same.

I came to this book expecting your usual radical-duder-goes-traveling-and-writes-about-it book. Hopped trains, romance in late coffee-fueled nights, a few protests, narcissism, etc. I was so excited to find this book wasn't, was more. While the book is about Ramor's travels, he doesn't feel like to focal point, rather the places he visits (and their politcal history) and the revolutionary movements he experiences while there. It's very informative, but much more palatable than a straight-up history book.

One of Vonnegut's best. Delightful.

George R.R. Martin and S.M. Stirling walk into a bar. It sounds like a joke, but I'm pretty sure that it has happened, and as I was reading Dies the Fire, The Protector's War, and A Meeting at Corvallis I often imagined the two men, both round-faced and balding, sitting in a dark-wood-paneled pub and discussing their respective universes. "Westeros, blah blah blah" says George R.R. Martin. He tells a joke. The men laugh. "Portland, Oregon blah blah blah," says S.M. Stirling. George R.R. makes fun of him for being too lazy to invent a new universe in which to set his stories. S.M. Stirling feels jealous of George R.R.'s HBO series. They drink frothy dark beers.

I had been hearing about Stirling's post-apocalyptic book Dies the Fire for a long time. It was on every post-apocalypse (PA) book list. I liked the title. When I discovered a vein of English language books being sold in Germany online that included the trilogy sometimes referred to as the Emberverse series, but called the Change Series on Stirling's own website (consisting of Dies the Fire, The Protector's War, and A Meeting at Corvallis), I placed an order. It was high time that I was initiated.

In Stirling's "alternate history" (though it feels more accurate to call it "potential future") the electricity has gone out. There is a flash of light and POM! nothing electrical works anymore anywhere in the world. Gunpowder no longer burns at a rate that would make firearms possible either. Why this happens is not explained in this trilogy, though the characters whimsically muse that it must have been the "Alien Space Bats," as they can conceive of no logical human-caused explanation. What I wish I had never found out was that the Change is caused by a freak incident that occurs in another one of Stirling's books, a book in which Nantucket gets sucked back thousands of years in time. Aliens may or may not have been involved, and, damn it, the series would have been better without that bit of absolute ridiculousness. I want to be able to actually believe that this world is possible you fool! Either way, taking guns out of the equation really stirs things up, and the result is a lot of scavenged, piece-meal armour, sword fighting, and archery.

Though the premise may be ludicrous, the resulting PA tale is really fun, addictive, and worth a read if you fulfill one of the following requirements:

1. You are in the SCA. (A reenactment group that features largely in the story.)

2. You are a fan of Tolkien. (Whose books also feature largely in the story and the world post-Change.)

3. You love post-apocalyptic fiction.

4. You love archery and sword fighting and war logistic geekery.

5. You like reading and the characters get under your skin (in the good way) before you have time to realize that you are reading the book equivalent of a half ton of lollipops. Some might even call it trash.

But I should explain. Stirling's books aren't trash in the way that, say, Nora Roberts' books are trash. They are however, not anything you could consider literature, and there is nothing breathtaking about the writing. (In fact there are some very troubling issues with chronology and sudden stops in the middle of the action, though they are easy to read around.) This doesn't mean that Stirling isn't talented. He is a fantastic storyteller, and he creates characters that are easy to fall for, stories that you want to find out the end of. But it is important to differentiate between great storytellers and great writers. Vladamir Nabokov is a great writer. Stephen King is a great storyteller. And so is S.M. Stirling. If the world ever does come to an end, I wouldn't mind having him sitting around my fire to tell a tale.

tell us about the damn books already

So. Dies the Fire. Great. The excrement hits the air conditioning, and we get to watch it scatter. People in cities think the power is out. People in air planes fall from the sky. Millions of people have trouble wrapping their heads around what has happened and the fact that it is permanent. This results in their deaths. Those who survive have a good run of luck, a few important skills, and the ability to accept that what has happened is going to completely change their paradigm forever and to act on that knowledge. There is a lot of what-the-fuck!? scrambling, and the luckiest, most resourceful folks come out of it alive.

It doesn't take (the book) long to have the two main surviving groups of characters—the Bearkillers and the MacKenzies—put together working, if incredibly small, tribes through resourceful moves (like stealing old-school farm equipment from museums), charity (taking in all the survivors they can), and a hell of a lot of luck, particularly when it comes to age and injury (the post-Change world does not house many over 50). The amount of sweat and labor needed to harvest a field of wheat sounds exhausting, and I found myself wondering why there isn't more scavenging—beyond hunting, particularly as the wild boar and deer populations explode in the decade following the Change—going on. In The Protector's War and A Meeting at Corvallis, Stirling jumps ahead nine years to show us how these two groups are continuing to function, and how they deal with the problems posed by the medeival dictatorship that Norman Arminger has set up in Portland.

What I really love about Stirling—and apparently he does this in most of his books—is that he doesn't limit his characters to hetereo-normativity, or any normativity for that matter. There are homosexual characters, for one, and the trilogy directly addresses the way that homosexuality is accepted in certain communities post-change and ridiculed in others (ehem, those who hold onto the teachings of the Catholic church). You would think that including something that is totally normal in everyday life wouldn't be a big thang, but shit, take a look at the books on a shelf of best sellers (or any shelf really) and count how many homosexual characters get face and name time. For two, one of the main surviving groups, the MacKenzies, are Wiccans, and the religion plays a huge role in the book because of it.

In an effort to keep what could very easily become a thirty-page discussion to a blog-able length, I'll say this: the books are so expansive, so epic, so rich in well-thought-out detail that despite their lollipop-like nutritional content, they do offer quite a lot of fodder for thought. I was particularly fond of the handling of the issue of how ordinary events become legends and how children of the Change are so different than those born before it. Though Stirling doesn't mention the fact that more child-bearing women and babies are dying than modern folks were used to, he does have the forethought to mention the return of wet nurses, the renewed danger of childhood diseases, and, rather randomly, a few characters' laments that in a few years there will no longer be any more stretch fabric for sports bras.

emberverse, the change, sunrise lands, and montival, OR: why write a trilogy when you can keep writing books in your series forever?, OR: how s.m. stirling took a page from george r.r.r.r.r.r.r martin


Once I became addicted—to the Dies the Fire universe, to the characters, to the story arcs of the Bearkillers and the MacKenzies (two groups of Change survivors)—I was happy that Stirling had stretched the tale into a trilogy. Once the second book brought that addiction to a level of obsession, I was ecstatic that he hadn't stopped at three, but had written six more books in the same universe. The Sunrise Lands, The Sword of the Lady, and The Scourge of God comprise the Sunrise Lands series, while The Tears of the Sun, The High King of Montival, and Lord of Mountains comprise the Montival series. All of them take place a generation after the Change. Same characters, same universe, same addiction. Looks like I am going to be reading a lot of sweets this winter.

This was originally published at www.clickclackgorilla.com.

Pleasant short story that takes place after the His Dark Materials series.

Great resource for planning your own root cellar. A little boring to read if you're not yet to the stage when you'll be building one soon, but full of exact plans, first-hand stories, and recipes. I was particularly impressed by a root cellar made by burying most of a large truck.

A world made by hand—the words first send visions of people sitting around knitting and doing handcrafts and then, perhaps more accurately and in the sense that it is used in the title of Kunstler's book, of having a hand in creating a new society. Agency! Without it the world may feel secure in some way, stable, but thoroughly out of reach. I want to have a say in how the little world I live in works. Today society is set up in a way that makes individual agency practically null, that makes change something that has to be fought for with nails and teeth instead of an ingrained, organic part of the system, something that happens naturally with the coming of each new generation in order to ensure that the world fits those living in it. If it was possible to make the world like this without something huge—be it revolution or collapse–I would stop dreaming about apocalypse. But for now individual agency in our communities feels like it is a thing of the past. Or perhaps, if all the PA lit has it right, of the future.

James Howard Kunstler's 2008 book World Made by Hand depicts just such a world. Civilization and government have collapsed due to some global issues that arise due to squabbles over oil. Though no date is ever mentioned, the world depicted is so close to our own—minus all the cracks in the pavement and trees growing through floors—that it could be a picture of next week or next year.

In a small community in upstate New York called Union Grove a group of people have survived and have refocused their efforts on agriculture and animal husbandry. One group of people have taken over management of excavating the dump for useful items, any house not lived in has been stripped of useful materials, the local doctor experiments with the poppy in an attempt to manufacture sedatives, and fish are running the streams again in never-before-seen-by-civilized-eyes numbers due to the absence of new pollutants. Though the electricity comes on again for a few minutes from time to time, the only thing left on the radio are the ramblings of religious zealots.

Kunstler's book follows the day to life of folks in Union Grove, looking at how the people who have survived war and collapse and sorrow and a nasty strain of "Mexican flu" deal with things like crime, justice, religion, sorrow, and love. The book is full of delightful little details: how a fish is gutted, how an outdoor shower works, what the people eat to get vitamin C. And when PA (that stands for "post-apocalypse" for the non-PA-lit geeks reading) literature is full of accurate little details like that it starts to feel a little bit like an instruction manual for survival as well as a bit of fun mental exercise.

The people of Union Grove have it pretty good, though the one thing they don't have much of is community cohesion. When I imagine a world post-apocalypse, I imagine finally getting the chance to work things out from scratch: to build a world based on mutual respect and aid. But this almost never happens in PA lit. In PA lit people revert to a lot of raping and violence, and then they get on with the business of trying to recreate the world that has left them. But why? The situation in every single one of these books makes it more than obvious that there was something seriously wrong with the world that has passed, that has been a part of its passing. So why settle for mimicry when presented with the first real chance for meaningful agency, for radical chance and experimentation? Why are so many authors certain that people would revert to the worst parts of themselves? (I am constantly wondering why PA authors always make rape a huge part of any PA world. I think it's important to ask ourselves why we can't seem to imagine a world without it.) Why not try to build something that makes a little more sense? Sure, people are going to be traumatized and wallowing in fear and nostalgia in a PA situation. But this seems to be a line of thought largely unexplored in PA lit, the one exception being Jean Hegland's Into the Forest, which is probably the most beautiful and inspiring PA novel I have ever read.

Overall World Made by Hand was an enjoyable read. The writing is simple, but the story propels you quickly through the book's 300 pages. At its close, the story takes a strangely woo-woo occult-ish turn which might have put me off if I didn't believe that we are not necessarily meant to take it literally, but as a reflection on the supernatural's place in the novel's handmade world. As in The Year of the Flood, religion plays a large role in the story—this time in the form of a strange hive community who call themselves "New Faith"—though it is the role of religion rather than the inner workings of the sekt that take center stage. Though it wasn't an instant favorite, and I look forward to reading the sequel The Witch of Hebron as well as Kunstler's nonfiction.

This review was originally published on Click Clack Gorilla, where you can read more PA lit reviews, as well as tales of an intentional caravan community in Germany.

Wow. After having been recommended to me twice in one day, I did something I rarely do and bought a copy of this book. And what an imagination! Mieville creates a dark, organic, rotting, pulsing, gem of a world, the kind of place you can really imagine ever sees daylight, and inhabits it with characters and beasts you will not soon forget. I was deeply impressed by his creation—finally a deep and complete-feeling fantasy world with na'er a gnome, dwarf, or wizard in sight. And damn the man has a large vocabulary. I haven't had to look up so many words while reading since I attempted, and failed, at reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy in the tenth grade.

Another fantastic creation of one of my favorite authors. This book is just as fun for kids as it is for adults, and it's REALLY fun for adults. Learn the history of beer, meet the beer fairy, and have a book on the shelf that you won't mind reading to your kids hundreds of times.