One of my earliest reviews, back in 2011, was Steven Konkoly's Jakarta Pandemic.
It is one of the more realistic novels we have reviewed here, more carefully thought out and thorough in its scope than a lot of "prepper-advice" style novels. If Alex has it a little too easy money wise, and is a bit of a hot head at times, it is a nice change from the "neighbors come together in adversity" meme that you often see overplayed in collapse scenarios. Much of the book is spent in arguments with non-prepared neighbors in their little cul de sac neighborhood.
In any case, in this day and age of e-book revisions, no book need ever be in its final form until the last person with the Amazon-self publishing site password dies. The author, as is typical now, has done a considerable amount of editing to the novel.
Essentially it is a clean up. It is too long ago that I first read it to recall if he deleted any scenes. None major enough that I noticed. The year was pushed to 2013 from the original 2012, but it could just as well be "any year" in the present.
In my mind I had forgotten a lot of sticky details about his heavy handed employer, his neighbor interactions, and even some of the details of the serious bad guy interactions. It is not the guns blazing, mass combat approach of his later (and lesser) Perseid Collapse novels, which feature the same cast of characters, but it is a realistic one. I would continue to recommend it.
[Updated 16 Dec. 2014]
I came across a nice interview with the author. He notes this in his future plans:
I plan to start a new series in 2015. The series will keep me squarely planted in the post-apocalyptic realm with a story based in southern California. I’m looking 15-20 years in the future, at a drought-ravaged southwest and Great Plains. Kind of a futuristic version of Grapes of Wrath. California will be on the verge of secession, plunged into a low-intensity political and martial conflict with the federal government. As usual, I’ll examine the impact of this world through the eyes of a family.
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| The new cover |
Interesting I did not know they could continually change the novels in that way.
ReplyDeleteI am so far behind on my reading it's terrible.
Pioneer: Yes, if you pull it up on your kindle, you get notified if has been updated. Not a big deal with minor editing, but needless to say, it does make me wonder how much some of the stories I have reviewed have changed. My guess is not much. Most folks who don't bother to do a decent job of editing the first go round aren't the types who are going to go to the trouble to do a major rewrite: our current author here being an exception.
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