Europe in Autumn: A Review

Dave Hutchinson's Europe in Autumn is a spy thriller set in a fragmented post-apocalyptic Europe that has splintered (even further) into an enormous number of small political units.  In the background is a general economic malaise and depopulation caused by pandemic disease.  Instead of the big open bordered entity of today, you have a collection of diminished entities in a tangle of border controls and mutual suspicion.  Enter into this equation, Rudi, the cook turned spy-courier.

 

Dave Hutchinson (originally publishing under David Hutchinson) (Sheffield, U.K.;  1960-) has written a variety of fantasy and science fictions while squeezing a journalist's career into the middle of it.  His Amazon bio has him living with his wife and cats in London.

 

Rudi is an Estonian who would badly like to become a chef/cook with his own restaurant.  But fairly quickly into our story he is pegged as an ideal runner for a latter day Les Coureurs des Bois who are an odd non-state secret service that runs messages and peoples across the now highly fragmented and guarded borders of Europe.  Much of the story comes across as a somewhat futuristic John LeCarre novel featuring all sorts of mundane spy operations.  It is only fairly late into the book, that a plot line comes together that begins to bring many of the earlier threads back into focus and tie them together.

 

Eventually, a full secret spy war explodes on the scene and bodies begin to stack up.  An element of highly speculative science fiction does come into play fairly late in the tale.  This does throw off a little bit the general gritty, natural feel of the proceedings, but not in such an extreme way as to ruin what preceded.

 

A bigger failing is that as we get to crunch time, the author begins to skimp on some of the more interesting details of the spy craft.  An odd choice to go through endless, if tense, details of the waiting periods, and then rush through the active stage. 

In all, I did enjoy it.  The spy novel stuff was fun, even if it got twisted in with a bit of sci-fi weirdness at the end.  Call it a qualified recommendation.  The feel of the novel is of a cold war espionage novel set to a science fictional near future alternate setting:  All right as a spy thriller, so-so as either apocalyptic, or science fiction fare.

 

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high. Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting. Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation. Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

 

Realism is high in the sense that all of this occurs in a world not too far down the road from our own, but low because of the highly speculative nature of some of the science fiction near the end.  There is an element of fuzziness and confusion that does a fairly good job of being much like the fog we live in.  It is a 5.

 

Readability is a bit harder to define.  There are no doubt all sorts of secondary allusions within the story that can be missed.  It helps to know a lot of obscure, to Americans at least, European factoids to get all the in-jokes.  At the barest level, it is a rather long (429 pp.) telling of a simple plot: a 3.

Red Hill: A Review

Jamie McGuire's Red Hill is set in a series of small towns, and the Red Hills of Kansas, as a small group of loosely associated people attempt to escape from a zombie apocalypse. These are slow (between walk and jog pace) zombies, who procreate by biting, but seem to have gotten their initial boost through a doctored up flu vaccine.  It is a standalone novel, and I am not aware of any planned sequels.  I "read" the audio version of the book.

 

 

Jamie McGuire was born in Tulsa, and raised in Blackwell, OK. She attended the Northern Oklahoma College, the University of Central Oklahoma, and Autry Technology Center where she graduated with a degree in Radiography. 

 

She now lives in Enid, OK on a thirty acre ranch with her three children and husband Jeff, who is a a cowboy.  Like Scarlett, one of her major characters, she has red hair (see photo below), two daughters and is a radiologist.  As she notes in an an interview, Scarlet is a bit of an alter ego:

I came up with the story two years ago when I was in X-ray school. I was in classes or clinic 40 hours a week, so I cleaned houses for the doctors to get by financially. One of the doctors had a ranchette an hour and a half away from school, in the middle of nowhere. I thought it would be the perfect place to escape to if the threat of zombies ever became real. I’m a huge The Walking Dead fan, and my oldest daughter and I have eleventy billion zombie escape plans. Every time I went out there to clean, I thought about that story, and what it would be like if my daughters were with their father during the first day of the apocalypse. How would they get to me?

Her earlier, very successful, novels had more of a YA-romance theme, so this novel was pointedly a change.

As to the location of the story, although the town names are fictionalized, the location is in a series of small to very small towns of Oklahoma, and then later a ranch just over the border in Kansas.

Based on the rhyming pneumonic (paraphrased below) that Scarlett's daughter made up:

West on Highway 11 - North on Highway 123 - Cross the border - Left at the white tower - Left at the cemetery - First right!  - Red Hill Road !

and the mutterings of one of the other protagonists, Nathan,

Less than a half hour down the road, I noticed a small sign that read Highway 123. Another small two-lane, it ran all the way to Kansas.  It was less than an hour away, and if I remembered correctly from where were the state line. Beyond that was nothing but farmland and ranch land for miles…

I don’t see an area that fits the exact geographic details of the story, but given the location of the Red Hills of Kansas, which lie along the central Southern border of Kansas with Oklahoma, we are likely about 70 west of the Wichita/Oklahoma City longitude (North-South) line, getting somewhat close to the Oklahoma pan-handle.  My guess is north of Buffalo, OK along Route 183.  The town of Anderson may use the authoress' current hometown of Enid as its (very rough) basis.

 

This is a lot of relatively flat open land.  It means that zombies that are walking around will be able to see a long way, and travel will be tough.

 

The narration jumps between three groups of characters.  A mid-30s divorced mother, Scarlette, who is trying to find her children (it's Dad's weekend) and get them to the Red Hill Ranch that is owned by a doctor she works for.  The second group is a young father with his young special needs daughter. Finally a group of four teenagers. The two girls in this group being the Doctor's daughters. 

All of them are looking for safety, and variously run across each other in passing as they separately make their escape.  Although the novel slightly overuses coincidental occurrences as plot devices, their coming together is no more coincidental than any story of how people from different backgrounds come to be in the same place - think of your typical workplace.

 

The novel doesn't seem like it at first, but is much more deadly to its heroes than your typical zombie-fare.  Lots of major characters bite the dust.  The death of likable bit players is the norm in zombie fare, but we're talking major players here.  The author, obviously likes strong female leads, but not all the women are titans of fortitude, and they are not super SWAT team types either.

 

The authoress is familiar with guns, which is good, but a little light on the specifics.  Glocks don't have a safety that disarms the trigger (the safety is within the trigger mechanism), a feature now copied by other manufacturers.  More to the point,  she underestimates how difficult it is to make a killing headshot.  Shooting a living person from the front only gives a 3x5 postcard size area for an instant kill.  And with zombies, shooting off their jaw or cheekbone, may not stop them.

On the plus side, most of the very heavily armed characters bolt action rifles, with a relatively small magazine: hunting rifles.  This tends  to slow up their engagement speeds, and you don't get that light auto-carbine fire hose of death effect of some other novels.

 

Supplies are more of an issue than in many Z-stories.  There is not a presumption of easy looting.  The zombies are too large in numbers, and even in the smaller towns, are too dangerous to just wander around pillaging.    The Red Hill Ranch, where the characters are trying to bug-out to,  is thus that device common to many apocalyptic novels, of that conveniently under utilized, ubber-stocked bugout shelter left to the characters disposal.  My suspicion is, that since a lot of folks. and authors, are not kindly disposed to survivalists, it allows the author to have a bug out/survivalist story with normal folks in the action.

There is a lot more depth to the group dynamics than typical.  One person, making very questionable, possibly selfish, decisions, can drive the group towards very risky actions.  And the end results are not sugar coated.  If there is a little bit of the "all's well that ends well" at the end of the story, the reader is not forced to buy into that thinking, and it is easy enough to note the people missing people.

The issues with the characters past, ex-spouses in particular, don't just drop by the wayside when the ball drops.  The trauma and psychology of children in a disaster is not ignored.  Rather than just some talking bits of furniture dragged around through the story, the children, and parental concerns, are main drivers of much of the story line.

I did enjoy the novel, and would recommend it.  It is a relatively rare zombie novel that goes enough beyond the boundaries of the genre that I think a more general audience would enjoy it.  It is not perfect, the occasional, not really necessary coincidence, is pulled out of the hat a few too many times, and cuts into the suspension of disbelieve occasional.  The peppy tone of the ending brings the story to a conclusion, and truncates the storyline at a manageable point, even leaving a few looming items up in the air, but doesn't fit particularly well with the rest of the tone.  Calling the last chapter an epilogue, rather than simply leaving it as the last chapter, was a poor choice.  But those are quibbles.  I am not sure if this one is going to become a classic of the genre, but it certainly is one of the better ones I have read.

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high. Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting. Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation. Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

As zombie-fare go, it is fairly realistic.  Although the zombies themselves cut into the ongoing realism, the other various issues of survivalism, firepower, bad people getting loose, group dynamics, and extraneous emotional baggage within group dynamics are all there.  I think the supply issue needed to be pushed a tad bit harder.  At some point, there should have been a statement as to just how much food they have on hand, and the water without electricity issue was noted, but didn't seem that clearly resolved.  It is a five.

Readability is straightforward.  It is not a page turner, but the group dynamics, and personal issues are very well balanced with the high danger action points.  In the case of the audio version, it did not use a "radio" style delivery with special effects and different character voices, but the narrative voice did change between the three main characters.  It is a 6.

Jamie McGuire

 

Logan's Run: A Review

William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson 1967 classic, Logan's Run, is a dystopian post-apocalyptic novel where the world is overseen by a computer superbrain that (somewhat) takes care of everyone's needs, but also insures that nobody lives past their 21st birthday.  The original was intended as a standalone.  But after the release of the movie, with its greatly changed storyline, Nolan wrote a number of other stories in the series.  I "read" the recent audio version.

Both authors had a fair number of published works, many of them with speculative themes.  Logan's Run is by far their most famous novel. William F. Nolan wrote many more works, but  George Clayton  Johnson had a number of interesting highlights: author of the first Star Trek episode (The Man Trap), wrote the story that became the basis for the movie Oceans 11, and also wrote the "lost" Twilight Zone episode.

 

In this alternate far future, society is a mostly carefree place where people work a little and play a lot.  With most of the actual work done through automation, most people-work is of a rather light touch.  One extreme exception is the Sandmen.  These are the men who hunt down the runners. And Logan3 is a Sandman.

 

Runners are the folks who don't want all the fun to end on their 21st birthday, and take off running to avoid their fate.  As the novel explains, the hard limit on living to the age of 20 years and 364 days came about as a solution to combined problems of world overpopulation, and the youth bulge of the baby boomers (not called that in the novel).  So the dystopia is all the boomer's fault.

 

The twist is that, Logan3, the Sandman, decides to become a runner himself.  Logan's flight involves a number of highly episodic adventures as he makes his way to a hoped for, somewhat legendary, sanctuary.  He meets up with Jessica, also a runner, very early on.  She of the great beauty and heaving bosom, plays a much more promising and active part than most heroines of this time period.  With  Logan being the  trained killers and survivalist, she is often ignored and overlooked, and manages to save the situation more than a few times. 

 

As the novel progresses, it is obvious that this Utopian-Dystopia's automated controls are slowly falling apart.  That, and the episodic adventures among strange folks, gives the novel a little bit of the whimsical feel of  Jack Vance's (earlier) Dying Earth series. Granted Logan and Jessica are more sympathetic, and there is a little more linkage (key words "a little") between the stories, but it all seems rather melancholy and a bit surreal.

 

It should be noted that many folks in the past would have rated the novel more highly than the famous movie.  Now that the movie has become a camp-classic, the favor-balance between the two is more even.  Both are a little dated, but fun in their own way.  I did like the novel, though I think Nolan's statement that is a multi-layered story is a bit dubious.

 

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high. Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting. Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation. Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

 

This is not a particularly realistic novel.  It is set in a highly improbable distant future.  I would give it a one except that most of the science doesn't stray that insanely far away from what we have to day, and their is no blatant magic as in the Dying Earth sagas.  It is a 2.

 

Readability is easy.  It is mostly a page turner through most of its relatively short (149 pages) length.  I gather most think the movie moves faster, but the novel isn't too far behind.  It is a six.

DMQZ: A Review

Quinn Fleming's DMQZ is a post-apocalyptic novel set in dystopian remnant of the United States with a number of small urban remnant enclaves holding out in a world ravaged by engineered diseases. The action takes place on the orderly, but tightly controlled, Manhattan Island within what once was the Greater New York City.  Initially planned as a trilogy, the sequel to the novel is in the works. It is arguable whether this novel is sufficiently self contained to be considered stand alone, a somewhat annoying issue for a novel that does not bill itself as part of a series.

Quinn Flemming (1982-) per his official bio was born and raised in Maine, and is currently living in New York City. Based on the author's blog, he appears to be far more interested in the medium of television , than the novelistic world.

 

The blurb goes like this:

In the wake of the global pandemic known as the "little dormouse," the line between the Safe Zone and the Quarantine Zone divides New York City. The shores and waters of the East River are the "DMQZ," the uninhabited area that separates uninfected Manhattan from the slowly dying borough of Brooklyn.

Jacob Hale is a Manhattan police officer rising in the ranks of the Safe Zone military government until a bank heist gone wrong lands him on suspension and under suspicion. On a quest to clear his good name, Hale finds himself drawn into a web of conspiracy, terrorism, and revolt - and into the orbit of a mysterious woman who may be the key to it all.

 

Which makes it all sound a lot more like a high suspense mystery, when really it is lot more of an action adventure novel than anything else.  Granted it is set up to be something of a mystery-suspense, but the plot line pretty much follows a connect the dots path, and their is a lot more interest in the (at times sci-fi fanciful) action sequences.

Did I like it?  Some of the middle portions of the book, where the hero is chasing down a mysterious, beautiful woman, who he thinks is the leader of the bank robbers, is interesting.  But it just falls apart into comic book like action scenes.  But fatally, it is a relatively slow moving comic book.  If it kept moving, you wouldn't have time to see through all the holes in the plot, or you might be entertained enough to not care.  But it doesn't, so you do.  I don't recommend it.

We now come to our two descriptive (not qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7 with 4 the mid-point and 7 high. Realism does not include the cause of the collapse or apocalypse, but is otherwise an assessment of how close to today's world is the setting. Could you imagine your friends, or families living through the situation. Readability is not literary merits, but literally how quick and painless of a read.

Realism is roughly equivalent to a Judge Dredd comic.

Judge Dredd for comparison purposes
 

So no, its not even remotely realistic.  The science fiction is fanciful, and the logic of the whole dystopian society is very sketchy.  It's a 1.

Readability is tougher in that it is a slow moving action adventure, with what little subtlety it had in the middle ranges of the novel, being washed away by the cartoonish final sequences.  It is a 4.



DMQZ map (link)