A brief pause for peak oil

We interrupt this program of scintillating reviews, to bring you a news flash:

Just as Lord Bison (a.k.a. Jim Dakins) takes his finger out of the dike, and runs off in full retreat, the peak oil action gets exciting.

Marginal oil production costs are heading toward $100/barrel
Kate Mackenzie, FT Alphaville, 2 May 2012 (hat tip: Big Picture)

Bernstein’s energy analysts have looked at the upstream costs for the 50 biggest listed oil producers and found that — surprise, surprise — “the era of cheap oil is over”

I hope Lord Bison remembered to bring his bolt action, and stew pot with him to his hideaway.

Terawatt: A Review.

Des Michaels' Terawatt is what you could call a Texas to Tennessee based apocalypse-in-progress travelling road show. It is a novel of rapid collapse set off by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) type event.  I say type, because the exact source of the problem is never exactly stated, and there is some intended ambiguity.  Although not billed as such, it is not a stand alone novel with follow up books intended.

Not much is said about the author.  He may be the Des Michaels that wrote Bio-Angel, a novella that originally went under the title String Theory. He may also be the Amazon reviewer here who is from Dallas Texas, and has Techniques of Selling Writing on his wish list.  Looks like he is interested in photography, and possibly science fiction war gaming.

The novel starts with a laid off teacher, Marc Sortel,  who stays behind in Dallas, Texas while his wife and 16 year old son go on to a vacation at her fathers place in Tennessee.  He has stayed behind in Texas to try and short sell their house before the bank reposes it.  He is also in charge of Rancid, his wifes aging cat.

As an aside,  Texas is apparently a hot spot for EMP events.  For reasons not entirely clear to me, a disproportionate number of our EMP stories include Texas within their environs.

Marc, our first-person narrator, is not entirely the likable sort.  The first person point of view, makes it difficult to tell if some these traits are a bleed through of the author's personality.  Marc is an overweight 40 year old who plays first person shooter video games, and as a history teacher enjoys pontificating on what is wrong with the world.  As someone who has been no doubt living on unemployment for some time, and worked for the government when he was employed, he none-the-less seems to see no irony in his belief that the Pilgrims almost collapsed because of their initial communistic setup:  communism for me, not for thee – so to speak.  Marc is completely unprepared for trouble, so you don’t get the survivalist prep pontifications, but you do get a fair amount of political, and politics-disguised-as-history rants.  It is fairly easy to see why Marc's young outdoorsy teenage son, cannot stand him. 

If some books have been accused of making all the white people villains, this one seems to lean the other way - at least with regards to Latinos.  You have a throwaway scenes where “immigrant” drunk driver kills a ladies husband and child, and when he is working alongside of some captive Latinos cleaning up an airplane crash, one of them is a thief, and the other is a lazy gay second generation fop.  Having worked in the field with a lot of Central Americans, I can assure you that this would not be representative of the type. 

Marc has issues with other folks.  One of his encounters is with an attractive immigrant woman from Africa who is with a group of religious flagellant types on a death march pilgrimage  to the Mississippi River.  Marc is one of those semi-agnostic types who says they like God and Jesus alright, but don’t like Christians.  Most of the outwardly devoted in the book come across as cruel zealots, or fools.  Granted, both types do exist, but the needless setting up strawman villains, gets to be a bit old.

Finally, the author has the tendency to make important people be attractive, while incompetent or stooge-like people are unattractive.  His calypso savior is a gorgeous.  The female reservist who stops him at a check point is described as bland faced with a small top and big bottom.   The reservists are only there to bother Marc, and to generally act in a high handed obstructionist manner.   It is obvious that the author strongly associates value with beauty- oh, well.

Marc himself is incompetent.  Which does make for the rather realistic portrayal of an incompetent, out of shape, middle aged man-child who none-the-less feels justified in his rather snarky view of his fellow citizens.  Isn't America great! LOL.

Here is an example of his snarkiness.  The EMP-event has happened.  Our overweight forty-year old jumps on his mountain bike (bought for exercise) and goes to the fire station to get some information:

I am not the only one with the bright idea, apparently. The firehouse Captain stands in the middle of a small crowd of people.  One of them is an overweight lady on a high dollar racing bike.  She wears bright yellow Spandex and a matching decaled helmet.  A chubby Lance Armstrong-with breasts.

As with many of these apocalypses in progress tales that involved completely unprepared folks, our hero is preternaturally lucky in being able to come up with supplies.  The author tries to implausibly rehabilitate him somewhat as the tale goes on.  But Marc lacks all caution, and walks or rides into almost every roadblock or ambush setup for him.  Every stray sniper type gets at least one free shot as he wanders around in the open.

The story  has Marc dither around in Dallas for about a week, getting into some minor tangles with some local toughs, before he decides to set off on a bicycle ride to Tennessee.  Before leaving, Marc does try to help an aging neighbor get some insulin, and does bring along his wife's cat.  His few good deeds do help, people don't shoot him on site because anyone carrying around their cat in a carry case is not likely to be a rampaging rapist-looter.

Although a bit uneven, the trip to Tennessee is the best portion of the book.  Much of what happens is not exactly plausible – his Calypso like capture by a beautiful (naturally) Nordic woman being a particular case in point – but there is more immediacy, and attention to day to day concerns.  Marc is lousy at surviving, and often pays for it.

The book is clearly written to be the first part of a series.  The book does not end at a natural location, but instead at a cliff hanger. There are some suspiciously militia-like conspiracies going on in this book that are not clearly resolved.  Presumably these will be explored in whatever later books come out.  Given that book peaked at the middle portion of the novel, just before Nordic-Calypso shows up, the trend line does not bode well for the second installment.

So did I like the book?  The first two-thirds yes.  The pre-travel, and travel portions were uneven, but interesting.  The first person approach made for something of a page turner during these sections.  With all of its flaws, I would actually say that the book actually gets a lot of stuff correct that other collapse books miss:  the huge advantage of cash in hand at the time of first crises, the huge advantage of night vision, the still existent – but uneven law enforcement.  At times it almost felt like the author had gone through my site here, picked up all my pet peeves about apocalyptic fiction, and went out of his way to address it.  If he could have just toned down some of the nasty world view of the main character, and avoided the conpiracy-compound silliness, he would have had a best-in-class story going.  As it is, it is a flawed, but often entertaining story. 

For our descriptive (versus qualitative) ratings (1 to 7: 7 being high).

How realistic (gritty) is it?  The cause of collapse does not count here, but would not be a huge problem.  It is not that far removed from the economic fast-collapse scenarios seen in Rawles' books.  Some of the events that occur are rather unlikely.  But the general tenor of day-to-day survival are pretty much on.  The randomness of outcomes is also pretty much on.  Prepared people run into more heavily armed antagonists, and lose.  Sometimes, unprepared people get lucky and survive.  There is a lack of information not only to the individuals, but to the people in charge.  Nobody really knows what is going on.  I am going to give it a top socre of seven.

How readable is the book?  There are some editing issues, but as a self-published effort, I thought the overall polish was above average.  As I noted above, the first two-thirds are pretty close to a page turner.  It bogs down some toward the end.  I am going to knock off another point because it is an unannounced first part of a projected series. So we will put it at an above average 5.

Solar Flare: A Review

Larry Burkett’s Solar Flare is an apocalypse-in-progress that takes place within the Greater United States before, and during a series of enormous solar flares that knock out the power grid and electronic devices.  Since we just survived (based on the fact this has been posted) a smaller version of the event (more info)(hat tip: Six Bears), this is not an entirely remote concern.

Larry Burkett (1939-2003) was a very influential within Christian broadcasting circles in the last three decades of the twentieth-century.  His show was very similar to Dave Ramsey’s financial sense program,and in fact Ramsey credit’s Burkett as being one of his primary influences.  The primary difference between the programs that I recall, Burkett was more of a stickler about repaying one's debts.  However, at that time peoples debt levels were much lower, and the sophisticated versions of predatory lending were just barely getting started.

Mr. Burkett wrote a total of 70 books. Most of them were self-help financial books.  However, he also wrote a few novels: The illuminati, The Thor Conspiracy, Kingdom Come, and this novel.

Solar Flare is a book with a grand scope.  Although much time is spent with Jason Hobar, an astronomer who researches solar phenomena, and had previously  given warnings about the disastrous effects of a large solar storm.  For those who are not familiar with them, the solar storms are what create the Northern Lights.  In fiction,  very large solar storm have a similar effect to that of an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) from an air burst nuclear bomb.

A large portion of the novel is spent arguing about the possibility of the solar storms.  The novel is very political.  If there is a bad guy/gal, they will be liberal Democrats.  If there are good honest folks, the will be conservatives.  This extends to activities that most people don’t even really view as being political, and categorizations that even in 1999, might have puzzled a few people.

My favorite observation, is that when all hell breaks loose, he has the “inner cities” uniformly erupting in chaos, while the good folks of the suburbs generally behave themselves.  He even goes so are as to announce that without transportation, the people of the inner city cannot find a way out to the suburbs right away, so the Government is able rescue all the nice people (about 100 million of them) and put them in farming camps.

Mr. Burkett seemed to have a rather limited idea of urban geography.  Apparently in his imagination, all cities had a dense urban core, surrounded by a wide swath of suburbia.  He apparently was not aware that many modern U.S. cities (including Charlotte, and Atlanta, which he mentions) have no real core.  They are simply large suburbs.  There may be a collection of one or more little downtowns, but the various apartment complexes that house most of the people are scattered all over the place.  I think in his mind, the suburbanites and rural folks were the nice people that listened to his radio show, while the urban centers did not.  Lots of listeners = good guys; people who don’t listen =...   His lack of immagination, and vindictivenss becomes tiresome.  Having rather like his radio show, I was surprised at the tone of the novel.

This is a collapse novel, so there is some mayhem along the way.  It is not generally described in to much detail, but you generally get the point.  He is of the British school of collapse theory, and pretty much has large groups of people tearing up the place within minutes of the first effects of the first large flare.

However, as I alluded to before, the Government is on it’s A-game.  You see a President Philip Houston is a Republican.  In fact he is a Republican who looks an awful lot like George W.   As such, he actually listens to the lone scientist in the wilderness and does his best to take precautions.  Of course the evil CNN news staff does their best to thwart his efforts.

The military is generally able to contain the rioting gangs to the city centers, and are always one step ahead of them.   The good folks are packed off to their farming camps.

Eventually, most of the people in the food camps start worshipping Christianity.  They bring back the Puritans punishment of being put into the stocks, which makes all the snarky teenagers behave themselves.  By the end of the novel, the majority of the camp dwellers decide that they like living better in the countryside, and in one camp they even vote to ban television from their community center.  It is all one big theocratic cozy finale.

Did I like the book.  No.  It was dull and tedious.  Having listened to Mr. Burkett in the late 1980s, I was surprised at the tenor of the book.  A lot of collapse novels take shots at what the author views as the evils of today’s society.  But Mr. Burkett is seriously over the top.  How he mixes extreme Republican politics with communal agricultural work camps  that comes very close to being a soviet commune is beyond me.  For reasons that are little unclear to me, he throws in a coup attempt against the President.  It brings in some of the less interesting presidential succession  elements of John Barne’s Directive 51.

For our descriptive (versus qualitative) ratings: 1 to 7, with 7 being high.

Realism:  No, not really.  In this case the solar flare is not a problem.  It could happen.  However, other than a statement like –there might be looting in the cities – there is not much about this story that has a very real feel to it.   The good guys are always smarter than the bad guys, and generally the bad guys are pretty easy to deal with if you are heroic enough in the author's eyes.   There is no discussion of where the food to feed 100 million people was to be found, and how it was to be transported.  It is not clear why everyone would love freezing or roasting in the work camps, not to mention the hard labor involved.  It is not like people in 1999 were a whole lot thinner or in better shape than us tubby Americans a dozen year later.  There are no witches or elves, so I will say that it is a 2.

Readability:  It is a very slow slog to get through the book.  If there is a nice little build up to action, the author will never fail to cut it short with the bad guys being handily defeated.  I suppose it the language itself is somewhat straightforward.  It’s not written in Chinese after all.  I’ll again call it a 2.

Warday: A review

Whitley Strieber, and James Kunetka's Warday is set in the United States in the year 1988, five years after a limited nuclear war has destroyed New York City, Washington D.C., San Antonio, TX, and the missile fields of the Western United States.  One o f the primary agents of destruction is multiple large electromagnetic pulses (EMP) derived from the explosion of Soviet Union hydrogen bombs in high orbit over North America leading to the destruction of much of the electrical grid, and most electronic devices.  Published in 1984 the novel would have been near future speculation.

Whitley Strieber (STREE ber) has had a very long career as a novelist, and been successful in some radically different subject areas.  The beginning portion of this novel is somewhat autobiographical.  It relates his success as an author (Wolfen) and his moving to New York City from San Antonio Texas.  He wrote the interviews and narrative found within the novel.

James Kunetka stopped publishing some time ago.  At the time of Warday he was better known for his non-fiction work dealing with Los Alamos and the birth of nuclear power, and weapons.  He does not appear to be authoring books at the moment.  He wrote the scientific information, and the bureaucratic documents.

The two authors were childhood friends in San Antonio, knowing each other from grade school through college. They presumably worked together on the sequel to Warday (finished but never published) and later wrote another apocalypse-in-progress (AIP) novel, Nature's End, about world devastation through over population and the resultant ecological catastrophy.  So presumably they are still friends.

The book was very popular in its day.  Streiber got a feature interview in People Magazine:

Two Authors Plot a Nuclear Nightmare to Wake Up Americans

William Plummer, People Magazine, 30 April 1984

The winds of Warday will soon be gathering up Strieber and Kunetka and carrying them to Europe to promote the book, which has already brought each of them $200,000. While there, they expect to put the finishing touches on their research for a sequel that will render the Soviet perspective on Warday. "What we want to do," says Whitley, "is humanize the Russians."

In their version of the apocalypse, novelist Strieber, 38 (best known for The Wolfen), and nonfiction writer Kunetka, 39 (author of a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer), cast themselves as a pair of journalists traveling about the U.S. in 1993, five years after Warday. They interview survivors of the catastrophe and assemble a chilling portrait of a Brave New World slapped together from the ruins of the old. "We did not want to write a book about explosions," says Strieber. "We wanted to take people into life beyond The Day After-to wake them up in the New World of the years after."

How authentic, how probable is the authors' depiction? Washington, D.C. and San Antonio have been vaporized. The wind whistles through the abandoned skyscrapers of Manhattan. Six million people died on Warday. Another 70 million succumbed later from the effects of radiation, the Great Famine of 1988, the Cincinnati Flu of 1990, and from new, mysterious maladies. The remains of government are holed up in California, which virtually escaped Armageddon, and Chicanos operate out of their own ad hoc nation in Texas and New Mexico, which is underwritten by the Japanese.

The second paragraph notes that the main characters are the authors themselves.  Their wives and families, such as survived, were there actual wives and families.  Although the journal approach takes away some of the anticipation-tension, we know they survive to publish it, it gives the whole enterprise the feeling of a documentary.  The made up government documents are an excellent way to info dump, and give an air of credibility to the proceedings, without having forcing the reader to read every last word of them to get an idea of what has happened.

On Warday there were 7 million U.S. casualties, and in the five-years that have since passed there has been follow on deaths from starvation and disease of another 60 million people.  British relief officials tell them that they estimate that there are another 1/4-million deaths every month related to the war.  One of the authors (fictional version) has received enough radiation that it is expected he will be numbered one of those fatalities within a few years.

The post-nuclear United States has broken up into various component parts.  If not in name, than in reality.  The better off portions of the country, California and to a lesser degree the Southeast United States actively work to limit people coming into their areas.  At one point Georgia law enforcement complains that the Northeast States have sent 18,000 orphans to them for care in just the last six months.  He is then promptly scolded by the local Georgian citizenry for being hard hearted, and relents in his conduct.  California is even more of an armed camp, with a Neo-Facist government keeping people in line.

Most other areas are either glassy nuclear wastelands despoiled by unattended industrial chemicals, or residual Strontium 90 dust .  The midwest is threatening to turn into a dust bowl, and New York City is a depopulated salvage yard where work is being done to (ironically) dismantle the World Trade Centers for their materials.  Some buildings just can't catch a break. 

As we noted, Warday had a sequel that was written but never published.  The author notes that he could not get enough  (second interview Audio Interview with Whitley Strieber) publisher support to make a run of it.  He thought it would happen eventually, but it never did.

Which brings us to one point of note.    This book was written at a fairly cold part of the cold war, Andropov was premier, and were still in the early years of Reagan's presidency.  Given that the planned implementation of the Star Wars defense system is the initiator of the conflict, and a few quips late in the book, it is obvious that Streiber is not fan of Reagan, nor a hawkish Scoop Jackson Democrat either.

Early on the authors visit the newly formed state of Aztlan that sits mostly in U.S. Territory in the area of the old Mexican territories less California.  Although it is not a workers paradise he notes with a certain admiration the small workers cooperative farms.  And latter on shows some sympathy, even while having to escape from, the books version of Anarchist Socialists.

In the novel there is no discussion of the Polish Communist crackdown in and continuing repression in Poland, or the Soviet offensive that would have been going on int Afghanistan. The bloodiest year there (1985), and Stingers Missiles to the mujahideen was still ahead.  Streiber, in charge of the books narrative, neither mentions this neither in the novel, nor in interviews.

The second novel was to tell a sympathetic version of the  Russian (the Soviet Union collapsed with the war) side of the story. 

In this novel the author gives his opinions and tells his story, but does a light enough touch with most of the politics that you don't feel bludgeoned if you are not in agreement with his positions.  Given the nature of the narrative, it is very possible to believe that the narrator is wrong in his assessments.  The book does not try to force his point of view down your throat.  Having seen a couple of books handle this poorly,  Gretchen Hummel's Dreamers Island (religion) and Larry Burkett's Solar Flare (politics), I think it is a lesson well learned by many authors.  I probably agree with many of Burkett's general viewpoints of the time, yet I find Streiber, who I probably agree with very little on, to be far more convincing within the scope of this book. 

My suspicion is that Streiber lost that balance in writing the sequel.  And nobody wanted to touch a book showing heroic Soviets back in the late 1980s.

One of the driving themes of the book is the hopeless nature of even a limited nuclear war.  Although not remembered today, there was a little (often politically motivated) discussion at the time about the winnability of such a war.  In fact in the People Magazine article there is a dissenting view given: 

Other experts are not convinced. Dr. Michael Vlahos of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies calls the novel "riveting," but finds it unduly pessimistic. "As long as a central authority is there, I don't see a financial collapse taking place," he says. "And I can't see America, not under attack and with medical facilities still intact, having such a plague of diseases as described in the book." Neither does he think famine likely, given that the nation has a decade's worth of food and grain salted away. "The authors place an absolute dependence on the superstructure of the modern world," he scoffs. "Without an American Express Card, they obviously don't think life is worth living."

Politics can make for some pretty foolish, particularly in retrospect, arguments.  The medical facilities are not intact.  In the 1980s we may have had a little bit larger of a food supply, but I doubt the left over canned goods from the 1960s nuclear bomb shelters make up a decades worth of food. And of course it is not an American Express Card that is missing, but all the electronic records of monetary accounts.  Everyone's money is gone. 

The novel is convincing in showing that a limited nuclear war would be difficult to pull of in a superpower war, and that if it somehow did occur, it wouldn't be winnable.

The book is not entirely one of hopelessness.  While Kunetka convinces you of the extent of the disaster, Striever does a very good job of showing average Americans rising to the occasion.  The hard times bring out some bad behavior, but they also bring out some resilience.  If California is disheartening for its turning its back on the rest of the country, the Midwest shows grit, and the Southerners show some compassion. 

 

Did I enjoy the novel.  Yes I did.  It has a very thorough, well researched feel to it.  It is somewhat comparable to Earth Abides, but with better rounded out characters, and a more contemporary realistic feel.  Instead of quaint encounters with rustic black folk on their Southern homestead, you have a discussion with a Black Singer in Chicago who notes that the blacks, being poorer to start with, were wiped out by the follow on disease and starvation, and that she, as a black person, is now a relatively rare site in Chicago.  And the author is smart enough to leave the possibility of rioting and violence up in the air.  You can believe what you wish.

The book sold very well, and then (as noted in this  comparative review with World War Z) faded quickly. Likely public interest in nuclear war and disarmament faded with the end of the cold war ix years later.

Now for our descriptive characterizations:  Realism and Readability.  As ever they are descriptive, not qualitative, in nature and the numbering is from 1 to 7, with 7 being high.

Is it realistic?  Do you feel like you are there?  You feel like the author was there, and you are reading about it.   The journal nature of the story, puts you at a slight remove, and while the concerns are very real, you miss some of the day-to-day nature of the survival concerns.  People don't go into too many details about the scary periods of starvation, and pandemic.  Or more accurately, you get a flavoring of the problem, before most interviewees loose steam and shy away from the subject.  I am going to say that it is a 6.

Readability is very high.  Streiber is an exceptional narrative writer.  Given that it is not a shoot-em-up type of novel, it moves along pretty well.  It is a little lengthy.  It is not an action packed page turner.  I am tempted to give it a 6-1/2 (it is a little easier of a read than Earth Abides), but will settle for a 6.