Yellow Cake Summer: A Review

Guy Salvidge’s Yellow Cake Summer is set within an overheated, post-apocalyptic slow crash Western Australia. It is the sequel and conclusion to his earlier Yellow Cake Spring.

We discussed the author's Background when we reviewed The Kingdom of Four Rivers.  The author is a school teacher from Western Australia, it is my understanding that he does not intend to write anymore science fiction, so we likely we will no longer being seeing any more apocalyptic fare from him.

 

The novel involves a return of our earlier protagonists, Rion and Sylvia, by separate routes, to the Western Australia located, Chinese owned nuclear facility.  In this world, China is a dystopian mess, and Australia is a collection of collapsed urban hubs surrounded by a great lawless rural wasteland.  We get to see a little bit of this wasteland, and that is one of the more interesting sections of the book.  We also return the earlier novels controlled dreaming meme, and add to it very intrusive/invasive observation methods.

 

Most of the story involves some sad sack nuclear protestors, and the Chinese and Australian governments nasty efforts to keep the protests from getting out of control.  There is a fair amount of tension built up as we head toward the conclusion.

 

Unfortunately, while there is a certain amount of drama to the story, in the end it is a bit anti-climatic.  As noted, the issue at odds is the expansion of a nuclear facility run by the Chinese.  All of which would might lead one to believe that their are some sort of dire territorial issues at stake, except that the territory at stake is a barren post global warming dried up wasteland.  The Australian Government is more interested in protecting its citizens only as a matter of degree, they are not the standard bearers of liberty and justice.

 

In the end, nobody winds up being all that interesting, and the issues come across as rather small potatoes.  Beyond the individuals involved, life goes on as usual, without much enlightenment beyond the general dystopian warnings.

 

Did I enjoy it?  Not too much.  I am ambivalent. The author builds up an interesting world, but the story seems more like the middle connector to a trilogy than the conclusion of a duology.  I like a lot of the ideas, but the story left me a bit flat.  A lot of unrelieved, or maybe better stated as deflated, tension. The author writes well enough, that I lean toward a qualified recommendation.

 

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.

 

Is it realistic?  It is more dystopian, than survivalist in the second novel, but it is a very near, plausible future.  Survival is not easy in either the dried up wilds, or the bleak urban setting either.  It is a seven.

 

Readability is fairly straight forward.  There is too much moping and pondering for it to be even remotely a page turner, but the author rights well and the story doesn't bog down.  The dream state sequences maybe add a little confusion, but any high level symbolism is buried enough that I missed it.  Not as much action this time around, so we will call it a 5.

Equations of Life: A Review

Simon Morden's Equations of Life is a cyberpunk flavored post apocalyptic novel set in the scarred remnants of London after nuclear terrorists have destroyed much of the country.  It is set after, and includes many of the characters who were introduced in, the short story collection we reviewed earlier: Thy Kingdom Come.  The novel is a standalone story, but there are three other novels that followed this one.

We went over the author's background in our earlier review, so we won't repeat it here. It is worth repeating that the metrozone series is a  Philip K. Dick Award winner.

 

The general theme, if you ignore the level of world wide ruin, is pretty standard cyberpunk fair.  Maybe not as much time in virtual reality, but there are all sorts of super bad assassin nun fighting women, dangerous AI computers, and dangerous machinations in a not very law abiding world. The poor are screwed, and the wealthy can fall quickly.

 

The hero is a not very reputable, not very legal, Russian immigrant who has been hanging out in London's overcrowded new-style slum district.  He is involved in physics research at the local university, but obviously has some underworld connections.  When he rescues a pretty young Japanese woman from Russian Ukrainian gangsters, he finds himself in the middle of a couple different fights: Gangsters versus Yakuza, and Church versus street gang.  And that is before it all gets really hairy.

 

The novel is entirely set in London.  It shows a plausibly collapsed society.  If not down to the stone age, it has the usual haves and the left behind.  Of course in a post-nuclear setting, even if the nukes were somewhat limited, the have-nots are in a very dire position.  Technology is advancing, but not everyone gets to share.

 

The novel is sort of a long form (367 pages) of an action adventure.  Outside of the various violent scenes, it is not a page turner, but it does move along.  Much of the action involves our hero getting himself beat up by various protagonists.  In fact there is so much of this, it becomes a bit implausible that anyone would even be still in one peace after even half the activities.

 

Did I like it?  Yes.  It has a reasonably enjoyable story line, even if all the adventurous activity gets to be a bit much after awhile.  A trimmer book would have been cleaner and faster paced without sacrificing much in the way of story.  So I enjoyed it, even if I am not willing to call it a new classic.

 

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 moderate.  It is near future, but there are enough campy elements (zombie like nuke survivors, fighting nuns) of speculative science to give it an air of unreality.  That the hero comes up with plausible equations to fill in the voids of the unified field theory is not a particularly realistic element either.  So we will call it a four.

 

Readability is straightforward, a slightly overlong fast paced novel with only a touch of philosophizing.  A five.

The Darwin Elevator: A Review

Jason M. Hough's The Darwin Elevator is an action adventure post-apocalyptic science fiction novel set within a mid-23rd century ruined earth.  Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the world is abandoned except for devolved (sort of zombie-like) humans.  Only the small Northern Australian coast city of Darwin, protected by a high tech radiant barrier, is safe for normal humankind.  And they are barely hanging on by their teeth. This novel is the first in a three part series.  This part leaves some plot lines hanging, but works reasonably well as a stand alone as some of the major issues are resolved. I "read" the novel as an audio book.

Jason Hough (pronounced Huff), per his Amazon biography lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife and two children.  He is a former 3-D artist and game designer.

The elevator of the story is a big mystery object. It had shown up a few decades prior when an alien ship parked overhead and spun down a large tube like structure: what is commonly called a space elevator.  The aliens never told anyone what they were about, and never made an appearance after the elevator showed up.   A few years after its arrival, a pandemic broke out that killed most of humanity, leaving the few survivors as devolved primal urge driven ape-like creatures.  Only the tiniest fraction of the population was immune.  The one area where the disease seemed to have no effect was in the immediate area of the elevator.

There are a handful of major characters within the novel.  The key figure is an ex-Dutch pilot who is one of the rare immunes who flies a semi-legal scavenging craft to various locations, looking for items that will help the remnant population's life easier, and more importantly, get him paid.

There are a number of antagonistic groups within the remnant society, and much of the story revolves around their scheming.  There is another major plot line which involves the ultimate intentions of the aliens that built the elevator.  Although some suspect them of also introducing the virus that caused the collapse, it is still somewhat up in the air as to their ultimate plan.

The novel is entertaining as an action adventure, with the sub-humans making a more interesting variant of the zombie theme without slavishly following the type.  The morality of the various good guys and bad guys is a bit ambiguous.  If the author didn't make the bad guy out to be an opportunist pervert - with no actual logic as to why the bad guy would be the perverted one - you could reverse many of the good guy/bad guy parts pretty easily.  That, and the artificial nature of the survival setting kept me from getting overly involved with the fate of the characters.

 

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.....hmmm....   The positive...  The weapons technology is identifiable with our own, a lot of fairly easy technology (drones) don't seem to be much used anymore.  So a lot of the action has a modern day shoot out atmosphere.   The negatives.  It is far future science fiction with a number of unlikely events having a major impact.  Much of the technology (the alien elevator, the virus, the electrically powered aircraft) is given some mumbo jumbo rational, but certainly isn't "real" in any modern sense of the word.  Too much magical happenstance.  It is a 2.

 

Readability is easier.  With the series split in three that keeps the novel from dragging out too long.  At 496 pages for just this first part, it is not a long novel chopped into novellas.  It is a true trilogy.  As I noted above, it is an action adventure, and a lot of the writing has a page turner feel to it.  There are is a little bit too much time spent with the dull beautiful Indian scientist with the Bollywood looks, and much of her plotline (investigating the aliens) seemed superfluous in the end.  It is a 5.

Watership Down: A Review

Richard Adam's Watership Down is a catastrophic (versus globally apocalyptic) novel of rabbit survival set in the English countryside.  Although there were latter add-on stories, this novel was intended to be a stand alone story.

Richard Adams is a famous English novelist whose most famous novel is Watership Down. Originally composed as a bedtime story for his daughters, it is a modern classic  selling over 50 million novels, being one of the top 25 selling single-volume novels of all time.  His novel, Plague Dogs, also made into a movie, has apocalyptic themes as well.

 

So why review a book about rabbits, when my usual fare is either outright apocalyptic, or somewhat apocalyptic future-dystopian?  Well it is the fault of that "Druid-guy".

The worlds of pulp fantasy are by and large worlds in decline, strewn with immense ruins and scattered with artifacts no one can duplicate any more. The heroes of pulp fantasy are caught up in the undertow of decline, and their battles and quests are generally defined by legacies of the pre-decline past that have to be preserved or destroyed before the future can begin to take shape...

A brand of fiction commonly dismissed as sheer escapism, in other words, provides narratives more useful to the current state of the industrial world than the supposedly serious narrative of progress that still shapes every detail of contemporary public discourse.

And I agree.  A lot of fantasy is very apocalyptic in tone. It various from the modern narrative in that the hero is generally in a position to do something about the impending doom.  The situation can be corrected.

 

What makes Watership Down, a talking-animal brand of fantasy, is that it is not a tale of avoiding an apocalypse, but of surviving an apocalypse.  Almost from the very get go, the small band of rabbits have been turned out of their burrows, and are out in the wilds without the safety of shelter.  They are thrown on their own resources.  And like its swords and sorcery cousins, the heroes are in a position to make a difference.

 

So how do the rabbits survive?  How do their survivalist techniques differ from the two-legged survivalist novel?

1. They make friends with everyone they can by helping folks with no immediate expectation of return benefit.  Sometimes their friends help them in big ways, other times it is just a little warning that makes all the difference.
2. They don't use a one-headed tribal model.  They have a variety of leaders, each tending to dominate within their area of expertise.  This is actually how most "tribal" societies actually work, rather than the head-man fantasies of many anthropologists.
3. They are not particularly choosey about who joins them.  They value each other for company and friendship, and generally figure that just about everyone has something useful to add, even if it is only another pair of alert eyes.
4. They don't really on firepower, and only to a limited amount on combat skills, to win their way through. 

In general, they succeed by being nice, and by being community spirited.  Some of their other methods are more traditional. They find a defensible position to live in. They work hard, are brave, cunning, and  doggedly determined.  So are these viable survival strategies for people?  I don't know;  But they certainly are nicer strategies.

 

The novel has a longer focus than most human-centered survival fiction.  This isn't too hard to do as rabbits don't live long, so it only takes a couple of years to get to the passing of a generation, and thus making it a more foundational story:  somewhat along the lines of George Herbert's Earth Abides.

 

So did I like it?  Of course, I read it when it came out in 1974, and my second re-reading was by way of reading it aloud to my son at bed time.

 

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?  It is a story about talking rabbits.  It is fantasy.  It is a one.

 

Readability?  It is an absolute classic.  It was published to instant acclaim.  There is some chatting, and philosophizing thrown in for good measure, but it reads pretty quickly for a book that is close to 500 pages long.  Remembering that this is not a qualitative ranking, we will call it a 6.