OmegaMom

What do you do when the power goes out?  If you’re like me, you wait a minute or two before you do anything, because you know it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  If it lasts longer than a few minutes, then it’s time to haul out the candles and lamps, and maybe give a call to the local electric company.

What do you do if it’s not just your house, your neighborhood?  What if it’s your city?  Well, folks who have been in hurricanes or earthquakes know it’s just a matter of time before the services come back on; the news is filled with folks telling you what’s caused the outage, estimates of how long it will take to get things working again, where the evacuation centers are, and passing on the information that people out of the area are working hard and it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  The realities, of course, are often different than the estimates, but you are assured that someone’s taking care of things.

What if it’s not just your city?  What if it’s everywhere?  What if, at the same time as the (electric) power went out, all batteries went dead, all internal combustion motors died, gunpowder stopped working…everything stopped working?

Imagine living in, say, Los Angeles.  Or Phoenix.  Or the East Coast metroplex stretching from northern Virginia all the way up to the middle of New England.  Imagine realizing, fairly quickly, that there is no power, that no-one can fix it, and there’s no way to replenish the food at your local grocery store–if you’re lucky enough to live near enough to walk or bike to it.  Imagine 40 million people all getting hungry and thirsty, and all very, very scared.  Add in the fact that no fire engines work, no police cars work, no ambulances work, and every single airplane in the sky has just become a plummeting bomb filled with thousands of gallons of flammable liquids…Top it off with ravaging illnesses in a few weeks, as unsanitary living conditions spread (40 million people pooping and nowhere to put the poop).

Now imagine it happening worldwide.

That’s the premise set up in the first chapter of S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire: A Novel of the Change.  News of a strange, enormous electrical storm affecting the island of Nantucket is immediately followed by radios, lights, everything going dead.  The world changes in an instant.  Is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  No-one knows.  The novel follows one woman, Juniper MacKenzie, a Wiccan who leads a group of survivors from Corvallis, OR, and one man, Mike Havel, who was piloting a puddle jumper for a rich man and his family through the Idaho mountains when the lights went out, manages to crash land, and leads them to safety.

Food is a big issue in the novel–the realization by modern people of just how much work is involved in getting food on the table, and how important it is to survive.  And violence.  Lack of order leads to lack of law leads to violence.  (Warning:  graphically described violence–you may get tired of hearing about how people’s bowels let loose when they get thrust by a sword.)

The main focus is how they survive, and how their communities develop and cope with a larger, more ruthless community led by Norman Arminger, a former history professor who is now living his dream of resurrecting post-Norman-Conquest medievalism in the city of Portland.

The next two novels–The Protector’s War and A Meeting at Corvallis–take place nine years later.  All three communities that were the center of the first book have stabilized and grown, and it’s obvious that the younger generation is taking things that most of the olders consider “pretend” morale boosters much more seriously.  MacKenzie’s clan–started almost as a joke–has become more and more “clannish”; Havel’s younger BearKillers, who were just kids when The Change occurred, revere him as a leader and warleader; youngsters who grew up in Arminger’s Protectorate are internalizing the huffy formality of court life.  And there’s a war.  But the bad guys aren’t necessarily as horribly bad as they seemed…and there’s a growing sense that the deus ex machina that caused The Change is interfering in a mystic way with some folks.  Just a bit.

The next two novels–The Sunrise Lands and The Scourge of God–take place twenty-one years after The Change. Juniper’s son, Rudi, who was the focus of a prophecy at his dedication ceremony at the end of the very first book, is now an adult, and facing a Quest–to go to Nantucket Island, source of the mysterious storm that caused The Change.  New characters are introduced, but old characters are there as well.  Old enemies now work together as somewhat comfortable allies.  New enemies appear.  Nantucket is a mysterious place that bends the space-time continuum in weird ways.  Some of the old survivors are dying off, while those that remain are befuddled by how the youngsters have internalized the makeshift morale boosters used to get through the crisis, turning them into a way of life.  The youngsters, in their turn, regard the tales of “before The Change” as so much mythical mumbo jumbo and roll their eyes when the older folks go into reminiscing. 

The mystical clues get thicker and happen more often…is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  Is Rudi the reincarnation of King Arthur?  How can some of the eeevul Prophet’s folk become essentially zombies?  You have to wait until the final volume is published in September.  I hope.

In the midst of all the blood and gore were some really intriguing ideas and amusing byplay.  MacKenzie clansfolk heading to the battlefield with their longbows, riding bicycles.  A social taboo against singing “The End Of The World As We Know It”.  Teenagers who take Tolkein literally, and start the Dunedain Rangers as a do-gooders’ association supported by payments for escorting caravans and a retainer for ridding the land of bandits–they speak High Elvish amongst themselves, and have had to cobble together ways to curse and talk about menstruation.  A society based on leadership of a bunch of yogi who were having a conference in the Tetons on how to use the newfangled internet to advertise their businesses when The Change occurred.  The Society for Creative Anachronism pops up all over the place as people who could adjust to the new world just a little bit easier.

I enjoyed the books.  You do have to suspend your disbelief at the mechanics of The Change–even his characters note that its effects happen only on the surface of the earth–but I assume the deux ex machina has taken care of that.  Some readers have commented that they don’t like Stirling’s descriptive style, so be warned:  he spends a helluva lot of time setting the scene, incorporating sights, sounds, smells.  I like it; you may not.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Books, Reader Input. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.