I have been reading Boing Boing for 10 years, and I’ve finally registered to respond to this post because I read about 25% of the first novel in the series and had to put it down. It was terrible. Most of the characters were one dimensional, many were outright racist, women were treated like animals, people with years of training and of high morals simply dropped their responsibilities and turned evil overnight, and the military turned on civilians within the US at the first sign of trouble (all while complaining that their orders were ridiculous - I hate my orders, but I need to shoot and kill civilians anyway… seriously?). The author clearly believes that our society and civilization are ready to collapse at the moment things get tough, a view I recall hearing a lot of voices repeating often when Y2K was imminent and not long after 9/11 happened. But what I’ve observed is that when Americans are confronted with hardship, they stand together and fight, not turn against each other and give up. I love good zombie novels where civilization and individual morals are challenged, but this book portrays a world where both of those elements are so fragile and people so deeply flawed that I simply had to put the book down in disgust. People are flawed, but when challenged, many people actually overcome those flaws… but not people in this author’s vision of the world. Nuts.
You’re an optimist! I like that! Good first post by the way. It’s not often I put down a book in disgust, the last one I did was a homeopathic extremist cult manual I think.
I hope you’re right, about the people uniting in the face of chaos. At the risk of sounding like a way cool person, this quote from the dark knight instantly jumped to mind- When the chips are down, these… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other. which is kinda what I’d expect to happen. The riots in London a little while back were by no means fun for people not participating, but it was interesting to see the cases of politeness between some of the buggers “oh you were looting these jeans? So sorry, you take them. I’ll loot some different jeans” and the anti-antisocial response of the teams of people out with brooms tidying everything up.
I really just signed it to point out that the guy on the cover of the book looks like the conductor of the poop train.
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