Just Finished Reading: Without Warning by John Birmingham (FP: 2009)

March 14, 2003. Without a moments warning a massive energy field envelops most of the North American continent cutting off all communication – for two minutes. When live video feeds come back up they show nothing. No people – anywhere. Planes in flight continue towards their destinations and crash land when they run out of fuel. Ships heading towards dock plough into their bays and explode. Seemingly everyone inside the wave has simply disappeared. On the eve of the US led attack on Iraq the American forces are suddenly without leadership. Political and Military hierarchies have basically been decapitated. Meanwhile 5 million Americans out of country look on with a mixture of shock, disbelief and horror. Then things start to get really bad. As uncontrolled fires sweep across the US the resulting toxic cloud dips the western hemisphere into a temporary ‘nuclear’ winter. Across the globe some countries celebrate the disappearance of America, others morn its lost while the brave few take swift advantage of the opportunity to take anything they can before the coming collapse of the world’s economy. As the world tips into chaos it’s a fight for survival and still over the horizon the wave sits over the continent poised, ready to move and swallow the world.

After reading and greatly enjoying his alternative WW2 series I was looking forward to this first book in the inevitable ‘After America’ trilogy. I was strangely disappointed. The Wave itself was OK – it’s basically a continent wide plot device – “what would happen if America suddenly disappeared?” It was certainly an intriguing enough phenomena especially as, as far as the available scientific instruments could tell, it didn’t actually exist. What I found rather less than satisfying is the way the world basically collapsed into a heap in a matter of a few weeks. OK, I realise that there would be considerable seismic shifts in the political and economic realities but I never could figure out why the sudden disappearance of the USA would cause – in less than a month – a civil war in France and for Britain to become a huge prison camp. About the only political event that made much sense (actually most of Europe, Africa or Asia even got a mention in this first volume) was Israel’s response to the worsening crisis in the Middle East. This is not to say that this was a bad poorly executed book – it wasn’t. The writing was generally good to very good. Characterisation was good although I did find quite a few of them too good to be true – oh, and try not to get too attached to any of them. The author is not afraid to kill off main characters or characters that might look as if they’re going to be central to the plot. The ending also felt rushed. We jumped in time from the first week to the first month and then straight to the first year. It honestly left a generally bad taste in my mouth. I will, probably anyway, pick up the other two books in the series to find out what happened afterwards. So it certainly hasn’t put me off reading more. I’m not rushing to do so however. If I see them in my travels I’ll get them but I’m not going to busting to read them any time soon. Reasonable.