- Birmingham, John.
Without Warning.
New York: Del Rey, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-345-50289-6.
-
One of the most common counsels offered to authors by agents and
editors is to choose a genre and remain within it. A book which
spans two or more of the usual categories runs the risk of “falling
into the crack”, with reviewers not certain how to approach it and,
on the marketing side, retailers unsure of where in the store it should
be displayed. This is advice which the author of this work either never
received or laughingly disdained. The present volume combines a
political/military techno-thriller in the Tom Clancy tradition
with alternative history as practiced by Harry Turtledove, but
wait—there's more, relativistic arm-waving
apocalyptic science fiction in the vein of the late Michael Crichton.
This is an ambitious combination, and one which the author totally
bungles in this lame book, which is a complete waste of paper, ink,
time, and money.
The premise is promising. What would happen if there were no United
States (something we may, after all, effectively find out over the
next few years, if not in the manner posited here)? In particular,
wind the clock back to just before the start of the 2003 invasion of
Iraq, and assume the U.S. vanished—what would the
world look like in the aftermath? You ask, “what do you mean by the U.S.
vanishing?” Well, you see, an interdimensional portal opens between
a fifth dimensional braneworld which disgorges 500,000 flying saucers
which spread out over North America, from which tens of millions of
10 metre tall purple and green centipedes emerge to hunt down and devour
every human being in the United States and most of Canada and Mexico,
leaving intact only the airheads in western Washington State and Hawaii
and the yahoos in Alaska. No—not really—in fact what is
proposed here is even more preposterously implausible than the saucers and
centipedes, and is never explained in the text. It is simply an absurd
plot device which defies about as many laws of physics as rules of
thumb for authors of thrillers.
So the U.S. goes away, and mayhem erupts all around the world. The
story is told by tracking with closeups of various people in the
Middle East, Europe, on the high seas, Cuba, and the surviving remnant
of the U.S. The way things play out isn't implausible, but since the
precipitating event is absurd on the face of it, it's difficult to
care much about the consequences as described here. I mean, here we
have a book in which Bill Gates has a cameo rôle providing a
high-security communications device which is competently implemented
and works properly the first time—bring on the saucers and giant
centipedes!
As the pages dwindle toward the end, it seems like nothing is being
resolved. Then you turn the last page and discover that you've been
left in mid-air and are expected to buy After America next
year to find out how it all comes out. Yeah, right—fool me once,
shame on you; fool me twice, not gonna happen!
Apart from the idiotic premise, transgenred plot, and side-splitting
goofs like the mention of “UCLA's Berkeley campus” (p. 21),
the novel drips with gratuitous obscenity. Look, one expects soldiers
and sailors to cuss, and having them speak that way conveys a certain
authenticity. But here, almost everybody, from mild-mannered
city engineers to urbane politicians seem unable to utter two sentences
without dropping one or more F-bombs. Aside from the absurdity of the
plot, this makes the reading experience coarsening. Perhaps that is
how people actually speak in this post-Enlightenment age; if so, I do
not wish to soil my recreational reading by being reminded of it.
If we end up in the kind of post-apocalyptic world described here,
we'll probably have to turn to our libraries once the hoard of
toilet paper in the basement runs out. I know which book will be
first on the list.
March 2009 