One Second After, by William R. Forstchen

One Second After
By William R. Forstchen

A middle-aged widowed ex-Army college professor, his two daughters, two dogs and mother-in-law must face a devastating nuclear attack. But nothing is blown up, no one dies of fallout poisoning, and no one is killed in the first seconds. The nuclear warheads exploded in the upper atmosphere, its electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) knocking out all electronics and as a result all the electricity in North America. In their small mountain home in Western North Carolina, the impact will be felt almost immediately. But it will come home with savage force as the weeks and months go by.

John Matherson and his family learn quickly when, during his twelve year old diabetic daughter's birthday party everything shuts off. What do you lose when there is no electricity and no one to come to your aid for.. a year? Communications go out. Cars stop running. Medical equipment, like blood glucose monitors, won't work. Refrigerators stop retrograding. And that's just the immediate impact. Unable to function in a new and unknown world, one known well by our ancestors, people eat spoiled meat and die. They run out of medications and die. They get hurt and without antibiotics they die. They start to run out of food and they die. Despair and suicide come next and they die. Maarauders from the urban areas start to show up with guns and many die. They, weakened by hunger, catch diseases from the marauders and die. People have to mobilize to fight off small armies of more ruthless marauders and are killed in the wars.

That's basically the story of this novel. John Matherson, who really is a college history professor in Black Mountain, NC, based his character and town on his real life. With military history as his expertise he is uniquely equipped to understand what is going on. He knows no quick fix will come. It will take weeks, months, maybe longer for the parts of the world still functioning to get aid to the U.S. First, though, everything will run out. Hard choices will have to be made: do we let pets live and consume food we could use or eat them? Do we ration food until people can barely survive on the few hundred calories. Do we execute criminals , and if so, who pulls the trigger?

The ultimate question is: will anyone ever come to save us or is this the end?

The strength of this book is its methodical examination of what we would lose, step by step. It does not shy away from much. The relationships, though clearly from a strictly male point of view and a father's at that, are affecting.

The book has two major flaws, however, ones that are almost unavoidable in apocalyptic fiction. The first is the simple overlooking of simple realities. I know an author can't think of everything, and Forstehen did a good job thinking of things that perhaps other authors would not have, but there are a few glaring omissions. One is radio. In One Second After's world, even where they have old radios not affected by the EMP they hear nothing on the mediumwave (AM) band until the Voice of America comes back on. The truth is that with all electrical interference eliminated you could hear all sorts of stations from quite great distances (DX). Even if a location was just too far from these foreign broadcasters, somebody, a ham radio operator, is going to have an old tube radio. Then shortwave broadcasters and operators would come in strong from Europe, Africa, South America, and anywhere else not hit by the additional nukes. Further these people could transmit like never before, with no interference from lights, appliances, cell phone and microwave towers, computers, you name it. Forstehen wanted to create isolation, but he can't just overlook something that important.

The other flaw is one that we have found in just about every end-of-the-world novel we have read. It's what my husband Jim calls "macho doomer war porn". An effete intellectual male turns into a warrior and the world crumbles into battling fiefs. It's always in order to allow the author, I suspect, to play big butch army guy. Even our favorite doomer novel, Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon! is infested with this theme. How refreshing something like The Day After and Testament are.

Other problems include a character mentioned at the beginning, the neighbor who lives without electricity in the pre-EMP world, who never gets mentioned again; thee Edsel ex machina; the lecture at the beginning and end of the book. One thing John says that made us both shake our heads, that we should prepare the way people always are ready for hurricane outages... they are?! Since when? And a warning: the introduction is written by Newt Gingrich, clearly angling for the Presidency.

By the way, Forstehen really is an ex-Army college history professor at the real Presbyterian college in the real town of Black Mountain, NC. I wonder if Asheville has closed its city limits to him, with the hatchet job he did on their rep.