One Second After

A must read for anyone.

What could happen if our country were hit with an EMP weapon or supermassive solar flare? One Second After is an interesting exercise in exploring that particular “what if.” I thought it was an entertaining read and certainly a thought-provoking read. I thought the characters were pretty well written. It's one that I couldn't put down once I picked it up.

This thing is so bad that I frequently considered that it might be a parody of bad reactionary right-wing writing. It isn't.

Anyway, there's a couple of possibilities: 1) Tobacco and gun lobbyists funded a novel-writing AI with it's sole input being a year of Fox News, or 2) every white grandpa in the midwest got to write a paragraph - as long as they promised to either be watching the History Channel or a 9/11 retrospective. I don't know if I hate myself enough to explore the series further.

Check my notes as I walk into the sea forever.

(I can't remember why I have this book in the first place, and I should've stopped when I found a forward by Newt Gingrich, a man perhaps most famous for bringing his children to visit their mother in the hospital where she was recovering from cancer surgery and announcing his intention to divorce her.)

It was a good cautionary tale with conversation points that you may not think of right away after the blast comes. It was definitely packed with sad and depressing moments but also didn't stray from the realism of what this situation might entail.

What a poorly written mess. Even once you get past the fact that the author doesn't know the difference between “must've” and “must of,” it doesn't get better. Every character other than our hero serves simply to praise the hero for every action he takes, no matter how ridiculous. And the repetition. The ceaseless repetition of information we already know. Three times in four pages the character “smiled” because a situation reminded him of ancient kings negotiating. Twice to himself, and then he announced it to the group. This book sorely needed a capable editor. If you want a book about America after technology stops working, do yourself a favor and read “Dies the Fire” instead.

I had to DNF this book because it was just so badly written! You know, I hardly ever one-star a book if you notice my reviews. It takes a lot to annoy me.

I was initially attracted to this book's premise: an EMP wave gets rid of the technology we've come to rely on, a small town struggles to survive.
The whole plot promises a lot of action but fails to deliver. It's not that nothing happens in the book, it's more like the characters spend most of their time TALKING about the action AFTER it happens. That's right, we have a book where the ‘action' takes place in meetings. I remember thinking during one such meeting where, damn, why couldn't the author plonk our main character in the thick of the action so that we can see and experience it through his eyes?

I gave the book as good as it got - read 50% - and just couldn't anymore. There are far better books out there.

Just like a ton of other dystopian, fall of civilization novels. The EMP cause was a bit interesting, but the writing itself was meh. It's also sort of heavy on the “Red Dawn” like NRA propaganda.

In America, we are completely dependent upon electronics. They run our cars, our phones, our houses, and more. But what if something came along and destroyed all that!? What if our enemies send an EMP our way? We would be completely lost!
One Second After deals with the after affects of an EMP and its devastation upon a small town in North Carolina. Black Mountain is cut off completely after the EMP is detonated, and what results are medieval methods to keep the town running. As the food runs out, and people are starting to come toward their town in hopes of making it, the town is forced to undergo martial law, and to establish strict rules just to keep themselves from being completely wiped off the face of the planet. “Outsiders” are not allowed within the confines of the town, and the townspeople are completely united in their struggle to just stay alive.
John Matherson is a retired colonel from the United States Army living with his family in the mountains. After the initial shut down of communication, he knows what they are facing, and what could possibly happen. As the leaders of the town pull together to ensure survival for as many as they can, they are forced to face hard truths, and have to face some things that are rather uncomfortable for many to think about.

I loved this book! I was completely drawn in and it was hard to put down. That being said, it was not an easy read! I found myself crying over parts, frustrated over others, and downright scared to think that this could really happen here. The fact that not many would be able to defend themselves, or be able to survive off the land is something that hits to close to home. When the book described the children and their declining state, that hit even harder. The large amounts of death and the large numbers of those who dropped simply because of inadequate medical care and food was hard to stomach. We have become to entirely reliant on the “easy” that we have let so many of the facts of life that would keep us alive. How many of us can do something without having to google our way through the process? How many of us would be able to survive without running water or food from the grocery store?
I honestly think this is a book that everyone should read, and start thinking about what they would do in the event that something does happen? How many would survive longer than a week!?

Absolutely terrifying. With most disaster stories, like the Walking Dead or Dies the Fire, you can sit back almost like a sports commentator and think things like “oh, that's going to hurt” or “how are they going to get out of that?” But with this one, if you can believe the forward, it's all precipitated by an actual military tactic that has been researched and gamed out. And if that ever comes to pass, we're all fucked. Social order breakdown, rampant disease, starvation, cannibalism, and pretty much every other nasty things that humans can do could happen. This book has me wondering if I should find a cabin in the woods somewhere isolated and start learning how to live like it's 1818 rather that 2018.

One of the books I'd strongly advise reading - not for the interesting story, setting or characters, although it is a fabulous read. This book makes one wonder “what would happen if...” It portrays the many levels of mankind after a cataclysmic event we should definitely be prepared for.

One Second After is a tale of disaster and survival. It deals with the detonation of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon over the United States, which destroys the electrical grid and anything electronic attached to it. The novel focuses on one small North Carolinian town that struggles to keep itself together after this attack.

This was, on the whole, a fun book to read. Simple, readable prose (with, admittedly, several nagging grammatical errors), likable characters and a plot that easily moves from a to b to c. There aren't any great surprises or relevations in it, but as popcorn literature it works.

At the same time, it featured a lot of the typical points featured in disaster stories like this that tend to bug me. The first is that they always protray society as incredibly fragile - it takes only hours for people to start to descend into chaos and anarchy. I can understand that this would eventually start to happen, but it's unlikely that it would happen so quickly; people don't even have time to learn the true nature of the threat they're facing before they collapse.

Second, and more importantly, is that books like this tend to have curious values. Democracy and the rule of law (notice in OSA the imposition of martial law and summary executions of medicine thieves) are quickly abandoned as quaint, pre-disaster ideals, while others, such as patriarchy, militarism, and the right to private property are defended as essential. I'm not sure if that reveals something about the psychology of the authors writing these stories, or if it's just required for the purpose of advancing the plot, but it is curious nonetheless.

Ultimately, One Second After is a novel that wants to be taken as more than just a piece of fiction - the preface and afterward by a former US congressman and a navy captain, respectively, help to underscore how serious the threat of EMP is, and I understand that it is a theoretically plausible one, but the novel ultimately doesn't provide the solutions that something that is more than a iece of fiction would be expected to include.