Dies the Fire
Ratings32
Average rating3.3
15
Ratings32
Average rating3.3
S. M. Stirling presents his first Novel of the Change, the start of the New York Times bestselling postapocalyptic saga set in a world where all technology has been rendered useless.
The Change occurred when an electrical storm centered over the island of Nantucket produced a blinding white flash that rendered all electronic devices and fuels inoperable—and plunged the world into a dark age humanity was unprepared to face...
Michael Pound was flying over Idaho en route to the holiday home of his passengers when the plane’s engines inexplicably died, forcing a less than perfect landing in the wilderness. And as Michael leads his charges to safety, he begins to realize that the engine failure was not an isolated incident.
Juniper McKenzie was singing and playing guitar in a pub when her small Oregon town was thrust into darkness. Now, taking refuge in her family’s cabin with her daughter and a growing circle of friends, Juniper is determined to create a farming community to benefit the survivors of this crisis.
But even as people band together to help one another, others are building armies for conquest...
Featured Series
15 primary books16 released booksEmberverse is a 16-book series with 15 primary works first released in 2004 with contributions by S. M. Stirling and S.M. Stirling.
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Reviews with the most likes.
This is the first in a post-apocalyptic series taking place in my home, the Pacific Northwest. An excellent read, although this first book gets a little gritty in the details. Stirling's characterization is phenomenal - he's very good at writing anti-heroes, flawed heroes, and generally people who seem real - there's always some facet of their personality that you just know you'd hate about them if they were real.
Characterization aside, this is a great series. There's generally very little set in the Pacific Northwest, and knowing the places adds a fun element to reading this series. I'm hooked - I can't wait for book 4 to move to paperback!
A very good book about the end of the world. You have to buy in that some sort of “event” made some of the laws of physics change, but once you resign yourself to that it's smooth sailing. I'm not a huge fan of poetry in my prose or trying to puzzle out how to pronounce a foreign language not even remotely related to my own, so Juniper's parts were sometimes daunting. The other “main” character, Mike, is a bit of a Gary Stu, but even he has exceptions.
I didn't like any of the characters and especially disliked Mike Havel, one of the main protagonists. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it was all those annoying internal observations he made.
The whole Wiccan angle was annoying too......maybe because of Juniper.
I was not drawn in emotionally at all and also found the writing itself of mediocre quality.
Too bad; I had high hopes for Dies the Fire.
Holy cow. That took forever to finish. Sounded liked a great premise to start with - a world plunged into mass chaos due to some big unexplained event that resulted no electricity and guns being useless (I still don't get how a gun won't fire but they can start actual fires)- but it took a wrong turn and got very, very lost along the way. I was so bored in the middle section of the book that got to the point where I didn't much care who fought who or who won (though since this is a series that part is kind of obvious) as long as the number of pages I had left was less than the number of pages I had already read. I just didn't care about any of the characters anymore. Can't see myself ever picking up book 2.
