One Second After by William R. Forstchen

"New York Times best selling author William R. Forstchen now brings us a story which can be all too terrifyingly real...a story in which one man struggles to save his family and his small North Carolina town after America loses a war, in one second, a war that will send America back to the Dark Ages...A war based upon a weapon, an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP). A weapon that may already be in the hands of our enemies."

Months before publication, One Second After has already been cited on the floor of Congress as a book all Americans should read, a book already being discussed in the corridors of the Pentagon as a truly realistic look at a weapon and its awesome power to destroy the entire United States, literally within one second. It is a weapon that the Wall Street Journal warns could shatter America. In the tradition of On the Beach, Fail Safe and Testament, this book, set in a typical American town, is a dire warning of what might be our future...and our end.

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.

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.

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.

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.