One Second After

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.