Review of Total War, Survivalist #1, by Jerry Ahern

The first ever review has to go to the grand daddy of all prepper fiction, Total War, by Jerry Ahern

Total War

The first thing to recognize is that this book came out in 1981, so you have to make some allowances. The Cold War was still alive and well, and with that as a cultural backdrop some of the issues with plausibility immediately fade away.

I love this book. Read it as a kid and it started me on the genre, but that being said there are some major flaws. The protagonist is slightly better at martial arts than Bruce Lee, better with women than James Bond, better at medicine than the entire staff of the Mayo Clinic, better with weapons than Bullseye, and smarter than Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty put together. He also has Bill Gates level resources to put supplies into place before things get bad. The larger than life nature of the hero kind of kills the tension and some of the moral choices the hero makes seem to be anything but. <spoiler> leaving the wife asleep while he lets the kids grow old enough to be useful, or picking out a mate for his daughter, or the relationship with Natasha, all questionable</spoiler> There is also quite a bit of gun porn throughout the pages, Ahern had a connection to Detonics and it definitely shows. If you like the old school Chuck Norris movies where the white hat kills all the black hats, and the idea of a lone badass taking on commie hordes appeals, this is a pulpy fun read. If you're looking for realistic, not so much.

Useful survival tips from the series? After lots of thought I came up with three.

1) It would be helpful to have millions of dollars worth of supplies set up in an ultra-secure state of the art bunker pre-apocalypse.

2) In a survival situation, if you could be a medical doctor with advanced combat training only going up against semi-literate thugs who spray and pray that would be helpful.

3) Don't trust any commies. This one actually seems like it might still be a good idea.