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Slow Apocalypse
Despite wars with Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as 9/11, the United States’ dependence on foreign oil has kept the nation tied to the Middle East. A scientist has developed a cure for America’s addiction—a slow-acting virus that feeds on petroleum, turning it solid. But he didn’t consider that his contagion of an Iraqi oil field could spread to infect the fuel supply of the entire world…
In Los Angeles, screenwriter Dave Marshall heard this scenario from a retired US marine and government insider who acted as a consultant on Dave’s last film. It sounded as implausible as many of his scripts, but the reality is much more frightening than anything he could have envisioned.
An ordinary guy armed with extraordinary information, Dave hopes his survivor’s instinct will kick in so he can protect his wife and daughter from the coming apocalypse that will alter the future of Earth—and humanity…
In Los Angeles, screenwriter Dave Marshall heard this scenario from a retired US marine and government insider who acted as a consultant on Dave’s last film. It sounded as implausible as many of his scripts, but the reality is much more frightening than anything he could have envisioned.
An ordinary guy armed with extraordinary information, Dave hopes his survivor’s instinct will kick in so he can protect his wife and daughter from the coming apocalypse that will alter the future of Earth—and humanity…
443 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 4, 2012
41 people are currently reading
940 people want to read
About the author
John Varley
234 books603 followersFull name: John Herbert Varley.
John Varley was born in Austin, Texas. He grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, and graduated from Nederland High School. He went to Michigan State University.
He has written several novels and numerous short stories.He has received both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
John Varley was born in Austin, Texas. He grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, moved to Port Arthur in 1957, and graduated from Nederland High School. He went to Michigan State University.
He has written several novels and numerous short stories.He has received both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
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April 25, 2013
I met John Varley once, quite by chance, years ago. He and his partner Lee Emmett were holding a rummage sale, and I just happened to see their ad in the Portland Oregonian in time to make it down the hill.
It was a rather sad occasion—they had just lost the lease on their apartment, a gigantic, ramshackle abode that took up the whole upper floor of a two-story building with a beautiful view across the Willamette River to downtown. Beneath them was an old Italian restaurant called the Monte Carlo. Varley was quite busy with the sale and plans for moving, but was a gracious host nonetheless as my son and I walked through the detritus of his life and picked out a few small items to take home.
Varley and Emmett left town in their RV for points south. The Monte Carlo closed, and the building itself no longer exists. It burned to the ground while standing vacant, and its location is now a field where urban goats are let graze to keep down the weeds.
That forced exodus, and the spectre of abandonment, may have influenced this novel to some small extent, but Portland is not the place that figures most prominently in Slow Apocalypse. For some years after leaving Portland, Varley and Emmett lived in Los Angeles (though they may not live there still—it's surprisingly difficult to divine their current whereabouts through casual websurfing)... and the City of Angels, not the City of Roses, is the true genius loci for this book.
Varley's prose here conveys an extremely solid sense of place—replete with geographical details and mental snapshots from all over the L.A. basin. The tangled freeways that chop neighborhoods into slices of isolated territory; those expensive houses perched precariously in the Hollywood hills; the hot, dry Santa Ana winds; the population's abject dependence on water and other resources brought, every day, from miles and miles away... all of the strangenesses that start seeming perfectly normal after you've been in L.A. for awhile are reproduced in Slow Apocalypse—and with total fidelity, at least as far as I could tell from my own five years spent there.
Otherwise, though, Slow Apocalypse reminded me of many previous apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic tales. The precipitating event this time is the release of a genetically-modified bacterium that solidifies crude oil deposits into unpumpable sludge (a more substantial and scientifically-plausible version of the scenario in Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eaters, that slim British disaster novel from the Seventies, if I recall its plot correctly), but that's just the beginning of this particular collapse. And despite the title, this apocalypse is not especially slow once the slide starts. The majority of the book sees the characters in a mad rush to escape L.A., reminiscent of the Steve De Jarnatt film Miracle Mile, all reported in the dispassionate, journalistic style of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's own SoCal catastrophe novel Lucifer's Hammer.
Dave Marshall, our Virgil for this particular stroll through the Inferno, is a likeable guy, a screenwriter who has one (and only one, but who's counting?) successful sitcom under his belt. Dave has a dissatisfied wife, a teenaged daughter, an oversized, overpriced house in the hills north of L.A., and a Cadillac Escalade (his wife drives the Mercedes).
Dave's also a very, very lucky guy. He receives advance notice of just how our civilization is about to collapse—and so, equipped with only that foreknowledge, a number of no-limit credit cards, the Internet, the GPS in that Escalade, and a "posse" of fellow writers, Dave tries very, very hard to make sure he and his family survive the coming end times.
Which are pretty apocalyptic. In addition to those oil-eating bacteria, there are... well, let's just say that it never rains but it pours. This is the kind of thing that gets you started thinking along survivalist lines—where to put the caches of food and durable equipment; where to hide the snipers; how to cobble together wood-powered, armored trucks; how to farm using only hand tools and grunt labor... Dave's bright, resourceful and well-informed, but he's no prepper, and his best-laid plans have a hard time surviving actual contact with the antagonists, both human and otherwise, standing in the way of their epic trek to the Promised Land.
Slow Apocalypse has many good parts. The characterization is believable—Dave Marshall and his family and friends are neither omnicompetent nor complete idiots—and the plausible nature of both the events, and of people's reactions to those events, is chilling to read. The aforementioned geographic realism adds impact. And the title's great, even if it's not perfectly descriptive (according to Varley's website, it was a crowdsourced effort). This really is post-apocalyptic fiction done well.
The bad part is that there's nothing really new here... as Lucius Shepard put it once, "the world has ended many times, but few men have ever noticed" (Life During Wartime, p.351). Once this particular form of the end has occurred, Dave Marshall's story becomes a familiar one of survival against adversity: of the gathering of supplies; of travel through devastated wilderness and newly-minted barbarian tribes; of companions lost along the way... and of the gradual (sometimes not-so-gradual) sloughing of effete and unnecessary attributes of civilization to reveal the mettle of people (of Americans, specifically) (of white, affluent Americans, to be even more specific) who rise to challenges they never foresaw.
It is a compelling story, to be sure, and it has heroes in it that you'll probably be rooting for, but it's not exactly ground-breaking... and that's more disappointing than it would be otherwise when coming from this author. John Varley was one of the more amazing SF writers of the 1970s and 1980s. His work was both transgressive and coherent—a rare combination. Blockbuster collections like The Persistence of Vision and novels like The Ophiuchi Hotline, the Big Smart Object trilogy (Titan, Wizard and Demon)—his topsy-turvy Eight Worlds where human beings were evicted from Earth but allowed to keep the rest of the Solar System, symbiotic spacesuits, casual gender-reassignment and memory-editing... it's no wonder that Varley was on my buy-on-sight list for a long, long time.
His output became much more sporadic after he was seduced by Hollywood (for the first time?). His novel Millennium, based on an earlier short story about time-travelers from an ecologically-devastated future, was a good book turned into a rather awful film. After that, his books seemed to come at wider and wider intervals. He's been writing more in the Aughts, though, and this is just the latest in a series of solid, if no longer Earth-shattering, science-fiction tales.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did—but I liked it a lot more than I was afraid I would.
It was a rather sad occasion—they had just lost the lease on their apartment, a gigantic, ramshackle abode that took up the whole upper floor of a two-story building with a beautiful view across the Willamette River to downtown. Beneath them was an old Italian restaurant called the Monte Carlo. Varley was quite busy with the sale and plans for moving, but was a gracious host nonetheless as my son and I walked through the detritus of his life and picked out a few small items to take home.
Varley and Emmett left town in their RV for points south. The Monte Carlo closed, and the building itself no longer exists. It burned to the ground while standing vacant, and its location is now a field where urban goats are let graze to keep down the weeds.
That forced exodus, and the spectre of abandonment, may have influenced this novel to some small extent, but Portland is not the place that figures most prominently in Slow Apocalypse. For some years after leaving Portland, Varley and Emmett lived in Los Angeles (though they may not live there still—it's surprisingly difficult to divine their current whereabouts through casual websurfing)... and the City of Angels, not the City of Roses, is the true genius loci for this book.
Varley's prose here conveys an extremely solid sense of place—replete with geographical details and mental snapshots from all over the L.A. basin. The tangled freeways that chop neighborhoods into slices of isolated territory; those expensive houses perched precariously in the Hollywood hills; the hot, dry Santa Ana winds; the population's abject dependence on water and other resources brought, every day, from miles and miles away... all of the strangenesses that start seeming perfectly normal after you've been in L.A. for awhile are reproduced in Slow Apocalypse—and with total fidelity, at least as far as I could tell from my own five years spent there.
Otherwise, though, Slow Apocalypse reminded me of many previous apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic tales. The precipitating event this time is the release of a genetically-modified bacterium that solidifies crude oil deposits into unpumpable sludge (a more substantial and scientifically-plausible version of the scenario in Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eaters, that slim British disaster novel from the Seventies, if I recall its plot correctly), but that's just the beginning of this particular collapse. And despite the title, this apocalypse is not especially slow once the slide starts. The majority of the book sees the characters in a mad rush to escape L.A., reminiscent of the Steve De Jarnatt film Miracle Mile, all reported in the dispassionate, journalistic style of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's own SoCal catastrophe novel Lucifer's Hammer.
Dave Marshall, our Virgil for this particular stroll through the Inferno, is a likeable guy, a screenwriter who has one (and only one, but who's counting?) successful sitcom under his belt. Dave has a dissatisfied wife, a teenaged daughter, an oversized, overpriced house in the hills north of L.A., and a Cadillac Escalade (his wife drives the Mercedes).
Dave's also a very, very lucky guy. He receives advance notice of just how our civilization is about to collapse—and so, equipped with only that foreknowledge, a number of no-limit credit cards, the Internet, the GPS in that Escalade, and a "posse" of fellow writers, Dave tries very, very hard to make sure he and his family survive the coming end times.
Which are pretty apocalyptic. In addition to those oil-eating bacteria, there are... well, let's just say that it never rains but it pours. This is the kind of thing that gets you started thinking along survivalist lines—where to put the caches of food and durable equipment; where to hide the snipers; how to cobble together wood-powered, armored trucks; how to farm using only hand tools and grunt labor... Dave's bright, resourceful and well-informed, but he's no prepper, and his best-laid plans have a hard time surviving actual contact with the antagonists, both human and otherwise, standing in the way of their epic trek to the Promised Land.
Slow Apocalypse has many good parts. The characterization is believable—Dave Marshall and his family and friends are neither omnicompetent nor complete idiots—and the plausible nature of both the events, and of people's reactions to those events, is chilling to read. The aforementioned geographic realism adds impact. And the title's great, even if it's not perfectly descriptive (according to Varley's website, it was a crowdsourced effort). This really is post-apocalyptic fiction done well.
The bad part is that there's nothing really new here... as Lucius Shepard put it once, "the world has ended many times, but few men have ever noticed" (Life During Wartime, p.351). Once this particular form of the end has occurred, Dave Marshall's story becomes a familiar one of survival against adversity: of the gathering of supplies; of travel through devastated wilderness and newly-minted barbarian tribes; of companions lost along the way... and of the gradual (sometimes not-so-gradual) sloughing of effete and unnecessary attributes of civilization to reveal the mettle of people (of Americans, specifically) (of white, affluent Americans, to be even more specific) who rise to challenges they never foresaw.
It is a compelling story, to be sure, and it has heroes in it that you'll probably be rooting for, but it's not exactly ground-breaking... and that's more disappointing than it would be otherwise when coming from this author. John Varley was one of the more amazing SF writers of the 1970s and 1980s. His work was both transgressive and coherent—a rare combination. Blockbuster collections like The Persistence of Vision and novels like The Ophiuchi Hotline, the Big Smart Object trilogy (Titan, Wizard and Demon)—his topsy-turvy Eight Worlds where human beings were evicted from Earth but allowed to keep the rest of the Solar System, symbiotic spacesuits, casual gender-reassignment and memory-editing... it's no wonder that Varley was on my buy-on-sight list for a long, long time.
His output became much more sporadic after he was seduced by Hollywood (for the first time?). His novel Millennium, based on an earlier short story about time-travelers from an ecologically-devastated future, was a good book turned into a rather awful film. After that, his books seemed to come at wider and wider intervals. He's been writing more in the Aughts, though, and this is just the latest in a series of solid, if no longer Earth-shattering, science-fiction tales.
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did—but I liked it a lot more than I was afraid I would.
December 24, 2012
A terrifying apocalyptic story!
My Take
Wow. Just, wow. It starts out like an action suspense with black ops swarming, but soon disintegrates into a terrifying nightmare. Varley caught hold of my imagination so well that I actually was outside in the "real" world running errands---and I realized I was wary about being out in the open. I was worrying that someone might leap out and attack!
I mean, duh, it was just a story. And one that affected my thinking in real life. The effect only lasted a few hours. Thank god. So be cautious as to whether you decide to pick this story up. If you are at all susceptible to worrying about catastrophic disasters, don't read this book.
This story just pulls you in and doesn't let you go. You can feel Dave's worry, how far his family has slipped away, and the fear that he's made the wrong choices. At least until the fires explode in the U.S. It's fascinating how disaster can both pull together and rip apart. In many respects, Dave is a lucky man.
I'm impressed by how mature Addison is in all this.
It's exciting and horrifying. I love the can-do attitude and the ingenuity. I hated the every-man-for-himself attitude, even as I understood it. Imagine how well your hometown could survive without food being delivered. How is your electricity produced? How is your water supply delivered? How would you get around without gas? What are your survival skills like? Gardening and small-lot farming will be the future. Meat will be what you can catch. And you have to protect it all from others who will want to step in and take it.
It's an interesting question: what do you talk about after civilization has crumbled? Today, we have friends we IM, email, online chat with. What if all that disappeared? Before we had radio or Victrolas, let alone iPods, people made their own music, danced, recited memorized bits from famous authors, performed amateur theatricals. Connected with each other on a personal level. An interaction that makes Dave realize how petty his former worries were as he discovers that now his days are full of real meaning.
The Story
Trolling for story ideas, Dave Marshall met a military advisor for the movies, who got drunk one morning. What he told and showed Dave has him scrambling, stockpiling food, weapons, gas. He doesn't care how big a debt he runs up...that particular bill is never coming due.
Neighborhoods become armed camps. For a short while. Then it turns into every man for himself.
The Characters
Dave Marshall is a sitcom writer. Or, he was. It's been a bit since his Ants! hit and he's desperate for a new one. His wife Karen is so angry with him that she's close to demanding a divorce. Addison is their horse-mad daughter. Three people living in one house, but not with each other. Ranger is Addie's warmblood gelding.
Dave's former sitcom writing team
Jenna Donovan is coming up on thirty and still single; Dennis Rossi is hyperactive; Roger Weinburger is calm and quiet until he tosses out that line that has 'em rolling in the aisles; and, Bob Winston is the old man of the group. The others are desperate for a new show while Bob invested well and has retired. Now, he just wants to get his family and his fellow writers and their families out of LA. His wife is Emily and their kids, who made it to LA, include Teddy Winston, who reconnoiters on his motorbike; Mark is an engineer who has configured wood-burning engines and his wife Rachel with their twin daughters, Olivia and Sandra, and their Down Syndrome son, Solomon; Marian, former military, is the younger daughter with four-year-old Taylor and her husband Gordon; and Bob and Emily's other daughter, Lisa, is a doctor as is her husband Charles with their two kids, Elyse and Nigel.
Doheny neighborhood militia includes:
Richard Ferguson is a former CEO of an aeronautics firm and takes charge of the new militia. Fellow militia include Sam Crowley and his son Max, Marie O'Brien, Art Bertelstein, Peggy, and Petrelli, who wants to be the new king of the hill.
What's left of the LAPD is mapping the neighborhoods with militias. One less part of town they need to worry about.
Lake Elsinore
The Overlords are a motorcycle gang terrorizing the inhabitants around the lake. Officer Lopez is the Winston-Marshall party's first official contact. Councilwoman Barbara Ortiz is inclined to accept them; Edgar Kovacs is a realtor; Melanie Gold is the chairperson; Pablo Martinez is a restaurateur, and Stewart Jankowitz is a blogger and 'Net designer amongst other trades. Harvey Wilkerson was the banker.
Mr. Henrikson is a steam enthusiast who helps bring back the steam trains.
Colonel Lionel Warner, USMC, ret., consults on military procedures and actions for the movies. He's been involved in some very hush-hush operations. Eddie Parker is brilliant and a scientist tasked with helping to squeeze even more oil out of the oilfields. Too bad they don't understand how much he hates Saudi Arabians for their contribution to 9/11.
The Cover
The cover is something of a disaster itself with its thick layer of paint peeling away from a very rusty door. One with a handle just teasing you into...opening this book.
The title is not kidding. This is a Slow Apocalypse. One that you see coming, almost in slow motion. Don't be caught short.
September 11, 2012
Mini review: A man gets some warning that apocalyptic events are about to occur. He hurriedly goes about trying to set himself up with canned goods and the like. The events unfold slowly. Wife doesn’t believe him. Daughter does. Earthquakes, fire, destruction, oil gone from the world.
Solid book. Interesting ideas. I do not necessarily dislike any of the characters. Interesting enough book, if slow. I’d recommend it.
Longer review with some rambling about Varley: Varley’s one of those authors I started reading way back deep in the past when I’d take “best of” short story books and zoom through them looking for authors to explore. He had several short stories that I rather enjoyed, "The Phantom of Kansas", “Press Enter#”, “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” among others. So I turned to his books.
Just as an aside, Jack McDevitt is another one I found at the same time through short stories. But with him, I rather disliked his short stories and vowed to never look for him in book form. Luckily I forgot that 15 years later when I found the first book I read by him. Sadly, I’ve found that being good at a particularly story length does not always translate into being good at a different story length.
If I recall correctly, I think I liked Varley’s short story “Air Raid”. And I know I liked it as the film Millennium. But I was about to turn to Varley’s novels. Millennium, the book, wasn’t that much different than the movie. And I’d seen the movie first. So it didn’t tempt me to look for more of Varley’s books, nor stop me in my progress. No, it was the Gaea trilogy that lead me to stop reading Varley in book form. At least for a short while. Way too long ago to remember why, though there is a vague recollection that the books were a mess.
Mammoth and the Red Thunder trilogy were good interesting reads. Mammoth lured me back to Varley’s books by having an interesting idea. Red Thunder . . .well, I kept putting that particular series off for years. Probably the mere idea of “kids” deciding enough’s enough, people should voyage to Mars, and so they’ll do it. Well, I thought that was what the books were supposed to be about. The “kids” weren’t exactly kids but that’s a different book series. No, I put it off long enough, might as well turn to Slow Apocalypse.
Varley tends to have interesting concepts. Good ideas. In the short form these ideas can be quickly expressed through an entertaining quick short story. But extended to book form, the ideas kind of fall apart. Get stretched out. Well, the book is titled “Slow” Apocalypse. He did let the reader know ahead of time. The story really does flow out slowly.
The concept begins interesting enough. A television writer who got lucky on one tv series and rose with its popularity, is now out of work and looking for a concept. He pays a military consultant to tell him interesting stories.
One of these interesting stories involves a deep undercover secret government lab containing a man who lost his love during the 9/11 attacks. That man noticed that most of the terrorists came from Saudi Arabia. Noticed how the USA doesn’t appear to want to annoy the Saudi’s, and so takes matters into his own hands. He was already working on a special chemical that would make it easier to get oil from oil deposits. Higher concentration of oil, less of water. He slows down production of that so that he could work on a mutated version of that chemical, with the intended purpose of destroying all Saudi oil.
The tv writer, and I suppose it would be easier on myself to use his name, Dave Marshall, finds this concept or story to be outside his normal genre of comedy, but believes it would make a good film. So he sets down to write it. The military consultant wakes up hung-over and realizes he might have accidently said too much. He calls Dave and asks him to come over. Dave does, is told that it was all real, and hey, look at these ‘need extremely high clearance to look at websites’. They show the Saudi oil fields on fire. But not the normal type of fire, because it isn’t the oil that’s on fire. It’s the other chemicals that got released when the oil was solidified or whatever it happened to it.
That deep cover scientist had no intention, it is assumed, of destroying all oil in the world, but just as he was able to mutate the biological agent that was designed to make oil flow faster, it itself can and did naturally mutate. To become airborne. And spread all around the world. Which is shown to Dave. Russian oil fields on fire, etc.
Then the websites let the military consultant know that he’s been bad to try to look at them. And to keep the line open. Security will be with him shortly. The military consultant, after destroying the computer, suggests that Dave leave. And prepare for a world without oil.
Even with all the evidence before him, Dave isn’t really sure how to take all of it. Until he hears military vehicles squealing up. Heavily armored military personal stream inside the building his military consultant lives in. And then shortly afterwards watch as that man plunges to his death.
Pretty exciting stuff, eh? Especially as all of the above occurred within the first two (or was it three?) chapters. The rest of the book involves Dave driving around trying to buy what he thinks he should buy to “prepare”. Informing his former writing team from that successful tv show he ran. Informing his daughter and estranged wife. Having his estranged wife not believe him. Weeks pass. Nothing much happens. Stock market fluctuates. News is suppressed. No big mean people show up and kill Dave.
News starts to filter out. The President admits something has happened, rationing of gas will start shortly. Slowly the apocalyptic events unfold. Slowly. Dave makes a plan to head off to his wife’s brother’s place in Oregon as it gets more rain and is better situated to live in during and after apocalyptic events.
Earthquake of 9.3-9.8. Massive firestorms. Panic, death, motorcycle gangs (I should toss in: if you are a member of a motorcycle gang, you probably won’t like this book). Book whimpers to conclusion.
Solid book. Interesting ideas. I did not necessarily dislike any of the characters. Interesting enough book, if slow. I’d recommend it.
Solid book. Interesting ideas. I do not necessarily dislike any of the characters. Interesting enough book, if slow. I’d recommend it.
Longer review with some rambling about Varley: Varley’s one of those authors I started reading way back deep in the past when I’d take “best of” short story books and zoom through them looking for authors to explore. He had several short stories that I rather enjoyed, "The Phantom of Kansas", “Press Enter#”, “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” among others. So I turned to his books.
Just as an aside, Jack McDevitt is another one I found at the same time through short stories. But with him, I rather disliked his short stories and vowed to never look for him in book form. Luckily I forgot that 15 years later when I found the first book I read by him. Sadly, I’ve found that being good at a particularly story length does not always translate into being good at a different story length.
If I recall correctly, I think I liked Varley’s short story “Air Raid”. And I know I liked it as the film Millennium. But I was about to turn to Varley’s novels. Millennium, the book, wasn’t that much different than the movie. And I’d seen the movie first. So it didn’t tempt me to look for more of Varley’s books, nor stop me in my progress. No, it was the Gaea trilogy that lead me to stop reading Varley in book form. At least for a short while. Way too long ago to remember why, though there is a vague recollection that the books were a mess.
Mammoth and the Red Thunder trilogy were good interesting reads. Mammoth lured me back to Varley’s books by having an interesting idea. Red Thunder . . .well, I kept putting that particular series off for years. Probably the mere idea of “kids” deciding enough’s enough, people should voyage to Mars, and so they’ll do it. Well, I thought that was what the books were supposed to be about. The “kids” weren’t exactly kids but that’s a different book series. No, I put it off long enough, might as well turn to Slow Apocalypse.
Varley tends to have interesting concepts. Good ideas. In the short form these ideas can be quickly expressed through an entertaining quick short story. But extended to book form, the ideas kind of fall apart. Get stretched out. Well, the book is titled “Slow” Apocalypse. He did let the reader know ahead of time. The story really does flow out slowly.
The concept begins interesting enough. A television writer who got lucky on one tv series and rose with its popularity, is now out of work and looking for a concept. He pays a military consultant to tell him interesting stories.
One of these interesting stories involves a deep undercover secret government lab containing a man who lost his love during the 9/11 attacks. That man noticed that most of the terrorists came from Saudi Arabia. Noticed how the USA doesn’t appear to want to annoy the Saudi’s, and so takes matters into his own hands. He was already working on a special chemical that would make it easier to get oil from oil deposits. Higher concentration of oil, less of water. He slows down production of that so that he could work on a mutated version of that chemical, with the intended purpose of destroying all Saudi oil.
The tv writer, and I suppose it would be easier on myself to use his name, Dave Marshall, finds this concept or story to be outside his normal genre of comedy, but believes it would make a good film. So he sets down to write it. The military consultant wakes up hung-over and realizes he might have accidently said too much. He calls Dave and asks him to come over. Dave does, is told that it was all real, and hey, look at these ‘need extremely high clearance to look at websites’. They show the Saudi oil fields on fire. But not the normal type of fire, because it isn’t the oil that’s on fire. It’s the other chemicals that got released when the oil was solidified or whatever it happened to it.
That deep cover scientist had no intention, it is assumed, of destroying all oil in the world, but just as he was able to mutate the biological agent that was designed to make oil flow faster, it itself can and did naturally mutate. To become airborne. And spread all around the world. Which is shown to Dave. Russian oil fields on fire, etc.
Then the websites let the military consultant know that he’s been bad to try to look at them. And to keep the line open. Security will be with him shortly. The military consultant, after destroying the computer, suggests that Dave leave. And prepare for a world without oil.
Even with all the evidence before him, Dave isn’t really sure how to take all of it. Until he hears military vehicles squealing up. Heavily armored military personal stream inside the building his military consultant lives in. And then shortly afterwards watch as that man plunges to his death.
Pretty exciting stuff, eh? Especially as all of the above occurred within the first two (or was it three?) chapters. The rest of the book involves Dave driving around trying to buy what he thinks he should buy to “prepare”. Informing his former writing team from that successful tv show he ran. Informing his daughter and estranged wife. Having his estranged wife not believe him. Weeks pass. Nothing much happens. Stock market fluctuates. News is suppressed. No big mean people show up and kill Dave.
News starts to filter out. The President admits something has happened, rationing of gas will start shortly. Slowly the apocalyptic events unfold. Slowly. Dave makes a plan to head off to his wife’s brother’s place in Oregon as it gets more rain and is better situated to live in during and after apocalyptic events.
Earthquake of 9.3-9.8. Massive firestorms. Panic, death, motorcycle gangs (I should toss in: if you are a member of a motorcycle gang, you probably won’t like this book). Book whimpers to conclusion.
Solid book. Interesting ideas. I did not necessarily dislike any of the characters. Interesting enough book, if slow. I’d recommend it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 12, 2012
I've read a number of books in the curious genre of science fiction that attempts to describe a vision of the future after some apocalyptic event such as nuclear war, peak oil, viral plague, or electromagnetic pulse. (Earth Abides, World Made by Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Alas Babylon, Down to a Sunless Sea, One Second After).These books follow a basic formula where there is 1) a horrific event that destroys or seriously damages large parts of the globe, 2) survivors divided up into good guys and bad guys, 3) a narrative on survival methods and the ethical problems survivors will face, i.e. "Could I shoot someone to protect my family?' or, "Would I share?" and, finally, 4) in most cases some form of happy ending that demonstrates the resilience and adaptability of the human race.
In his new book Slow Apocalypse, John Varley pulls out all the stops: world-wide destruction of oil fields by an airborne bacteria, massive earthquake, floods from broken reservoirs and firestorm. His setting is Los Angeles. The protagonist is a TV writer who gets a heads up on the impending crisis and begins prepping which puts him ahead of the survival game. But the disasters come so fast and furiously that the reader is left a bit breathless waiting to find out what happens to his family and friends who band together to try and escape a destroyed and now unlivable LA. Escape routes are blocked by quake and landslide and surrounding communities are barricaded to stop the inflow of immigrants. So our small band must slowly work their way out of the city in a wood fueled bus to try and find a new promised land. Along the way there are gunfights and humanitarianism and the inevitable happy ending albeit one of hard physical labor.
Mr. Varley's book starts a bit slow and contrived but in the middle picks up steam and ends up a page turner that will, no doubt, be made into a disaster flick.
The significance of the books like this is to make us think about worst case scenarios and to give some thought to some basic preparation that we should make for short and long term disasters.
Each doomsday novelist has a different take on what a post apocalyptic future might be like. But the common theme is that everything would be easier if one has some "stuff" put by.
When the Swiss Family Robinson was shipwrecked they were lucky to be able to recover an amazing amount of booty from their ship in the form of foodstuff, supplies and even animals. It made life on their island pretty easy. Most of us would not have a ship full of supplies to pull from if something untoward happened. So, we might take a hint from the doomers and make some basic preparation.
In his new book Slow Apocalypse, John Varley pulls out all the stops: world-wide destruction of oil fields by an airborne bacteria, massive earthquake, floods from broken reservoirs and firestorm. His setting is Los Angeles. The protagonist is a TV writer who gets a heads up on the impending crisis and begins prepping which puts him ahead of the survival game. But the disasters come so fast and furiously that the reader is left a bit breathless waiting to find out what happens to his family and friends who band together to try and escape a destroyed and now unlivable LA. Escape routes are blocked by quake and landslide and surrounding communities are barricaded to stop the inflow of immigrants. So our small band must slowly work their way out of the city in a wood fueled bus to try and find a new promised land. Along the way there are gunfights and humanitarianism and the inevitable happy ending albeit one of hard physical labor.
Mr. Varley's book starts a bit slow and contrived but in the middle picks up steam and ends up a page turner that will, no doubt, be made into a disaster flick.
The significance of the books like this is to make us think about worst case scenarios and to give some thought to some basic preparation that we should make for short and long term disasters.
Each doomsday novelist has a different take on what a post apocalyptic future might be like. But the common theme is that everything would be easier if one has some "stuff" put by.
When the Swiss Family Robinson was shipwrecked they were lucky to be able to recover an amazing amount of booty from their ship in the form of foodstuff, supplies and even animals. It made life on their island pretty easy. Most of us would not have a ship full of supplies to pull from if something untoward happened. So, we might take a hint from the doomers and make some basic preparation.
September 23, 2012
Great Book. 4.5/5 easily bumped to a 5 despite a few nitpics...and really, they are minor. Overall, the story is basically similiar to some others I've read...The Shell Game (Lack of Oil being an issue) & Super Volcano (Apocolpytical happenings happening in real time) but it handles the topics better than both. This story is about a biological agent that attacks petrolium in the group and causes a lot of issues...which lead to more...and more...which lead to the de-evolution of society as we know it. The book has a single POV...which I'm starting to realize is why many other books are annoying me right now (they just don't pull of the multi-POV well). Our Single POV, Dave, is likable and believable amidst all of the stuff going on. It is his story, along with his family (Karen and Addison). The events that happen around them seem believable (and very bad) and are gripping.
My nitpic is that the climax of the story is resolved in a way that seems all to believable in the setting, but seems a let down from a fiction point of view. What a conundrum! I like the believable aspect of the story throughout...why would this seem...a small let down? I don't know. It can't bring down the book though. And it shouldn't stop you. The epilogue is good and helps resolve the 'what happpens' to our favorite characters after the end. I liked it.
Any book that stops me from reading all others (when I read about 6 at a time) from the first page is a book to note. I had read John Varley way back when Titan and Wizard came out and I lost track of him. Time to put him back on the reading list!
My nitpic is that the climax of the story is resolved in a way that seems all to believable in the setting, but seems a let down from a fiction point of view. What a conundrum! I like the believable aspect of the story throughout...why would this seem...a small let down? I don't know. It can't bring down the book though. And it shouldn't stop you. The epilogue is good and helps resolve the 'what happpens' to our favorite characters after the end. I liked it.
Any book that stops me from reading all others (when I read about 6 at a time) from the first page is a book to note. I had read John Varley way back when Titan and Wizard came out and I lost track of him. Time to put him back on the reading list!
August 26, 2012
I've loved John Varley's books for the past 30 years or so, and it's good to see he's still producing highly readable, involving stories. But it is strange to see him moving so decidedly from science fiction into something that's about halfway between a Michael Crichton thriller and an agitprop doc. SLOW APOCALYPSE offers a brief explanation of a chemical-warfare-induced meltdown of the world's oil, and then the rest of the novel largely just tracks how society would fall apart after that, particularly in Los Angeles, where the protagonists live. A great deal of it is just a tour of apocalyptic L.A., full of wildfires and earthquakes and looters. It's compelling in a will-they-survive-and-how way, but apart from a closing chapter directly drawing a line between all the crises the characters face and how we live — dependent on petroleum products, crowded into dense cities dependent on outside communities for basic supplies, and generally ignorant of survival basics — it's mostly a disaster story akin to TOWERING INFERNO or THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, with a series of inciting incidents and then a group of people working practically to survive. It's so detailed, specific, and real-world that it almost reads like a road map to disaster preparedness. Unfortunately, step one of that preparedness is "Stop being societally dependent on oil." At any rate, this is a very closely written but quick-moving book, more about the situation than the characters and their identities, which sometimes feels like a problem, but certainly doesn't get in the way of a fast, breathless read.
July 18, 2018
The best that might be said is ‘typical’. John Varley is or rather has been a reasonably good writer insofar as he has been able to keep my attention at least in some previous works. And once again the writing is relatively good, at least to the extent that I did not start skipping pages until about page 150. Typical because here is an author who writes some relatively good first novels and then thinks they can simply throw out other books on the coattails of success without indulging in such mundane storytelling features as plot, character development, action, audience engagement, etc. Slow Apocalypse throws out an almost interesting premise but then proceeds to slowly masticate it into senseless incomprehensibility. For a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author this was an extreme disappointment. There were glimmers here and there of well what would I do if caught in a similar situation. First off it was impossible to believe I would be caught in a similiar situation by my own choice - as has the 'hero'. However here we have a protagonist who has been given the foreknowledge of what is to come and does absolutely nothing with it. Frankly 2/3rds of the way through I was just hoping the principle character would die off so we could move onto something much more interesting. This may have been the slow end-of the reading cycle or the slow apocalypse by boredom of Varley books. Ugh!
October 11, 2012
For a book to merit five stars, it has to be one that I finish in a few days. If I putter along with it for two or three weeks chances are it was decent, but didn't quite pull me in and along. SLOW APOCALYPSE had me engaged and turning pages with abandon. It's not a flashy YA dystopian-world's-end fashion statement. It's more than that.
It also doesn't foist on the reader multiple perspectives that many disaster books favor. You know the ones where the characters are geographically, socially and dutifully diverse. The cast doesn't include a survivalist, a renegade seismologist, a teen runaway and a janitor with a hidden past.
It's about two families and their few connected friends coming together. It's about holding on to your humanity while adapting to the brutal challenges and decisions in a collapsed world.
Adding even more pathos to the story, the main character doesn't even come from a background that equips him at all to survive. That's at first glance, of course. He soon learns to adapt in a way that is organic, reactive and not always seamless.
I really enjoyed this book and will keep an eye out for more from John Varley.
It also doesn't foist on the reader multiple perspectives that many disaster books favor. You know the ones where the characters are geographically, socially and dutifully diverse. The cast doesn't include a survivalist, a renegade seismologist, a teen runaway and a janitor with a hidden past.
It's about two families and their few connected friends coming together. It's about holding on to your humanity while adapting to the brutal challenges and decisions in a collapsed world.
Adding even more pathos to the story, the main character doesn't even come from a background that equips him at all to survive. That's at first glance, of course. He soon learns to adapt in a way that is organic, reactive and not always seamless.
I really enjoyed this book and will keep an eye out for more from John Varley.
December 9, 2012
I'm a big Varley fan. The whole Titan-Wizard-Demon series was amazing and I must confess to having read them more than once. This book, however, was a disappointment. Way too much ink was ejaculated on the cartography associated with Los Angles and I just turned the pages when he spent time talking about the street layouts and neighborhood characteristics. It seemed egotistical and flatulent at the same time, I did not enjoy it, either way.
The basic story is that a Hollywood writer has insight into an onrushing disaster and takes steps to prepare for it. He then spends some time traveling south from LA before reaching a commune of sorts. Along the way, he rebinds with his wife and daughter. Yawn. After reading Varley's descriptions of sex with centaurs whilst orbiting Saturn, in his earlier books, similar endeavors were uniformly boring in this book and consistently implausible. To be honest, the protagonist was a major league wuss and I have trouble seeing him survive in the real world let alone a post-apocalyptic America.
Anyway, it's worth a read if you're not spending your lucre on this one, otherwise, there are better thrills out there.
The basic story is that a Hollywood writer has insight into an onrushing disaster and takes steps to prepare for it. He then spends some time traveling south from LA before reaching a commune of sorts. Along the way, he rebinds with his wife and daughter. Yawn. After reading Varley's descriptions of sex with centaurs whilst orbiting Saturn, in his earlier books, similar endeavors were uniformly boring in this book and consistently implausible. To be honest, the protagonist was a major league wuss and I have trouble seeing him survive in the real world let alone a post-apocalyptic America.
Anyway, it's worth a read if you're not spending your lucre on this one, otherwise, there are better thrills out there.
November 19, 2012
Note: Spoilers!
I visit John Varley's website so I knew going in that this was not a science fiction book. I also knew better than to start reading in the late evening, but I did it anyway because it's a new John Varley book! I finally finished the book after the sun came up the next morning, and I have no regrets.
The scenario seems entirely plausible to me, and utterly frightening. I've seen complaints about excessive detail on LA's geography, but that didn't bother me at all even though I have little idea where they were at any given time. I expected more violence from the trek portion of the book, but then again he's writing about eighteen armed people in three armored vehicles, so maybe not. I certainly wouldn't mess with that group!
I really wanted to go to sleep, but I was so caught up in the story and I had to know what happened. Had to! This is something I will read over and over again. I was afraid I'd miss the science fiction elements, but I didn't even notice. I just plain loved it, from start to finish.
I visit John Varley's website so I knew going in that this was not a science fiction book. I also knew better than to start reading in the late evening, but I did it anyway because it's a new John Varley book! I finally finished the book after the sun came up the next morning, and I have no regrets.
The scenario seems entirely plausible to me, and utterly frightening. I've seen complaints about excessive detail on LA's geography, but that didn't bother me at all even though I have little idea where they were at any given time. I expected more violence from the trek portion of the book, but then again he's writing about eighteen armed people in three armored vehicles, so maybe not. I certainly wouldn't mess with that group!
I really wanted to go to sleep, but I was so caught up in the story and I had to know what happened. Had to! This is something I will read over and over again. I was afraid I'd miss the science fiction elements, but I didn't even notice. I just plain loved it, from start to finish.
September 23, 2017
Read for the Apocalypse Now! Reading Challenge and the Second Best Reading Challenge.
Method of the world's destruction: an engineered bacteria is released into Iraqi oil fields by a lovelorn scientist as vengeance, which mutates to become an airborne pathogen that solidifies all liquid gas resources on earth into useless lumps.
Nominated for the John W. Campbell Award 2013.
When you've read as many apocalyptica stories as I have, I suppose you become a little bit critical in ways that the average person, who probably has only read The Stand or maybe World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, won't be. So take my review with that grain of salt.
You've probably often wondered, considering the limits of fossil fuels; what would happen if crude oil became useless tomorrow? Varley attempts to answer this question with the McGuffin of an oil-solidifying pathogen, which sounds a bit like bitumen to me, but perhaps this alters the very chemical structure of the stuff or something. Whatever, it's a McGuffin. The protagonist is a comedy writer from L.A. who probably doesn't know the first thing about how biochemistry works, so we don't really need to know either.
Our protagonist, Dave Marshall, happens to get some advance warning because he happens to be in contact with a retired marine colonel with some clout and black-ops security clearance, who warns him when the first reports of destroyed oil fields in the Middle East start coming in. Dave wisely maxes out his credit cards and spends all the money in his bank account laying in supplies. This turns out to be the only thing that saves his family when the proverbial offal hits the air distribution device, and his advance warning of his friends and writing team helps most of them to get a leg up too; although it doesn't save everyone and some people we never find out the fate of, which I like.
And it's fortunate that he's done so, because his wife is useless. Accustomed to a higher standard of living than she can currently afford based on what Dave is making, she spends the early part of the apocalypse shopping and the later part hiding in her bed and sulking, until it's too late to get out of L.A. easily and an enormous earthquake, caused by the pathogen, trashes the city.
Part of this is Varley's way of having an important dialogue, part of the decision-making process that humans really do struggle with after a major disaster is when to get out. Most people wait too long because of denial, and because evacuation is such a daunting prospect. Karen vs. Dave is Varley's method of addressing that conflict, and considered on its own, it works rather well.
I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but a heroic effort is eventually made to pull the community together, and then to flee L.A. because they have to. Karen, the wife, eventually turns into a functioning human being, and Addison, Dave's daughter, is a pretty useful and resourceful person.
Which is why it annoys me so much that many of this book's good qualities are, for me, ruined by its degeneration into an American Libertarian masturbation fantasy.
First of all, after being a useless tit for most of the first part of the book, Karen becomes useful and resourceful . . . except that she willingly gives over all agency to Dave as the "man of the family." This was a woman who didn't do what her husband suggested because she thought he was crazy (and who wouldn't?) but then she decides to suborn her will to his because . . . apocalypse? Nope, it didn't fly for me.
Also, Addison, who was his ally and helper at the beginning of the book, becomes a child again who has to be told what to do when Karen decides she's going to adjust to the new reality and take her head out of the sand. As a teenager whose parents sometimes failed her in difficult times, I can tell you that I certainly wouldn't just accept this (and didn't).
Also, as an adjunct to this, Karen decides, after many years of a rocky marriage in comparatively good times, that she's just going to go ahead and have sex without birth control with Dave before they even flee L.A. Because . . . clearly she wants to bring a child into the world who might immediately die of famine, if it ever makes it out of the womb, considering the malnutrition she's already suffering? You know, I realize that people have lots of babies in areas where infant mortality is high, but I think it would take a rational, middle-aged Western woman who has enjoyed all the benefits of white privilege and L.A.'s Hollywood society much longer to get there, is all I'm saying. Especially since her daughter is already in her late teens.
Second, naturally humanity immediately degenerates into a bunch of gun-toting barbarians. I've written about why this would not actually happen in the past. But I'll sort-of give Varley a pass because the big issue, he wisely realized, was famine. With the over-populated Los Angeles area unable to drive or ship food in, food and water runs short quickly, and some people decide they are willing to kill for it. Okay, that's probably to be expected. And with all the authorities so overwhelmed, I suppose it's even likely.
I do wish that he had refrained from the tired old trope of a woman who had the audacity to try to survive the apocalypse on her own getting gang-raped though. Really, this is nonsense, especially when famine is the main issue, and it seems like every apocalypse writer has to try to assert the idea that a woman's rights as a human being are dependent on Law and Order in Western civilization, so they're a nice pipe dream while they last.
Seriously, if you're a man reading this, is the only reason you don't go around raping women that the cops would get you if you did? Yeah, right, didn't think so. There's always a small handful of psychos out there, but they'll be psychos whether a woman is alone or not. I swear, this is becoming so much a trope of apocalyptica that there's going to be rape-gangs going around in the apocalypse just because that's expected. Varley lost a lot of brownie points with me for this. Probably it cost him a whole star.
When things start getting bad, the Marshalls are given the option, several times, of joining evacuations being organized by the U.S. government and military. Which they never take, because they don't trust them. They don't like the looks of them. The refugee camps, seen at a distance, are described as "prisons." Nope, the only thing to do is to band together in little tribal bands and protect ourselves with our guns. Good thing they've got their guns.
Except . . . they really have no reason not to trust the authorities. None. The best the characters can offer is that a hospital was forcibly evacuated. Do they think that maybe that's because it's on an extremely unstable major fault line that might, at any time, plunge it into the ocean? No, of course not. I swear to the gods, the American distrust of government is going to turn their country into the world of The Postman when the apocalypse happens, and the survivalist libertarians will take them all back to the Stone Age!
The conclusion, while logical, is a bit anti-climatic. The government continues to censor news and information so that they can control all the former United States citizens and keep them in the dark. Except . . . maybe they're doing that to keep other countries, such as Russia, China, or maybe even Canada, who might be in better shape, from knowing how bad things are and how fragmented their government, military and infrastructure has become so they won't decide to invade? Does this cross the characters' minds? Of course not. They just go right on defending their little community with their guns. Because guns.
And while we're at it, I could have done without the smug lecture in the epilogue. "Yep, we've got a world where we're living green now! Conservation is necessary, no more oil is getting burned, and we're right back to the Victorian Age! Isn't that nice?" Varley all but purrs, "Looks like those environmentalists got what they wanted! Isn't this a great world?" Except that a) no it's not, because they're still using coal, and where possible, nuclear power, although some power plants have melted down and now there's irradiated areas in the former U.S.; b) seriously, nobody wants to go back to the Victorian Age. Environmental advocates are asking for a transition; we know that everything stopping cold would be a disaster of epic proportions. But you know, it's now cheaper to run solar power than gas power, and wind power is gaining all the time. There are other ways to do things, and we're finding them.
I started out really liking this book, too. It's well-written. The action keeps coming. The characters are ordinary people trying to survive an extraordinary situation. The ideas about what would happen should oil immediately go belly-up are worth thinking about, especially since that's exactly what's going to happen if and when it runs out. Maybe we should plan ahead for that, and this makes you think about it. Which is a good thing. I just wish that . . . I don't know, I wish that Varley, whose research was so good in some areas, had chosen not to ignore contradictory information, such as the fact that the National Guard and the U.S. Military have been positively heroic in every major disaster I've heard of in the past several years. And I wish he understood women better.
Method of the world's destruction: an engineered bacteria is released into Iraqi oil fields by a lovelorn scientist as vengeance, which mutates to become an airborne pathogen that solidifies all liquid gas resources on earth into useless lumps.
Nominated for the John W. Campbell Award 2013.
When you've read as many apocalyptica stories as I have, I suppose you become a little bit critical in ways that the average person, who probably has only read The Stand or maybe World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, won't be. So take my review with that grain of salt.
You've probably often wondered, considering the limits of fossil fuels; what would happen if crude oil became useless tomorrow? Varley attempts to answer this question with the McGuffin of an oil-solidifying pathogen, which sounds a bit like bitumen to me, but perhaps this alters the very chemical structure of the stuff or something. Whatever, it's a McGuffin. The protagonist is a comedy writer from L.A. who probably doesn't know the first thing about how biochemistry works, so we don't really need to know either.
Our protagonist, Dave Marshall, happens to get some advance warning because he happens to be in contact with a retired marine colonel with some clout and black-ops security clearance, who warns him when the first reports of destroyed oil fields in the Middle East start coming in. Dave wisely maxes out his credit cards and spends all the money in his bank account laying in supplies. This turns out to be the only thing that saves his family when the proverbial offal hits the air distribution device, and his advance warning of his friends and writing team helps most of them to get a leg up too; although it doesn't save everyone and some people we never find out the fate of, which I like.
And it's fortunate that he's done so, because his wife is useless. Accustomed to a higher standard of living than she can currently afford based on what Dave is making, she spends the early part of the apocalypse shopping and the later part hiding in her bed and sulking, until it's too late to get out of L.A. easily and an enormous earthquake, caused by the pathogen, trashes the city.
Part of this is Varley's way of having an important dialogue, part of the decision-making process that humans really do struggle with after a major disaster is when to get out. Most people wait too long because of denial, and because evacuation is such a daunting prospect. Karen vs. Dave is Varley's method of addressing that conflict, and considered on its own, it works rather well.
I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but a heroic effort is eventually made to pull the community together, and then to flee L.A. because they have to. Karen, the wife, eventually turns into a functioning human being, and Addison, Dave's daughter, is a pretty useful and resourceful person.
Which is why it annoys me so much that many of this book's good qualities are, for me, ruined by its degeneration into an American Libertarian masturbation fantasy.
First of all, after being a useless tit for most of the first part of the book, Karen becomes useful and resourceful . . . except that she willingly gives over all agency to Dave as the "man of the family." This was a woman who didn't do what her husband suggested because she thought he was crazy (and who wouldn't?) but then she decides to suborn her will to his because . . . apocalypse? Nope, it didn't fly for me.
Also, Addison, who was his ally and helper at the beginning of the book, becomes a child again who has to be told what to do when Karen decides she's going to adjust to the new reality and take her head out of the sand. As a teenager whose parents sometimes failed her in difficult times, I can tell you that I certainly wouldn't just accept this (and didn't).
Also, as an adjunct to this, Karen decides, after many years of a rocky marriage in comparatively good times, that she's just going to go ahead and have sex without birth control with Dave before they even flee L.A. Because . . . clearly she wants to bring a child into the world who might immediately die of famine, if it ever makes it out of the womb, considering the malnutrition she's already suffering? You know, I realize that people have lots of babies in areas where infant mortality is high, but I think it would take a rational, middle-aged Western woman who has enjoyed all the benefits of white privilege and L.A.'s Hollywood society much longer to get there, is all I'm saying. Especially since her daughter is already in her late teens.
Second, naturally humanity immediately degenerates into a bunch of gun-toting barbarians. I've written about why this would not actually happen in the past. But I'll sort-of give Varley a pass because the big issue, he wisely realized, was famine. With the over-populated Los Angeles area unable to drive or ship food in, food and water runs short quickly, and some people decide they are willing to kill for it. Okay, that's probably to be expected. And with all the authorities so overwhelmed, I suppose it's even likely.
I do wish that he had refrained from the tired old trope of a woman who had the audacity to try to survive the apocalypse on her own getting gang-raped though. Really, this is nonsense, especially when famine is the main issue, and it seems like every apocalypse writer has to try to assert the idea that a woman's rights as a human being are dependent on Law and Order in Western civilization, so they're a nice pipe dream while they last.
Seriously, if you're a man reading this, is the only reason you don't go around raping women that the cops would get you if you did? Yeah, right, didn't think so. There's always a small handful of psychos out there, but they'll be psychos whether a woman is alone or not. I swear, this is becoming so much a trope of apocalyptica that there's going to be rape-gangs going around in the apocalypse just because that's expected. Varley lost a lot of brownie points with me for this. Probably it cost him a whole star.
When things start getting bad, the Marshalls are given the option, several times, of joining evacuations being organized by the U.S. government and military. Which they never take, because they don't trust them. They don't like the looks of them. The refugee camps, seen at a distance, are described as "prisons." Nope, the only thing to do is to band together in little tribal bands and protect ourselves with our guns. Good thing they've got their guns.
Except . . . they really have no reason not to trust the authorities. None. The best the characters can offer is that a hospital was forcibly evacuated. Do they think that maybe that's because it's on an extremely unstable major fault line that might, at any time, plunge it into the ocean? No, of course not. I swear to the gods, the American distrust of government is going to turn their country into the world of The Postman when the apocalypse happens, and the survivalist libertarians will take them all back to the Stone Age!
The conclusion, while logical, is a bit anti-climatic. The government continues to censor news and information so that they can control all the former United States citizens and keep them in the dark. Except . . . maybe they're doing that to keep other countries, such as Russia, China, or maybe even Canada, who might be in better shape, from knowing how bad things are and how fragmented their government, military and infrastructure has become so they won't decide to invade? Does this cross the characters' minds? Of course not. They just go right on defending their little community with their guns. Because guns.
And while we're at it, I could have done without the smug lecture in the epilogue. "Yep, we've got a world where we're living green now! Conservation is necessary, no more oil is getting burned, and we're right back to the Victorian Age! Isn't that nice?" Varley all but purrs, "Looks like those environmentalists got what they wanted! Isn't this a great world?" Except that a) no it's not, because they're still using coal, and where possible, nuclear power, although some power plants have melted down and now there's irradiated areas in the former U.S.; b) seriously, nobody wants to go back to the Victorian Age. Environmental advocates are asking for a transition; we know that everything stopping cold would be a disaster of epic proportions. But you know, it's now cheaper to run solar power than gas power, and wind power is gaining all the time. There are other ways to do things, and we're finding them.
I started out really liking this book, too. It's well-written. The action keeps coming. The characters are ordinary people trying to survive an extraordinary situation. The ideas about what would happen should oil immediately go belly-up are worth thinking about, especially since that's exactly what's going to happen if and when it runs out. Maybe we should plan ahead for that, and this makes you think about it. Which is a good thing. I just wish that . . . I don't know, I wish that Varley, whose research was so good in some areas, had chosen not to ignore contradictory information, such as the fact that the National Guard and the U.S. Military have been positively heroic in every major disaster I've heard of in the past several years. And I wish he understood women better.
November 11, 2012
I've have seldom read a more promising book that fell apart worse in the last 20 pages. Varley is a favorite author. The premise is intriguing. The characters engaging. The plot unpredictable.
The book is worth reading, but I was disappointed, having invested that much time and energy, in how it wilted at the end.
The book is worth reading, but I was disappointed, having invested that much time and energy, in how it wilted at the end.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 20, 2017
Excellent apocalypse story. I'm a bit of a dystopian novel fan and think I've probably read most of them now. So I was pleased and surprised to come across this one, which doesn't (but should) appear on any top 100 Apocalyptic book lists. There were a number of things I enjoyed about this--the main character being a comedy writer in Hollywood was a nice twist. Can you think of anything more useless in a crisis than, well, the definition of useless, I suppose. But Dave gets forewarning of the catastrophic event about to happen...wait for it...from an ex-military man (the definition of useful) and takes (for a liberal) very appropriate measures to ensure that his family and friends are prepped to some extent.
I'm being a bit facetious about this, but it was quite fun reading about the Hollywood elite, who were vehemently anti-gun and anti-border control when they were top of the global pile, suddenly putting up barricades on their street, to defend their food supplies, and shooting anyone coming along (just begging for some food or water) at the first hint of trouble.
This is actually quite a political novel--the author didn't need to make all his characters wealthy Hollywood-hills residents, but he does, so he clearly wants to bring out some of these issues. To be fair, he's pretty even handed over his treatment of things. Sometimes the daft virtue-signaling of Dave and his tiny band of survivors (giving their food away as they travel down the highway, for example) is shown to be the right thing to do morally, and I didn't feel particularly manipulated into this feels social justice nonsense. At other times, they have to do realistic, necessary things which they find morally repugnant (such as shooting some children), which, again, didn't make me feel like gloating that they were learning some harsh realities for once.
I think any feminists would have the vapours about some of this book, especially Karen, the wife.
So, a great read. I was hooked. I'm docking one star because if I wanted a detailed knowledge of the streets of Los Angeles I'd read a map, but a highly recommended read other than that.
I'm being a bit facetious about this, but it was quite fun reading about the Hollywood elite, who were vehemently anti-gun and anti-border control when they were top of the global pile, suddenly putting up barricades on their street, to defend their food supplies, and shooting anyone coming along (just begging for some food or water) at the first hint of trouble.
This is actually quite a political novel--the author didn't need to make all his characters wealthy Hollywood-hills residents, but he does, so he clearly wants to bring out some of these issues. To be fair, he's pretty even handed over his treatment of things. Sometimes the daft virtue-signaling of Dave and his tiny band of survivors (giving their food away as they travel down the highway, for example) is shown to be the right thing to do morally, and I didn't feel particularly manipulated into this feels social justice nonsense. At other times, they have to do realistic, necessary things which they find morally repugnant (such as shooting some children), which, again, didn't make me feel like gloating that they were learning some harsh realities for once.
I think any feminists would have the vapours about some of this book, especially Karen, the wife.
So, a great read. I was hooked. I'm docking one star because if I wanted a detailed knowledge of the streets of Los Angeles I'd read a map, but a highly recommended read other than that.
December 26, 2020
Ouch. This book sucked. Were it not for his famous trilogy this wouldn't have even been finished. Why? Let's state pros/positives. The beginning is good. Intriguing idea: a bacterium that eats petroleum. A cataclysmic earthquake destroys L.A.: alright.
And folks, that's about it for the pros/positives! The cons/negatives: ~5 examples. One, there is way too much cartographic detail. And the geographic detail is thin & evanescent. In Southern California, one notes instantly the mountains looming east, southeast, and there are numerous valleys. Varley wrote nothing of the shade one feels in the valleys, or how the sun sweeps the L.A. basin; he doesn't describe the scents in the air of brush, & sage, & eucalyptus, or how gnarled an oak can appear. Varley wrote in the end that Southern Californians are used to rain in the winter. No-we-are-not! It never rains in So Cal. And why did he even write that after going on about L.A. being reliant upon external sources of water, i.e. a desert? It might be that Varley never grew up in L.A. and only moved to the city later in life. Again, the issue w/geographic detail extends to fauna. He mentions not the crows in the sky. Or the little brown jobs (sparrows & finches) fluttering wheresoever they can. Not a word on lizards. One sees them bask in the sun on walls or on rocks, or can catch them scurrying up palm trees. Damn Varley, how far you've gone from that most awesome book about centaurs singing & the planet talking & those cables that extended into outer space! In "Slow Apocalypse" there is little mention of the palm trees, or the endless blue sky (again, it doesn't rain much in L.A. or So Cal). Instead, the reader is overexposed to a parade of names of streets & buildings, a folder of directions that serve no purpose above filling the page with ink.
Second example: Jenna was gang-raped? What? Okay, Varley, I DID catch that part...but you spent 0.1 microseconds on it. Varley, you left it for the reader to read-between-the-lines, but, why does the reader have to read between the lines of a book that is called Slow Apocalypse? It's called apocalypse. The point is this: this book took a rated R subject & dealt with it as one would a PG-rated film. A fu#$!ng horse? So, we took this dangerous subject of an earthquake (9.3-9.something) & made a father-daughter pony story? Yea, the horse was for the end, to let them get admitted into the community, but the very presence of the horse cheapened the plausibility of the story. Why would they pay such attention to hitching the trailer & transporting the horse like that, and how they heck are people supposed to really relate at all to a girl living in the hills of L.A. with her own horse? Varley didn't write a book that laid bare the brutality of gang-rape. He just slipped it in at the end that, oh yeah, that one sentence was meant to mean that she was raped by those guys that told her to stop. Varley skims the danger. It never feels visceral or imminent. Dave managed to protect his wife & daughter through an apocalypse, virtually unscathed. How wonderful.
Third example: who the heck is Dave? If he's a comedy writer, shouldn't he crack jokes or something? The reader never gets a glimpse into his work life. It would have been nice to return frequently to some reverie of his former life. And not the bland writing that Varley put forth here, but some excellent introspective, Frank Herbert-esque writing on the human condition during such times of peril. Varley couldn't treat the subject of death with any seriousness. I'd guess the guy isn't too crazy about God on account of his writing not mentioning at all God. Is not the matter of apocalypse a divine one? There's no spirituality from Varley and so the book rings hollow on such scenes that treat morality. The best that the agnostic/atheistic(?) author can muster is to feed other people who are hungry, and to kill in only if for self-defense. This book could've included some deep scenes. Imagine Paul Atreides from Dune contemplating fear, the mind-killer; or Ursula LeGuin writing about sexuality; or any other great writing that pays homage to the Maker of the heavens. Varley's trilogy dealt w/God by means of the character Gaia. This book could use some soul to it. Not sure that it will be best conveyed through the eyes of a Caucasian comedy writer situated in the comfy life. There's little mention of the rapport between Dave & Bob. So much of the damned writing is just names of streets & places, & a garrulous GPS navigation. Ugh. Okay, where are they going next? Oh jeez another xyz.
Fourth: no mention of Mexico? The border? The most resilient would likely be Mexicans. There are terrible stereotypical moments that Varley creates. The first scene of looting has, also, the first two Afro characters. Like, really Varley?! A 9.3 earthquake & you can't create a more 'imaginative' scene? The way he writes for Karen, Dave's wife, is silly. She's so wooden & basically man-xplains. In other words, whatever Dave has running in his mind is concurrent with what Karen will eventually say or do. And what a whiny family! The author creates a less than likeable family. Especially Karen. He even stereotypes the damn dogs! The leader of the pack was the Rottweiler? And the one dog that had to be shot was the Pitt-Bull because it had locked its jaw onto someone's arm? C'mon! What next, the Chihuahua comes out & says "Yo queiro Taco Bell"? The author could've just created a raw scene of madness, or mangled dogs so dirty that you can't even make out what they are, and of mutts instead of pure breeds. I was like, am I really reading this right now? Did he just equate the Rottweiler with violence? The characters in this book often speak no different one from the other. It's often bland. No accents (except for the black & brown guys, of course) or slang. There is little to sympathize w/for a comedy writer living in L.A.. He had food, a head-start, vehicles, friends, & options...& a horse! In L.A.! Varley what were you thinking? Dave's wife whines so much. There are names that just pop in & out, or names that have no meaning behind them. Who is Bob? And Lisa, what's her story?
This book sucked. It's one star. But Varley wrote Titan & I loved that book. So. One last thing: there always this feel throughout the book that there is no objective. I kept wondering, where is this going? Are they going to talk about the bacteria that eats petro? I thought that this book was going to be ALL ABOUT THAT, but it had almost nothing to do with the stack of pages that this book was/is. It's very myopic. Just going from one point to the other. Surviving. But it has not the grit of that film/book "The Road" (Cormac McCarthy). Anyway, this book might be nice for anyone wanting some light fare. Or for Varley fans. I also read his Golden Globe book & enjoyed it. But this one was totally boring. Had to force the finish. If you're new to Varley, read "Titan." If you want apocalyptic fare, try "White Plague" by Frank Herbert, or "The Andromeda Strain" by Michael Crichton.
And folks, that's about it for the pros/positives! The cons/negatives: ~5 examples. One, there is way too much cartographic detail. And the geographic detail is thin & evanescent. In Southern California, one notes instantly the mountains looming east, southeast, and there are numerous valleys. Varley wrote nothing of the shade one feels in the valleys, or how the sun sweeps the L.A. basin; he doesn't describe the scents in the air of brush, & sage, & eucalyptus, or how gnarled an oak can appear. Varley wrote in the end that Southern Californians are used to rain in the winter. No-we-are-not! It never rains in So Cal. And why did he even write that after going on about L.A. being reliant upon external sources of water, i.e. a desert? It might be that Varley never grew up in L.A. and only moved to the city later in life. Again, the issue w/geographic detail extends to fauna. He mentions not the crows in the sky. Or the little brown jobs (sparrows & finches) fluttering wheresoever they can. Not a word on lizards. One sees them bask in the sun on walls or on rocks, or can catch them scurrying up palm trees. Damn Varley, how far you've gone from that most awesome book about centaurs singing & the planet talking & those cables that extended into outer space! In "Slow Apocalypse" there is little mention of the palm trees, or the endless blue sky (again, it doesn't rain much in L.A. or So Cal). Instead, the reader is overexposed to a parade of names of streets & buildings, a folder of directions that serve no purpose above filling the page with ink.
Second example: Jenna was gang-raped? What? Okay, Varley, I DID catch that part...but you spent 0.1 microseconds on it. Varley, you left it for the reader to read-between-the-lines, but, why does the reader have to read between the lines of a book that is called Slow Apocalypse? It's called apocalypse. The point is this: this book took a rated R subject & dealt with it as one would a PG-rated film. A fu#$!ng horse? So, we took this dangerous subject of an earthquake (9.3-9.something) & made a father-daughter pony story? Yea, the horse was for the end, to let them get admitted into the community, but the very presence of the horse cheapened the plausibility of the story. Why would they pay such attention to hitching the trailer & transporting the horse like that, and how they heck are people supposed to really relate at all to a girl living in the hills of L.A. with her own horse? Varley didn't write a book that laid bare the brutality of gang-rape. He just slipped it in at the end that, oh yeah, that one sentence was meant to mean that she was raped by those guys that told her to stop. Varley skims the danger. It never feels visceral or imminent. Dave managed to protect his wife & daughter through an apocalypse, virtually unscathed. How wonderful.
Third example: who the heck is Dave? If he's a comedy writer, shouldn't he crack jokes or something? The reader never gets a glimpse into his work life. It would have been nice to return frequently to some reverie of his former life. And not the bland writing that Varley put forth here, but some excellent introspective, Frank Herbert-esque writing on the human condition during such times of peril. Varley couldn't treat the subject of death with any seriousness. I'd guess the guy isn't too crazy about God on account of his writing not mentioning at all God. Is not the matter of apocalypse a divine one? There's no spirituality from Varley and so the book rings hollow on such scenes that treat morality. The best that the agnostic/atheistic(?) author can muster is to feed other people who are hungry, and to kill in only if for self-defense. This book could've included some deep scenes. Imagine Paul Atreides from Dune contemplating fear, the mind-killer; or Ursula LeGuin writing about sexuality; or any other great writing that pays homage to the Maker of the heavens. Varley's trilogy dealt w/God by means of the character Gaia. This book could use some soul to it. Not sure that it will be best conveyed through the eyes of a Caucasian comedy writer situated in the comfy life. There's little mention of the rapport between Dave & Bob. So much of the damned writing is just names of streets & places, & a garrulous GPS navigation. Ugh. Okay, where are they going next? Oh jeez another xyz.
Fourth: no mention of Mexico? The border? The most resilient would likely be Mexicans. There are terrible stereotypical moments that Varley creates. The first scene of looting has, also, the first two Afro characters. Like, really Varley?! A 9.3 earthquake & you can't create a more 'imaginative' scene? The way he writes for Karen, Dave's wife, is silly. She's so wooden & basically man-xplains. In other words, whatever Dave has running in his mind is concurrent with what Karen will eventually say or do. And what a whiny family! The author creates a less than likeable family. Especially Karen. He even stereotypes the damn dogs! The leader of the pack was the Rottweiler? And the one dog that had to be shot was the Pitt-Bull because it had locked its jaw onto someone's arm? C'mon! What next, the Chihuahua comes out & says "Yo queiro Taco Bell"? The author could've just created a raw scene of madness, or mangled dogs so dirty that you can't even make out what they are, and of mutts instead of pure breeds. I was like, am I really reading this right now? Did he just equate the Rottweiler with violence? The characters in this book often speak no different one from the other. It's often bland. No accents (except for the black & brown guys, of course) or slang. There is little to sympathize w/for a comedy writer living in L.A.. He had food, a head-start, vehicles, friends, & options...& a horse! In L.A.! Varley what were you thinking? Dave's wife whines so much. There are names that just pop in & out, or names that have no meaning behind them. Who is Bob? And Lisa, what's her story?
This book sucked. It's one star. But Varley wrote Titan & I loved that book. So. One last thing: there always this feel throughout the book that there is no objective. I kept wondering, where is this going? Are they going to talk about the bacteria that eats petro? I thought that this book was going to be ALL ABOUT THAT, but it had almost nothing to do with the stack of pages that this book was/is. It's very myopic. Just going from one point to the other. Surviving. But it has not the grit of that film/book "The Road" (Cormac McCarthy). Anyway, this book might be nice for anyone wanting some light fare. Or for Varley fans. I also read his Golden Globe book & enjoyed it. But this one was totally boring. Had to force the finish. If you're new to Varley, read "Titan." If you want apocalyptic fare, try "White Plague" by Frank Herbert, or "The Andromeda Strain" by Michael Crichton.
September 16, 2019
Science fiction -- or speculative fiction -- has two sides to it: first, the literary/storytelling side (it is fiction, after all), and the science/speculation/though-provoking side.
The very best SF does both very well, of course, but there's plenty out there that leans mostly on one of those. This book is one of them: as fiction or literature, this is nothing special. There's a big event that presents a convenient sequence of problems for the main characters to solve and they solve them. I didn't think it was anything to, ahem, write home about.
As science, or speculation, though, this is an excellent book, in several ways. Varley creates a world in which our current global oil-dependent civilization loses that oil in a matter of weeks, and it more or less collapses.
For months afterwards -- well, years, I guess, since I'm writing this review several years after having read the book -- I thought about what I would do in that situation, and how my community would fare compared to the southern California of the book. It made me ponder my lifestyle and the larger human relationship to nature and the way in which we've constructed our civilization. In that sense, this book is excellent.
And it continues making me think: I look around these days at the solar and wind energy we have (on homes, in grid-scale installations, and so on), and on the electric cars that would still be usable in an oil-less world, and it's clear that even in the few years since this book was written, our civilization has become more resilient against the apocalypse Varley envisions.
But then again, I write this a couple days after a drone strike in Saudi Arabia has disabled one of the world's largest crude oil processing facilities. The net effect on oil production seems like it will be minor, but it's easy to modify the ideas from Slow Apocalypse: we live in a world where $100,000 of drones can disrupt the supply of millions or billions of dollars of oil.
I give this 3 stars as literature or storytelling, but 5 stars for its science and speculation.
The very best SF does both very well, of course, but there's plenty out there that leans mostly on one of those. This book is one of them: as fiction or literature, this is nothing special. There's a big event that presents a convenient sequence of problems for the main characters to solve and they solve them. I didn't think it was anything to, ahem, write home about.
As science, or speculation, though, this is an excellent book, in several ways. Varley creates a world in which our current global oil-dependent civilization loses that oil in a matter of weeks, and it more or less collapses.
For months afterwards -- well, years, I guess, since I'm writing this review several years after having read the book -- I thought about what I would do in that situation, and how my community would fare compared to the southern California of the book. It made me ponder my lifestyle and the larger human relationship to nature and the way in which we've constructed our civilization. In that sense, this book is excellent.
And it continues making me think: I look around these days at the solar and wind energy we have (on homes, in grid-scale installations, and so on), and on the electric cars that would still be usable in an oil-less world, and it's clear that even in the few years since this book was written, our civilization has become more resilient against the apocalypse Varley envisions.
But then again, I write this a couple days after a drone strike in Saudi Arabia has disabled one of the world's largest crude oil processing facilities. The net effect on oil production seems like it will be minor, but it's easy to modify the ideas from Slow Apocalypse: we live in a world where $100,000 of drones can disrupt the supply of millions or billions of dollars of oil.
I give this 3 stars as literature or storytelling, but 5 stars for its science and speculation.
November 15, 2012
I've just 2 words for Varley's effort to join the ecofiction/apocalypse club: derivative and contrived. It this really the same author that wrote the Gaean Trilogy?
I've been reading such works for decades and a few stand out. The earliest I recall is When Worlds Collide from 1934 to the massive The Stand. Works by such authors as Margaret Atwood and the young Turk Paolo Bacigalupi and even Stephen Baxter come to mind. I am familiar with the subgenre in books and films (The Road Warrior is more worth your time) and can say unequivocally that there is nothing new in this book. It's all been said before and in much more interesting ways. Derivative!
I also found the cause of the world-wide disaster to be contrived. I'm not saying the causes of his apocalypse are impossible, just so very unlikely as to feel contrived. There are just a lot more likely causes of such a collapse from plague (an influenza strain with 50% mortality) to a heavenly body collision with Earth, eg.
Even if you accept that the book is derivative and contrived, it could be an interesting read if done well. But this book concentrated too much on the geography of Los Angeles and environs. If the book had been done better I might have gotten out a map and followed the action. But, the characters were uninteresting and their reactions too predictable.The protagonist family was too goody two-shoes for my tastes. I find that the black and white morality (which he calls Christian) defines sentimentality in literature.
I would recommend this novel only for those who have never thought about a civilization collapse; how they would would react or prepare for the possibility, and to those who like a simple, straight forward, superficial read. Average thinking pre-YAs might be a good target audience.
I gave it 2 stars only because it is possible he could write a really good sequel which might need a reread and because I did finish it, though wish I'd skipped the epilogue..
I've been reading such works for decades and a few stand out. The earliest I recall is When Worlds Collide from 1934 to the massive The Stand. Works by such authors as Margaret Atwood and the young Turk Paolo Bacigalupi and even Stephen Baxter come to mind. I am familiar with the subgenre in books and films (The Road Warrior is more worth your time) and can say unequivocally that there is nothing new in this book. It's all been said before and in much more interesting ways. Derivative!
I also found the cause of the world-wide disaster to be contrived. I'm not saying the causes of his apocalypse are impossible, just so very unlikely as to feel contrived. There are just a lot more likely causes of such a collapse from plague (an influenza strain with 50% mortality) to a heavenly body collision with Earth, eg.
Even if you accept that the book is derivative and contrived, it could be an interesting read if done well. But this book concentrated too much on the geography of Los Angeles and environs. If the book had been done better I might have gotten out a map and followed the action. But, the characters were uninteresting and their reactions too predictable.The protagonist family was too goody two-shoes for my tastes. I find that the black and white morality (which he calls Christian) defines sentimentality in literature.
I would recommend this novel only for those who have never thought about a civilization collapse; how they would would react or prepare for the possibility, and to those who like a simple, straight forward, superficial read. Average thinking pre-YAs might be a good target audience.
I gave it 2 stars only because it is possible he could write a really good sequel which might need a reread and because I did finish it, though wish I'd skipped the epilogue..
May 3, 2017
End-of-the-world books can be fun. Some of my favorites were Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall: big, door-stoppers with a world-ranging cast of characters, showing the world falling apart from a range of perspectives. Varley's book limits itself to one perspective, that of an out-of-work TV writer and his family and friends. This would be fine, if the characters were well-drawn, interesting people, but they're like cardboard cutouts, like something from a pre-YA book. The prose is dull as dirt, reading at times like Fodor's Guide to Los Angeles. The telling detail is the lifeblood of fiction. But here, we have nothing but lists and Mapquest directions. It's really not enough to simply come up with a scenario and put it through it's paces. We have to care about the characters that are having the world fall apart in their faces, in order for us to keep turning pages. Varley's pedestrian writing does not make us care in the least. I was a big fan of his early books, and it's sad to see what he's producing now.
The timing of this book's release is odd. Back in the early aughts, the End of Oil was all the rage. People like James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, and the Archdruid himself, John Michael Greer were shouting from the rooftops that soon we'd begin to run out of oil, and civilization would begin to unravel. I wonder if the title of Varley's book is at all related to Greer's title The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age. If you read it as fiction, you might find the Greer book more interesting than Varley's. Certainly a lot more thought went into it. "Slow Apocalypse" is in the same league as the movies "2012" or "The Day After Tomorrow." They were painful to watch, and this stinker was painful to read. Stopped at page 126, bored to death.
The timing of this book's release is odd. Back in the early aughts, the End of Oil was all the rage. People like James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, and the Archdruid himself, John Michael Greer were shouting from the rooftops that soon we'd begin to run out of oil, and civilization would begin to unravel. I wonder if the title of Varley's book is at all related to Greer's title The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age. If you read it as fiction, you might find the Greer book more interesting than Varley's. Certainly a lot more thought went into it. "Slow Apocalypse" is in the same league as the movies "2012" or "The Day After Tomorrow." They were painful to watch, and this stinker was painful to read. Stopped at page 126, bored to death.
June 2, 2018
This is an ok book. The opening scenes advertize that there will be a lot of excitement and blood will be shed, and Varley delivers on that. One of the great things about an "end of the world as we know it" book is loving and lurid descriptions of how locations and landmarks we know first-hand are destroyed or consumed in the apocalypse. SLOW APOCALYPSE has the gritty realism of a vivid observer driving and walking through actual, real locations and extrapolating, what if?
I wish Varley had devoted as much attention to his characters. There were several occasions where I lost track of who was talking, because they were so indistinguishable. It was hard to develop an attachment to the main character. Some of the secondary characters were sympathetic, but they seemed more like sock puppets than real persons with their own agency.
Varley gives a nod to fact that women can be as strong and as competent as men. Some of his more interesting characters are women, albeit as cardboard as his male characters.
The ending seems rushed and half-formed -- and then we all came together and began to rebuild civilization, and wasn't it better without all those distractions from cyberspace.
There is a cover blurb from Tom Chancy, "John Varley is the best writer in America." Not on the basis of this book. He has written much, much better. Still, it was ok, and it held my attention to the end.
I wish Varley had devoted as much attention to his characters. There were several occasions where I lost track of who was talking, because they were so indistinguishable. It was hard to develop an attachment to the main character. Some of the secondary characters were sympathetic, but they seemed more like sock puppets than real persons with their own agency.
Varley gives a nod to fact that women can be as strong and as competent as men. Some of his more interesting characters are women, albeit as cardboard as his male characters.
The ending seems rushed and half-formed -- and then we all came together and began to rebuild civilization, and wasn't it better without all those distractions from cyberspace.
There is a cover blurb from Tom Chancy, "John Varley is the best writer in America." Not on the basis of this book. He has written much, much better. Still, it was ok, and it held my attention to the end.
September 3, 2013
*spoilers* I had real problems with this book, some of which have been stated by other reviewers. It struck me as a first draft. I like Varley; he wrote one of the most memorable short stories I've read ("The Pusher").
It just struck me as a half-baked novel - a lot of research, a bunch of notes, and some good ideas or scenes he wanted to cram in. But he never edited and shaped it into an interesting story that hung together with exposition & and fun facts weaved in seamlessly.
*spoilers below*
Some specific annoying problems I had included The overabundance of local LA information, the wife just disappears upstairs for a while & then reappears, taking a horse so the daughter won't cry, and the 'hero' making the huge mistake of staying in his house for awhile, even after he convinced the reader it was the wrong move.
One particular issue that really threw the whole thing out the window for me was very early on he claims that the banking system broke down & the currency is no good. OK, fine, that's common in these stories. But then he has weeks of people riding bikes to work, businesses open, and no riots. Who's going to work if the money's no good? What are they doing? There just seemed to be a mismatch in the level of disruption that created a situation I could neither picture nor believe.
It just struck me as a half-baked novel - a lot of research, a bunch of notes, and some good ideas or scenes he wanted to cram in. But he never edited and shaped it into an interesting story that hung together with exposition & and fun facts weaved in seamlessly.
*spoilers below*
Some specific annoying problems I had included The overabundance of local LA information, the wife just disappears upstairs for a while & then reappears, taking a horse so the daughter won't cry, and the 'hero' making the huge mistake of staying in his house for awhile, even after he convinced the reader it was the wrong move.
One particular issue that really threw the whole thing out the window for me was very early on he claims that the banking system broke down & the currency is no good. OK, fine, that's common in these stories. But then he has weeks of people riding bikes to work, businesses open, and no riots. Who's going to work if the money's no good? What are they doing? There just seemed to be a mismatch in the level of disruption that created a situation I could neither picture nor believe.
November 29, 2013
A screenwriter living in the Hollywood Hills gets advance warning of a coming disaster, a nanopathogen that renders oil supplies useless. Thinking itself a little mad, he nevertheless stocks up on supplies such as canned food and water. Pretty soon there are gas shortages, and it is clear that society is slowly unraveling while the government is hiding the truth. Things get worse and the small hill community where our hero lives buttons up, barricading the access road to prevent refugees from coming in. Then a massive Earthquake brought on by the destruction of the Los Angeles oil fields hits. Fire, flood and anarchy ensue.
Unlike many post-apocalyptic stories, this one isn't about a superbly prepared person or group. Our hero is simply a normal person, and he does make mistakes. Varley's skill at bringing characters to life really shines in this book. The struggle is personal, and those with real power are far away, unknowable, and untrustworthy. The big moral of the story is of course how very dependent the world is on oil. What would happen if all the oil reserves in the world vanished within the space of a few weeks? Society would break down very quickly, especially in big cities dependent on cars like Los Angeles.
http://www.books.rosboch.net/?p=1689
Unlike many post-apocalyptic stories, this one isn't about a superbly prepared person or group. Our hero is simply a normal person, and he does make mistakes. Varley's skill at bringing characters to life really shines in this book. The struggle is personal, and those with real power are far away, unknowable, and untrustworthy. The big moral of the story is of course how very dependent the world is on oil. What would happen if all the oil reserves in the world vanished within the space of a few weeks? Society would break down very quickly, especially in big cities dependent on cars like Los Angeles.
http://www.books.rosboch.net/?p=1689
July 25, 2021
Not as challenging nor as transgressive as his earlier fiction, this tale of an affluent man and his struggles to survive an apocalypse fall unoriginally and disappointingly into displaced modern masculine wish fulfillment. The situation is a setup in which his disaffected wife once again begins to love and need him, his daughter to obey him, his friends rally round, and community is rebuilt after technological collapse.
I don’t disagree that the modern era is fraught with challenge. I also wonder if the internet unites or divides us, provides wider connection or cuts us off from intimacy with our fellow beings. And I did appreciate him addressing the usually unaddressed post-apocalyptic problem of whether to share limited resources and if so, how.
But there’s a chunk of patriarchal wish fulfillment fantasy in this story. Sometimes I worry that men think like this. ‘If only society would collapse, THEN I would be useful and appreciated.’ Guys? Et tu?
I don’t disagree that the modern era is fraught with challenge. I also wonder if the internet unites or divides us, provides wider connection or cuts us off from intimacy with our fellow beings. And I did appreciate him addressing the usually unaddressed post-apocalyptic problem of whether to share limited resources and if so, how.
But there’s a chunk of patriarchal wish fulfillment fantasy in this story. Sometimes I worry that men think like this. ‘If only society would collapse, THEN I would be useful and appreciated.’ Guys? Et tu?
October 9, 2012
Although I liked John Varley’s Slow Apocalypse I found it a very slow read. Varley does a great job with describing what living conditions might be if something like this were to actually happen. He does a good job depicting the fear and violence that may overtake the world under such dire circumstances. My big complaint is that I had a hard time with the geography. I wish the book had included a map or two to help me, since most of the book is Dave or the family trying to get to one location or another.
By the way, in the beginning of the Slow Apocalypse some of the female characters seemed very weak to me. That changed as I stuck with the book but it took a bit of reading to get there.
By the way, in the beginning of the Slow Apocalypse some of the female characters seemed very weak to me. That changed as I stuck with the book but it took a bit of reading to get there.
October 25, 2015
Good after-the-day book - a heck of a lot better than the current Revolution TV series. Kind of petered out a little bit early but was good while it lasted. Probably even better if I knew and appreciated LA and the surrounding countryside. Mostly I had to be satisfied with the various non-fiction stuff I had read set in the Laurel Canyon area - but this book in general rang true. The characters typically did reasonable stuff - not super smart - but far from dumb. I didn't spend this book yelling at the characters which made it better than lots of the sf on tv. Varley remains an author worth reading. But I wish the ending was stronger - though that may have been completely intentional.
October 10, 2016
Dave Marshall and his family join up with friends to survive after all oil/gasoline is turned into sludge by a scientist's creation.
Good thing: This book makes you realize just how dependent we are on oil and its derivatives.
Bad thing: Way, way too many specifics on what road/boulevard/building they're at - it's like a travel book of Los Angeles and the area to the south. Far too many characters that have no real personality or impact on the story.
This book is very slow paced (page 371: "At last, the caravan was moving.") with not enough tension. Based on this book, I would not pick up another by the author.
Good thing: This book makes you realize just how dependent we are on oil and its derivatives.
Bad thing: Way, way too many specifics on what road/boulevard/building they're at - it's like a travel book of Los Angeles and the area to the south. Far too many characters that have no real personality or impact on the story.
This book is very slow paced (page 371: "At last, the caravan was moving.") with not enough tension. Based on this book, I would not pick up another by the author.
July 22, 2013
I gave up about half way through. The research element showed through a bit too plainly. The characters were not that strong. Not terrible, but not worth finishing.
April 8, 2014
Original idea, but thats where it ends. The writing is cliched, the pace is slow, and the characters are all static.
July 3, 2017
I bought this book by reflex: a new John Varley!
In the tradition of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9..., it's a biological agent that attacks a basic resource worldwide; this time not rice and wheat, but crude petroleum (underground or in tankers) with explosive consequences. It's told almost entirely in terms of Los Angeles. which is great if you know the place . . . and even better if you cordially dislike it. More specifically, the central characters are a family living up in the affluent canyons, with a swimming pool and a horse (which accompanies them on their final well-equipped escape). They combine for the trek with a similar family. The loving emphasis on the destruction of landmarks where these people shop -- and most people can't possibly afford to -- suggest that perhaps the author cordially dislikes LA too.
The story is well told, with Heinleinish family bonding, lessons of self-reliance, readiness to kill, and so on, but never for a moment do they, even can they, question their sense of entitlement. Need I mention that any character who appears for more than a few pages is white? (That is not the LA of the neighbourhoods I lived in, or the friends I made there.)
I would love to read a counter-narrative focussed on a Korean/Hispanic/Black/Chinese/Islamic. . . family coping with the exact same string of disasters, without the forewarning these guys get, appearing as more than units in the faceless streams of refugees.
In the tradition of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9..., it's a biological agent that attacks a basic resource worldwide; this time not rice and wheat, but crude petroleum (underground or in tankers) with explosive consequences. It's told almost entirely in terms of Los Angeles. which is great if you know the place . . . and even better if you cordially dislike it. More specifically, the central characters are a family living up in the affluent canyons, with a swimming pool and a horse (which accompanies them on their final well-equipped escape). They combine for the trek with a similar family. The loving emphasis on the destruction of landmarks where these people shop -- and most people can't possibly afford to -- suggest that perhaps the author cordially dislikes LA too.
The story is well told, with Heinleinish family bonding, lessons of self-reliance, readiness to kill, and so on, but never for a moment do they, even can they, question their sense of entitlement. Need I mention that any character who appears for more than a few pages is white? (That is not the LA of the neighbourhoods I lived in, or the friends I made there.)
I would love to read a counter-narrative focussed on a Korean/Hispanic/Black/Chinese/Islamic. . . family coping with the exact same string of disasters, without the forewarning these guys get, appearing as more than units in the faceless streams of refugees.
February 24, 2025
When a radicalized scientist poisons the world’s oil supply, things quickly deteriorate as supply chains grind to a halt.
The idea, I thought, behind a slow apocalypse would be that the changes would take place, you know, slowly over time, the breakdown happening in ways that were unnoticeable until it was too late. Varley’s apocalypse, in fact, happens at lightning speed. One moment an oil field overseas is exploding, and the next it’s worldwide, there’s no food, no power, and it’s every man for himself. If that’s not enough, Varley throws in a 9.8 earthquake, flood from a failing dam, and a mega fire for his Californian protagonists to deal with.
On the other hand, maybe the slow referred to the pace of the novel. When heroes Dave and Karen venture away from their mansion to scope out the damage, every side street and historical building is categorized. I could practically use this novel as a street guide to Los Angeles.
There’s some exciting moments but they get hampered down by the slow pace and also by how damn good everyone is. They’re nice and kind and try to do the right thing and blah blah blah, and it would be nice if someone was just a jerk for once. Also, do these people not know anyone of colour in Los Angeles???
The idea, I thought, behind a slow apocalypse would be that the changes would take place, you know, slowly over time, the breakdown happening in ways that were unnoticeable until it was too late. Varley’s apocalypse, in fact, happens at lightning speed. One moment an oil field overseas is exploding, and the next it’s worldwide, there’s no food, no power, and it’s every man for himself. If that’s not enough, Varley throws in a 9.8 earthquake, flood from a failing dam, and a mega fire for his Californian protagonists to deal with.
On the other hand, maybe the slow referred to the pace of the novel. When heroes Dave and Karen venture away from their mansion to scope out the damage, every side street and historical building is categorized. I could practically use this novel as a street guide to Los Angeles.
There’s some exciting moments but they get hampered down by the slow pace and also by how damn good everyone is. They’re nice and kind and try to do the right thing and blah blah blah, and it would be nice if someone was just a jerk for once. Also, do these people not know anyone of colour in Los Angeles???
August 15, 2017
A TV show writer in Los Angeles interviewing a former marine becomes aware of a seemingly far-fetched story about a cover up. A vengeful scientist, whose girlfriend died in the 9/11 attacks, has created a microbe that destroys crude oil, and has unleashed it in Saudi Arabia. The following events are initially hidden from the public, but it soon becomes clear that the microbe is spreading and destroying the oil fields in neighbouring countries.
The writer tells a group of friends about what he has learned but they don't really take it seriously. However, he begins to prepare by stocking food, gasoline and other supplies. Of course, the story is true and chaos ensues as the world's supply of oil begins to run out. The bulk of the book follows the resulting social collapse. A lot of the standard apocalyptic fiction storylines occur, but in a fairly realistic manner. The book is well written and their are some original ideas in it.
The writer tells a group of friends about what he has learned but they don't really take it seriously. However, he begins to prepare by stocking food, gasoline and other supplies. Of course, the story is true and chaos ensues as the world's supply of oil begins to run out. The bulk of the book follows the resulting social collapse. A lot of the standard apocalyptic fiction storylines occur, but in a fairly realistic manner. The book is well written and their are some original ideas in it.
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