The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun

by Christopher Anvil

Ace Books, 1980. Mass market paperback original novel. Post-apocalyptic science fiction. There were three printings with identical cover 1980, 1983, and 1986.

Genres: Science Fiction, Military Fiction, Fiction, Alternate History

282 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published July 1, 1980

About the author

Christopher Anvil was a pseudonym used by author Harry C. Crosby. He began publishing science fiction with the story "Cinderella, Inc." in the December 1952 issue of the science fiction magazine Imagination. By 1956, he had adopted his pseudonym and was being published in Astounding Magazine.

Anvil's repeated appearances in Astounding/Analog were due in part to his ability to write to one of Campbell's preferred plots: alien opponents with superior firepower losing out to the superior intelligence or indomitable will of humans. A second factor is his stories are nearly always humorous throughout. Another was his characterization and manner of story crafting, where his protagonists slid from disaster to disaster with the best of intentions, and through exercise of fast thinking, managed to snatch victory somehow from the jaws of defeat.

Reviews

[Craig]

This is a post-apocalyptic military sf novel in which the cold war/failed detente era has lasted for two-hundred years, and the conflict is re-igniting as the U.S. is set to invade Europe with early 20th century technology. There's a lot of political discussion and philosophical conversation. It's a very Reagan-era novel. There's a little blurb on the cover that says it's an Analog book and the series editor is Ben Bova. I remember thinking it was okay at the time, but much preferred Anvil's Interstellar Patrol stories.

[Jim]

Anvil seems to be unpredictable--I did not know where this one was going. And it had some strange twists and turns right to the end...Published in 1980, it's a look at the post-apocalyptic world. It seems that the USA and the USSR have destroyed each other, but, after two hundred years, they have built themselves back up enough to have another go. The Yanks this time around are led by a bona fide military genius, a guy named Arakal, who after knocking out the Russian colony in Delaware, goes after Western Europe. As the American forces come ashore on France, they are warmly welcomed by the Resistance, who want to help the Americans drive the Soviets back to Russia. But all is not what it seems...

[Grady Hendrix]

I was baffled by how hard it was to read The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun: awesome dude in a poncho with a machine gun on the cover and totally impenetrable text. It didn’t help that this book is set in a quasi-Medieval society that’s arisen two hundred years after a nuclear war and is full of clever little in-joke names (the good guys live in the Western O’cracys – get it? The Western DEMocracys? There’s Arakal (Oracle) the leader and they live in cities with names like Kebek). It doesn’t help that it springs directly from the events in Christopher Anvil’s short story “Ideology Counts” which isn’t reprinted here. Anvil just assumes that, of course, you know what happened in his short story and so he doesn’t need to reintroduce his characters or the world in which they live.

But what really doesn’t help is that the entire book consists of people sitting around tables and talking.

Now, this is a book about a war-ravaged America restaging D-Day as they invade a technologically and economically superior Soviet-occupied Europe while rooting out traitors and spies who infest their proud American ranks. It’s a book that has a battle on a train. It features weird technology being unearthed, invasions from the sea and massive advances across snow-covered Northern Europe full of war atrocities and guerrilla attacks. And yet out of the 16 chapters, 9 of them start with people standing around in a room having a meeting. Sometimes the meeting is on a train. Sometimes it’s in the snow. Sometimes it’s on a ship. Sometimes, just to get your blood pumping, there’s not even a conference table. Only a desk.

Read my full review at:
http://www.gradyhendrix.com/the-steel...

[Ethan]

What the [redacted] [redacted] bloody [redacted] [redacted] bunny [redacted] did I just read?

It is currently the golden age of self-publishing when anyone can write a book on Amazon. This is largely recognized as a two-edged sword, since while it means that good writers have lower barriers to entry, so do the bad ones. The idea is that editors were gatekeepers who, while they may have prevented the careers of a few good writers, kept out the truly bad ones.

But then you read a book like this (or last year's most disappointing Little Free Library find, Centrifuge by J. C. Pollock), and realize the idea of editors as guardians against complete trash was theoretical, at best.

I am truly struggling to come up with words for this book. I guess the best I can say is it's an attempt at epic worldbuilding with a post-apocalyptic setting. Pretty sure this author thought he was Frank Herbert. I'm very sure he was not.

Perhaps it's supposed to be a musing on the nature of freedom in political systems or something? A study in the persistence of mythological histories? A defense of technological progress despite dangers?

I can tell you what it's not: a good story. Theoretically, the capacity for epic world building an the capacity for character development are orthoganal to each other. At the same time, there seems to be a strong inverse correlation between the two, which is very much on display here. One can usually get away with picking one or the other, even in the absence of any great skill, if one sticks in a gripping plot. But this...just...I'm out of words. And any more time I'm willing to waste on this book looking for them.

[James Felter]

I read this book MANY years ago and recalled it as a result of current events potentially validating its futuristic plot twist [SPOILER ALERT!]. Late in the book Anvil reveals that WWIII was actually negotiated mutual strikes to mitigate unintended accidents of genetic engineering mishaps.

Currently (2025), billionaires and oligarchs are building deep shelters. The richest man publicly acknowleged on earth recently stated that he thinks that there is a 20% chance that general AI will exterminate humanity, and that the genie is already out of the bottle because the upsides of the technology are so large that AI will be created within 24 months. Biowarfare is ever more possible, and we will not even know whether its creations are released by (v)accident or on purpose.

Nuclear strikes and EMP may be the only way to turn AI off if it goes rogue, and fracturing the world economy may be the only way to keep humanity from exterminating itself with biowar.

Anvil may have been more prescient than he is given credit for.

[J.J.]

Picked up for the obvious parallels with current US/Russia tension. Read this as a bit of a period piece with the Cold War sentiments throughout.. sure it was one of many that explores these themes a the time. Was wishing and hoping for my sci fi hints at what caused the great war but also satisfied with not knowing everything!! Solid post-apocalyptic page-turner. Finished most of it on a ferry ride from Nanaimo in June.

[Michael Gerardi]

I remembered reading a short story in Analog magazine that was a prequel to this book ("Ideological Defeat", IIRC, sometime in 1972). I liked that story, so when I came across this book I gave it a read. I have to say, it was OK, but its answer to how WWIII came about seemed like a cop-out. Still worth a read if you have a taste for ca. 1980 future Cold War SF.

[Andrew Brooks]

As a few others have mentioned, this book deserves some extra points for some subtle twists that make it more than a "follow the wiz bang action" tale.
"All is NOT as it seems" Definitely describes this story!

[Leo Kramer]

Went in a totally different direction then what I was expecting and was pleasantly surprised, was an enjoyable read.

[Andy Phillips]

This book is essentially a fictional account of a military campaign, but set against the backdrop of a world where nuclear war occurred around 200 years ago. The US and Russia are at war again, but their weapons are conventional and mostly at a World War II level. Although there is talk of regaining lost technology and knowledge, quite large sections of the story go by without any of that mattering very much. The fact that quite large parts of North America and Asia (as well as most of Europe) are largely undamaged by the war makes it a bit confusing that neither side seems to have decent records of what happened, or the ability to regain lost skills.

It's not a work of literature but it's an enjoyable story with some decent characters and a fair amount of action and adventure.