Every now and then we all come across a stellar book. One that grabs us and resonates with us like few others have.
Don’t Dream It’s Over is a hefty post-apocalyptic novel, coming in at over 700 pages. Such a length is not my normal cup of tea. I don’t particularly like long books. Inevitably there are parts that are just plain old boring and others that are tedious at best.
So imagine my surprise when I didn’t encounter any of those negatives in Mr Cormack’s book, and it grabbed me as few others have. It was a very pleasant and welcomed surprise.
There are many types of post-apocalyptic novels. There’s the very popular zombie apocalypse and it’s aftermath. There are the prepper PA novels. The EMP novels. The pandemics. Alien invasions. Cozy catastrophes (my favorite). And the list goes on.
However, Mr Cormack’s novel isn’t so easy to categorize. It comes closest to being a cozy catastrophe. A cozy is a PA novel that focuses on rebuilding the world to make it a better place than it was before the disaster. They are essentially utopian in character.
Classic examples of the cozy catastrophe are Earth Abides and The Day of the Triffids. Terry Nation’s BBC TV series, Survivors, and the book he wrote later on, also titled Survivors, fit nicely into the cozy catastrophe category, as well.
Yet, Don’t Dream It’s Over isn’t 100% cozy catastrophe either, because there isn’t a lot of focus placed on rebuilding the world. In fact, there is an interesting section where a wise old thinker postulates that the visionaries will die out and it will be the ones who think of nothing but expansion that will survive. A touch of dystopia there.
What Don’t Dream It’s Over primarilyis, is an extended character study. A character study of the narrator as he goes about his business of day-to-day survival and trying to figure out what to do with his life. Don’t Dream It’s Over is primarily a novel of self-discovery and personal growth.
Mr Cormack’s book is an engaging story. He grabs your attention, holds it, and doesn’t let it go.
The format is that of the epistolary novel, using journal entries instead of letters. What can be a difficult format, Mr Cormack handles exceedingly well. He knows how to pace the story and knows when to introduce thrills and spills to keep the narrative from getting boring.
I’ve read the book twice, and I don’t usually re-read novels. And I thoroughly enjoyed it both times.
I encourage you to buy a copy (it’s only 99¢ as of this writing and is in Kindle Unlimited). Support this fabulously talented indie author. He has another novel set in the same universe: Ganbaru. It is on my reading list.
The Conspiracy Game (Justinia Wright, PI #4) is available on a pre-publication sale this week only for 99¢. That makes for 7 Justinia Wright mysteries I’ve published. Three novels, a collection of 3 novellas, and 3 short stories. I love Tina and Harry and find their stories the easiest to write. However if all I wrote were mysteries, I think I’d become bored with writing. As the old adage goes: variety is the spice of life.
And so now I switch gears and turn my attention to one of my other loves: the post-apocalyptic tale. The Rocheport Saga currently has 5 volumes in the series and I’m working on number 6. It is the story of one man’s attempt to create paradise out of the disaster that has almost totally wiped out the human race.
The original manuscript for The Rocheport Saga is a monster over 2200 pages long. Normally I do not rewrite. I follow the practice of writers such as Lester Dent, Isaac Asimov, Robert E Howard, Robert Heinlein, and Dean Wesley Smith — get the story written and move on to the next one. Unfortunately with The Rocheport Saga my technical knowledge of surviving such a holocaust and what is possible has increased a hundred fold since I first wrote the manuscript. Therefore, rewrite I must.
The Rocheport Saga is a cozy catastrophe and I’ve written previously on the cozy catastrophe. You can find those posts here, here, and here. Over the next few weeks I’m going to present more detailed thoughts on and examples of this sub-subgenre of speculative fiction.
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories are very popular and their popularity shows no sign of abating. The current spate of zombie apocalypse tales is proof this subgenre isn’t going away anytime soon. We are fascinated by what it takes to survive. Will we survive?
I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s when the threat of nuclear war was very, very real. I still have those old civil defense pamphlets they handed out in grade school. To this day, I can’t figure out what hiding under a desk will do. But, hey, desperate times call for desperate measures. Right? For me the possible end of the world as I knew it was something I lived with every day. Sure it wasn’t in the forefront of my mind. After all I was a kid. But it was there, subtly, in front of me everyday implied in the newspaper, on TV, in books, and in those civil defense drills. One day, most of us might be wiped off the face of the earth.
The apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic tale is nostalgia for me, at least in part. Probably why I’m not keen on the flood of zombie apocalypse stories hitting the market. That stuff is pure fantasy. If it is fantasy I want, then I prefer the original zombie of Haitian folklore: an undead being created by the evil magic of a bokor. A supernatural being. The mindless slave of the evil wizard or witch. Robert E Howard was a master of this kind of zombie tale. “Black Canaan” being a classic zombie horror story. In fact, I class the zombie apocalypse as a horror tale and not a true apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic story. And, for me, I find the modern zombie story a laughable joke compared to the likes of “Black Canaan”.
The apocalyptic tale and the post-apocalyptic tale are different things, even though they are usually lumped together. The apocalyptic story deals mostly with the cataclysm and the events leading up to it. A classic example is the novel When Worlds Collide and the movie 2012. The emphasis there is on preparation to survive what is coming. The story can be plot or character-driven.
The post-apocalyptic story takes place after the cataclysm. Often the disaster comes upon us suddenly and we have no time to prepare for it. As in the BBC TV series Survivors and the classic sci-fi novel Earth Abides. The focus is not on the disaster, but on the survivors of the disaster. How they cope and what they do to survive in a sometimes radically altered world, such as we find in the Mad Max series, The Road, I Am Legend, and The Book of Eli. In other post-apocalyptic settings the world the survivors face is not radically different. We see this in Earth Abides, Survivors, and After Worlds Collide (where the survivors are on a very earth-like planet). Here, the story is usually character-driven and perhaps that is why I prefer it over the apocalyptic tale.
There are many apocalyptic scenarios, each one affecting the possible direction humanity and civilization might take. My favorite is the cozy catastrophe because the catastrophe is often environmental or the result of scientific interference with nature. The term was coined by Brian Aldiss to pejoratively describe a style of post-apocalyptic literature popular in post-World War Two Britain, made famous by John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. On the American side of the pond, the most famous example is probably Earth Abides by George R Stewart.
In the cozy catastrophe, the disaster is not dwelt on. It happens rather rapidly and wipes out most of the human race; leaving the world essentially as is, minus the human population. The focus is not on survival so much as it is on re-building civilization and doing a better job of it this time around.
Of course what I just wrote is a broad overview and exceptions abound. But in general, I find the cozy catastrophe on the whole positive — emphasizing the hope we hold on to that we can make the world a better place in which to live.
Over the course of the next several weeks, I’ll delve into more detail as to what is and what isn’t a cozy catastrophe.
The Machine Age is that glorious sixty-five years of scientific and especially technological development occurring between 1880 and 1945. Virtually everything we take for granted today, for good or for ill, has its origin in The Machine Age. In the coming weeks I’ll share with you some of the inventions, social movements, and artistic expressions originating in that glorious era when science and technology were going to solve all of our problems.
I became interested in The Machine Age when I started writing speculative fiction (or science fiction, if you prefer). And I soon discovered The Machine Age also touched upon the crime and horror fiction I also write, although much more indirectly. The Machine Age directly or indirectly touches on all writing.
Speculative fiction, whether heavily based in science or not, takes the known and extrapolates it into an alternative world from the one in which we live. That world might be in the future, another dimension, or an alternative past.
The speculative fiction I write falls into the subgenres of post-apocalyptic cozy catastrophes and dieselpunk. In both, I make heavy use of the wonders of The Machine Age.
InThe Rocheport Saga, the hero, Bill Arthur, has set for himself the task of not letting the human race descend into the Stone Age after a mysterious illness wipes out nearly all of humanity. He is determined to overcome our modern lack of knowledge of how things work in order to rebuild society. The knowledge is all there, in books and old people, we just need to learn how to do what our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did as a matter of course.
Bill Arthur takes comfort in the fact that The Machine Age inventions were largely produced by amateurs. The Wright brothers made bicycles and Santos-Dumont was a wealthy kid who liked to tinker — they weren’t aeronautical engineers. The Stanley twins, one a photographer and the other a school teacher, were not automotive engineers. Count Zeppelin was a retired military officer who knew nothing about flying. His chief engineer and designer, Ludwig Dürr, knew nothing about airships. And the greatest airship captain of all time, Hugo Eckener, was a journalist.
In a very real sense, amateurs built the foundations of our modern world. Therefore in the post-apocalyptic world of Rocheport and Bill Arthur, amateurs can do it again. People simply need to understand how things work.
In the Lady Dru series and the forthcoming Rand Hart series, I build dieselpunk alternative histories based on The Machine Age. From the late 1800s through World War II, the dreamers of what the future would be like came up with some pretty fantastic ideas. Robots to be our servants and fight our wars. Airships to provide safe and quiet transportation for people and cargo. Cities free from pollution and traffic congestion. And, yes, flying cars.
Those same dreamers also came up with things like particle beam weapons and orbiting parabolic mirrors to send the sun’s light in death rays to destroy cities. They even speculated on thought beam weapons. The flying wing, jet engines, the ballistic and cruise missiles also came from those same dreamers.
The Machine Age was a wonderful time of fantastic technological advancement. I look forward to sharing with you some of the things I’ve discovered while doing research for my novels and I hope you enjoy the discoveries as much as I did.
