Survivors Episode Two

On its second episode Survivors started to come into its own, whatever that might be. I am far more positive and optimistic towards the show than Quiet Earth's Survivors review and I'm holding out to see where they'll take it next. The acting isn't all that great, but neither is it terrible. Compared to a show like Jericho where they have 20 episodes to get into a story arc and develop the post-apocalyptic world, Survivors has all of six episodes and they seem to be using them well.

Character development started in earnest in this episode, with Al, Tom and Greg all going their own ways. Tom's turning out to have more depth than I expected, and although the secondary characters are essentially two-dimensional tropes that I can identify from a mile away they're still interesting.

Any post-apocalyptic story that begins before things go to hell needs to do a good job of portraying the steady breakdown of society (which they're doing) and the potential rebuilding (which they're hinting at.) The only thing is, it feels like they're doing it in lurches and bursts rather than as something gradual; there are some significant plot holes and the subplots are like tertiary brush strokes that bleed through the canvas and stick out more than they should.

I actually thought this was a better episode than the first, and it looks like there's going to be some meta-story going on behind the scenes as well, with the scientists locked in their holes. The interesting thing will be to see how the series goes when there are no more shops and warehouses to loot, when people like the guy with the shotgun end up doing more than driving around in a Land Rover, and how our plucky little group of civilization-loving survivors deals with those developments.

Next Tuesday, more action!

Survivors!

Not the show where people compete to stay on the island, but the BBC TV series Survivors about a band of people who survive a super-flu that wipes out 90% of the world's population in a matter of a couple of weeks. It's like The Stand without the good versus evil - at least, not yet.

Survivors is based on a series that ran on the BBC back in the 1970s, and has been updated for modern audiences. The first episode opened right as the 'flu crisis' was starting to destroy Europe. After a period of two weeks, the flu has wiped out the aforementioned 90% of the population (although it actually seems much higher than that, with London largely devoid of all life at all in some shots.) Infrastructure breaks down, power and water and cell phone service shut off, and people have to start thinking about living for themselves.

Spoilers may follow...

What I liked:

They didn't spend a lot of time on the apocalypse itself. The show was called Survivors, not End of the World, so that was nice.

They trotted out some pretty tired tropes (the Group Mom, the Quest for the Missing Family Member, the Jaded Scientist, the May-Be-Bad, May-Not-Be criminal, the Girl Whose Mind is Broken by Death, the Loner Survivalist) but managed to update them pretty well. The scene where the kid gets up from praying in the mosque and realizes everyone around him is dead was a memorable 'stay with you' scene.

Lots of strong women.

They're kicking off the survival part pretty fast, and it looks like that will be the focus of the series, at least in the short-term. Reminds me of early (great) and middle (greater) Jericho episodes.

The scene at the petrol (gas, for you American Puppeteers) station was unexpected and awesome. More like that, please. Pleasantly surprise me and I will continue to support you.

What I Didn't Necessarily Like:

It was a Very British Apocalypse. Which is to say, the bodies didn't decompose, there weren't very many of them and things were orderly. People literally died in queues waiting for medical assistance (this is even funnier to an American, I think.) But I expected London to be in flames by the end of it. I realize that part of that was budgetary limitations, but if you want a lesson on what would happen in a sudden apocalypse, watch the first 10 minutes of the remake of Dawn of the Dead: that's the new standard.

The tropes were a little, well, tropish. My wife and I took turns calling out what would happen next, and like the X-Files, we were right the vast majority of the time. A little less predictability would be nice.

Apparently the ratings weren't all that great, so here's hoping the show doesn't turn into another Jericho for me.

Thoughts:

The show is off to a very strong start, audience numbers notwithstanding, and the previews for the next episode look even stronger. I'll stick with the show and keep writing about it as it develops. Next episode airs 9pm on Tuesday (tomorrow) on the Beeb...

Book: The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson

The last Kim Stanley Robinson book I tried to read was The Years of Rice and Salt, which I couldn't finish. In the same Amazon order as the post below, I grabbed The Wild Shore, a post-apocalyptic tale by Robinson, and couldn't put it down.

Part of a triptych (trilogy) of similar books about three vastly different futures for Orange County, California, The Wild Shore takes place in an America about fifty years after a nuclear attack destroyed major cities. Bombs were detonated from ground-level, inside trucks and buildings, so the devastation isn't as complete as it could have been if they were launched from ICBMs, but it was still complete enough. The UN has decided that the United States should be cut off from the rest of the world for 100 years as punishment for its imperialism (at least, that's the explanation given in the book, but the narrator does show that there is a good reason to question whether or not that's true.) So anyone who tries to leave, is killed by one of the battleships that patrols the shore. Additionally, if any settlement makes too much progress towards reunification - such as building a railroad track - a space-based satellite destroys the structure.

A blurb on the back describes The Wild Shore as a cross between Huck Finn and Our Town, and that's as apt a description as any. The action centers around one small village of survivors, who have built a community based on fishing and agriculture. They battle with the "scavengers" who inhabit the ruins of Orange County, people who have chosen to simply live off the scraps of the old civilization rather than trying to make a new life. The book clearly comes down on the side of the farmers, and in an interesting twist for the genre, the calls to action for resistance, revolution, and reunification and rebuilding the old United States are less important than the personal lessons the main character learns as he instead grows up in his village and his decisions and perspectives start influencing the lives of those around him, for better or worse.

The Wild Shore is not a rollicking action-adventure, but it's a hell of a read regardless. It's an interesting contrast to David Brin's The Postman, which released about the same time (early 1980s) and embraced the spirit of reclamation and reunification rather than the spirit of community and family that The Wild Shore ultimately concerns itself with. Amazon sells The Wild Shore too.

Book: Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling

Fair warning: this is going to be less a book review than a confessional.

I typically try to keep a very open mind when reading books, especially when I'm reading a post-apocalyptic adventure novel - my favorite SF genre. So I grabbed Dies the Fire from an online recommendaton with a bevy of other books using a birthday gift certificate, because it was post-apocalyptic and sounded like an interesting premise: some sort of electrical disturbance basically puts everyone back a few hundred years, before electricity and steam. Breakdown of society, people coming together, evil enemy army, and so forth. Sure, sounds like a decent read.

The plot breaks into two arcs: rugged bush pilot flying wealthy family to remote Idaho, and Wiccan acoustic guitar playing single mother in small Oregon college town.

The pilot plot was OK I guess. But boy howdy, the other character's plotline was awful.

Maybe it's just because I've spent so much time around those folks, but in the first twenty pages the Wiccan was casting spells, remarking about how her friend who fought in the SCA and made fine weapons for Ren Faires would always stand by her side, and just generally reminded me of the worst parts of some GenCon attention whore, I put the book aside.

OK, I didn't. I skipped around. I read the end (a habit most people would cruicify me for if offered the chance, but fuck 'em, the journey is more important than the destination for me.) And the samples I found were an annoying and shitty as the first twenty pages. So this one landed on the pile that's going to Half Price the next time I'm taking a load down there.

Does that make me a bigot? Maybe. I tried to think how I would respond if the character were, say, a Muslim or a Christian. Would I be equally as annoyed by a Christian character making signs of the cross and quoting scripture? As much as I wish I could say "yes, that would equally annoy me," I know the answer is "no, not really." I have some personal feelings about Wicca and some - not all, but some - people who choose to practice that faith that color my personal judgement in this regard. But even that is a counterfeit argument - I have feelings about Christians as well, and not all of them very positive. But why my personal negative - and somewhat irrational - response to this character?

I guess the answer is, "I don't know." Maybe it is a little bit of bigotry, because it seems based largely on my personal disdain for some practitioners of the faith rather than the religion itself (as far as I'm concerned, religions are pretty much equal, with the exception of Scientology.) It's hard to explain. And maybe I don't have to.

I wish I could have kept reading, because Stirling penned some really tight prose. The pilot's plotline especially just rocked and rolled along, and I wanted to read more, just to see what happened next - not a bad thing. Seth mentioned that Stirling wrote some historical fiction, so I might try to track down a copy of that, just to give the author another shot.

If you really want to read Dies the Fire, there's a link to Amazon.com. I can't really recommend it though.

Book: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Amazon.com offered me 5% more off my order if I ordered Cormac McCarthy's The Road with World War Z, so I said "why the hell not" and added it to the cart. It's a good book. It's a very fast read. And it's one of those simple-but-difficult books, just because of the subject matter.

The book follows an unnamed protagonist and his son as they trek south towards some unknown and esoteric goal. The goal, whatever it is, acts as a MacGuffin to provide the two with a need to move. They push an old shopping cart that contains their worldly possessions, and avoid human contact whenever possible - in no small part because many of the the other humans in the ash-covered, burned-out wasteland have resorted to cannibalism to survive.

The book is heavy. It's barely 200 pages, but it's heavy all the same, because while it has the normal survivialist masturbatory fantasies post-apocalyptic books they play second fiddle to the relationship between the father and son. The father's goal is to basically survive long enough to teach his kid how to survive, and as the story progresses he becomes more and more desperate in his drive to do this. It is clear at some points that the father isn't willing to take the kinds of risks that might actually provide a better life for his son, and his descent into paranoia is equally heartbreaking for its utter lack of hope as it is for it inevitable conclusion.

I recommend The Road, but don't expect something lighthearted. Sleep will not be an easy time coming after you finish this book.