Remembering Three Mile Island: 30 Years Later
March 28, 1979 - March 28, 2009

It’s the 30-year anniversary of the nation’s worst nuclear disaster: the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear reactor unit 2 at Middletown, PA on Wednesday March 28, 1979.

I was 18 at the time, and attending college and working at a local grocery store part-time. I remember hearing about ‘problems’ at the reactor, but TMI was located way far away near Harrisburg, a good three hour-drive south from New York’s Southern Tier. So I didn’t feel particularly alarmed. The news announcements tended to reiterate a reassuring message from the plant operators (and by extension the nuclear power industry): the reactor is safely contained, no radiation had been released, no need to panic, etc., etc. Of course, playing in the theatres at that time was ‘The China Syndrome’ with Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, in which a fictional California reactor undergoes a near-meltdown, an event which is covered up by the mendacious plant operators. So public awareness of potential nuclear disasters had been heightened.

Over the next few days it became clear that there had indeed been a major accident at the plant, and a significant amount of radiation had been discharged into the atmosphere. It was also clear that the plant operators had underestimated the severity of the damage to the reactor core, and things had come frighteningly close to a genuine disaster. Realization that a partial (i.e., 50 %) meltdown had taken place was not attained until 1982 when a remotely manipulated video camera was used to examine the reactor core.

With the advent of the thirty-year anniversary of the TMI accident, here at the PorPor Books Blog we'll take a look over the course of next month at several SF / thriller novels that deal with nuclear accidents, as well as some nonfiction accounts about rad exposure and its (gruesome) consequences.

Grab your Geiger-counters, your potassium iodide, your Neupogen, and your rad suit. It's time to step into the Zone of Contamination ......

Unchecked Fecundity

Unchecked Fecundity: the 'Quiverfull' Movement !

An interesting article at the March 17, 2009 Newsweek site about the bizarre 'Quiverfull' movement among some fundamentalist Christians. Basically, the idea is to abstain from any form of birth control and just crank out the kids - or, in Quiverfull lingo, 'blessings'. The Duggars of TLC's '18 and Counting' reality series are the best-known proponents. Obviously, a philosophy in conflict with that of the neo-Malthusians and Population Bombers !

illustration from Dorie Clark 's Portland Phoenix article

Book Review: Famine 1975 ! by William and Paul Paddock

Book Review: 'Famine 1975 !' by William and Paul Paddock3 / 5 Stars

In 1964 the Paddock brothers – William, an agronomist, and Paul, a diplomat – published ‘The Hungry Nations’, their neo-Malthusian analysis of the world population expansion and the ability – or inability- of grain-producing nations to meet the challenges of more mouths to feed. 

By writing ‘The Hungry Nations’, the Paddocks were clearly trying to site themselves as the newest and most attention-worthy of the ‘futurologists’ (the term was really not in use in ’64 but seems apt) who previously had mined neo-Malthusianism for fame and fortune: William Vogt in 1948 with ‘The Road to Survival’, and Harrison Brown with his ‘Challenge of Man’s Future’ (1954).

I haven’t read ‘The Hungry Nations’ and I haven’t been able to determine what sort of reception it got, but evidently the Paddocks felt it didn't get the readership that it deserved, because just three years later, in 1967, they published a similar book, this time with a much more provocative title: ‘Famine 1975 ! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive ?’ (Little, Brown, & Co., 276 pp).

Perhaps it was the unapologetically neo-Malthusian tenor of the title, or the social mood of the day was more receptive to the Paddock’s entreaties, but ‘Famine’ definitely created a stir and along with Vogt’s book influenced Paul R. Ehrlich to write ‘The Population Bomb’, which was a best-seller and a very influential book when it was published in 1968.

‘Famine’ is organized into three parts, each part having several chapters. Part One, “Inevitability of Famine in the Hungry Nations’, is a fast-moving overview of the world population situation ca. 1966, and sets the tone for the rest of the book’s main arguments: namely, the world’s grain-producing nations will be unable to meet the demand occasioned by the Third World’s burgeoning hordes. All efforts to improve crop yield in developing countries – be they scientific, economic, cultural, or demographic – are destined to fail , and by the mid-70s catastrophic famines will take place in many of these nations.

Part Two, ‘Nor Can the Resources and Talents of the Developed World Avert Famine from the Hungry Nations’ argues that despite impressive advances in crop yields, the developed world will be incapable of providing sufficient emergency grain relief to the starving countries. There is a cogent overview of the US PL 480 program (renamed ‘Food for Peace’ in 1966) which throughout the late 50s and early 60s shipped substantial amounts of donated grain to 111 countries and essentially kept millions of people in Pakistan and India from starving. Most Americans were, and are, ignorant of the scale and scope of the PL 480 program, but it was responsible for the enormous growth in what is the present-day Foreign Aid Industry.

The Paddocks were aware of Norman Borlaug’s efforts to breed high-yield wheat varieties at the time they wrote ‘Famine’, but in their estimation the ‘Green Revolution’ would be inadequate to save countries like India, the Philippines, Egypt, or Haiti from forthcoming disaster.

The final Part, ‘Potential Role of the United States During the Time of Famines’ is the most overtly Malthusian portion of the book. The Paddocks define the term ‘triage’ and propose to apply it to the hungry nations ca. 1975. Egypt, India, and Haiti will be declared ‘can’t be saved’ and left to starve, since the amount of aid necessary to bail out their malnourished millions will be so great as to leave little for anyone else. The Gambia and Libya are ‘walking wounded’ who can survive without immediate aid. Pakistan and Tunisia will be the beneficiaries of US food aid, if only because they have made some effort to implement population control campaigns and have a sufficiently robust political structure to make them worth saving.

Needless to say, the concept of letting millions of brown, black, and yellow-skinned people starve to death in order to save a select fraction deemed most Worthy was, and is, controversial and to modern-day observers the Paddocks are nothing less than bigoted and racist white men playing at God.

But it should be noted that in 1967 the Paddocks were by no means alone in forecasting dreadful times for the world’s poor. A sizeable number of their contemporary statesmen, agricultural scientists, social scientists, and demographers shared – if more demurely than the Paddocks – the idea that eventually the US would have to play God and provide food aid only to those nations with the best chance of surviving a famine.

As we know, the predicted 'Famine 1975 !' never took place, due in part to the advent of Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution, and some adroit, last-minute changes to their agricultural economies by the Pakistanis and Indians. William Paddock produced another book in 1976, titled 'Time of Famines: America and the World Food Crisis', which I have not read. 

Presumably, in 'Time of Famines' Paddock addressed the failure of his predictions in 'Famine 1975 !'. But I also would not be surprised if Paddock stated that the predictions of 1967 continued to loom, perhaps at a later date than the mid-1970s.  

It’s particularly interesting to look back at ‘Famine 1975 !’ and other neo-Malthusian manifestos of the 60s and 70s, now that food availability and world hunger are going hand-in-hand with the concern over global warming. 

As in October 2023, I write an updated version of this review, Time magazine - which now is simply an online news portal, one of many such competing for Clicks - has a provocative story posted. 

Maybe the Paddocks weren’t so wrong after all. We shall see ?!

'Heavy Metal' magazine: February 1979
Here's the front and back covers (by Derek Rigg and Bob Wakelin, respectively) and a three-page b & w story, '1996', by Chantal Montellier.
 

Book Review: Population Doomsday

Book Review: 'Population Doomsday' by Don Pendleton
3 / 5 Stars

‘Population Doomsday’ (192 pp., Pinnacle Books, 1970) was originally released as ‘1989: Population Doomsday’. The cover artist is unattributed. I note that the ‘gas mask’ theme of Eco-catastrophe SF used for this book was to be employed for the cover of John Brunner’s novel ‘The Sheep Look Up’, issued two years later.

Don Pendleton was the author of the very popular ‘Executioner’ series of action novels. He was inspired to write ‘Population Doomsday’ after reading Paul R. Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb, and in fact ‘Doomsday’ has a preface consisting of a letter to Ehrlich from Pendleton:

But if your population bomb is science, Dr Ehrlich, then my population doomsday is prophecy and as valid as any educated projections of the best scientific information presently available.

‘Doomsday’ is set early in 1989, when Ehrlich’s predictions have come true, and America is in the grip of an Eco-catastrophe. Most of the population of 390 million are forced to wear gas masks to cope with the dense smog in urban areas. Food and water are rationed, and people resort to profligate drug use to try and escape the depressing circumstances of their lives in a grossly overcrowded, polluted nation.

As the novel opens, Bill Vance, a newspaper editor and reporter, attends a news conference given by his friend and newly elected President: Royal Hackett. Desperate measures call for desperate solutions: Hackett is banning use of all motor vehicles save for those required for vital services. It’s just one of a number of quasi-dictatorial measures Hackett plans to unleash in an effort to prevent a disastrous breakdown in the social and economic order.

Whether Hackett's measures will be effective is open to question, as Vance soon finds himself invited to cover a disastrous smog event in Gary, Indiana. Vance and a detachment of troops don NBC suits and venture into the stricken city, there to find disturbing evidence of the toll taken by the smog event. This section of the book is very effective, recalling the memorable chapter in Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain when the Wildfire Team surveys the silent town of Piedmont, Arizona.  

Within a matter of weeks, other disastrous outbreaks of lethal air pollution begin to roil the US. President Hackett implements drastic measures to rein in the national economy, including a cessation of all heavy industry; mass layoffs; government-sanctioned euthanasia; and even tearing up airport runways to plant food crops. 

But are these measures enough to prevent the extinction of mankind ? Or will Hackett be forced to take even more dramatic measures to ensure that some remnant of humanity survives ?

Like his contemporaries Louis L’Amour, Evan Hunter (‘Ed McBain’) and John D. MacDonald, Pendleton earned a living by writing at least one, more often several, short novels a year (this in the era before word processors). Like those authors, he was skilled at delivering an engaging narrative within the confines of genre novels of 200 or fewer pages. The first 10-20 pages of such novels are used with great efficiency to give the reader necessary orientation in the setting of the narrative, and familiarity with the main characters. After that, the plot takes over and the story flows rapidly to its conclusion. Lengthy expositions revolving around plot points, or in-depth passages designed to showcase character development, simply weren’t included.

Readers looking for a more thoughtful and contemplative treatment of Eco-catastrophe SF may find ‘Population Doomsday’ a bit superficial compared to the novels by Brunner or Harry Harrison. But Pendleton's novel has its merits in its fast pacing and economy of style – something I often wished Brunner had employed when I was plodding through some of his chapters. 

‘Doomsday’ is a worthwhile example of how one writer of ‘genre’ fiction was influenced by the apocalyptic tenor of neo-Malthusian tomes such as The Population Bomb. If you find it on the shelf of a used bookstore, I recommend picking it up.

Book Review: Dawn of the Dead by George Romero and Susanna Sparrow

Book Review: 'Dawn of the Dead' by George Romero and Susanna Sparrow
3 / 5 Stars
 
In the days before VHS tapes and DVDs, novelizations of popular feature films were quite prevalent and some even appeared in hardcover as well as in the ubiquitous mass-market paperback format.

The author was usually given a script some months in advance of the film’s release date and expected to provide a novel coeval to (if not slightly in advance of) to the opening date.

Sometimes the novelization would contain material that had been edited out of the film, so you could read some interesting passages that made watching the film a bit more comprehensive. Novelizations were also helpful in figuring out some of the more obtuse plot points in a given film, particularly in the days when DVDs with director’s commentaries simply didn’t exist. Back in the 70s you were left with a choice of paying money to see the film again, hoping to gain an insight you didn’t catch the first time around; or you could pick up the novelization, and learn what happened from the printed page.

This hardbound novelization of George Romero’s zombie classic was written by Susana Sparrow and published in hardback in January 1978 by St. Martin's Press. Currently, copies in good condition have asking prices in excess of $100. Luckily, a trade paperback version from Gallery Books is available for well under $20.

As for Dawn of the Dead, Romero had actually finished the film and screened it in the Fall of 1978 at the Cannes film festival, but the US version didn’t appear in theatres until the late Spring / early Summer of 1979, by which time it was competing with big-budget films like Alien, Prophecy, and The Amityville Horror. 

From what I remember from that Summer, Dawn was seen as something of a ‘stoner’ film, in that mainstream audiences really weren’t attracted to it. While the film’s gore seems rather unremarkable today, back in ’79 it was considered quite explicit, and to avoid garnering a commercially unviable ‘X’ rating from the MPAA, Romero released it as ‘unrated’. The film was popular enough to re-energize the ‘zombie genre’, spawned an entire ecology of dire Italian-made rip-offs, and played a major role in making zombies an indelible part of contemporary pop culture.

The novelization is pretty much a one-to-one narrative of the events of the film. It opens with the world in the grip of the zombie infestation featured in Night of the Living Dead. In Philadelphia, a SWAT team is entering a tenement to deplete its undead population and in the carnage officers Roger DeMarco, and Bad-Azz Mofo Peter Washington, form a bond. They join up with WGON-TV manager Francine Parker and her helicopter pilot boyfriend Steve Andrews, and escape the city in the station’s news chopper. The refugees locate the ‘Shopper’s Paradise’ mall in the outskirts of Pittsburg and decide to make it their new home. Our intrepid heroes discover that even if a mall has a resident population of hungry zombies, as long as you stay out of their way, you can get by. 

At least, until some hardcore, post-apocalyptic bikers come around, and these biker’s aren’t in a mood to share…...

I won’t give away any more plot details so as not to spoil the experience for anyone who has yet to view the movie, but even if you have seen it, having a copy of the novelization around is a good excuse to indulge in some entertaining reading. Nowadays, with the ubiquitous nature of DVDs, video-on-demand libraries, and online movie resources, I don’t expect movie novelizations to have much allure for younger people. But if you’re over 40 you may find getting a copy of this book, in all its gory glory, will bring back some offbeat, fond memories of 70’s pop culture.

Eco-catastrophe 1970: The R.I.T. Reporter

Eco-catastrophe: 1970
from The Reporter, R.I.T., April 22, 1970

A fascinating look at the attitudes towards the pending Eco-catastrophe at college campuses in the Spring of 1970: the Rochester Institute of Technology (R.I.T.) school newspaper The Reporter. Along with articles and information about an upcoming environmental workshop, and depressing b&w photographs of mounds of garbage and polluted landscapes, the April 22 issue included a quasi-satirical article on preparing for the coming ecological trauma.

Zero Population Growth from Life magazine

'Zero Population Growth': Life Magazine, April 17, 1970

Far out ! I was only nine years old at the time.

There was considerable attention being paid to the inaugural Earth Day in April of 1970, and Life magazine, at that time one of the most high-profile media outlets in the country, decided to focus on the overpopulation crisis, which at the time was very much of a phenomenon.

This Life article has no author attribution (common for the magazine at that time) but does credit Arthur Rickerby for the photographs. 

Since Life primarily was a picture-based magazine, the accompanying text is rather spare. It focuses on efforts by college students at a number of east-coast schools to promote Zero Population Growth ('ZPG') via demonstrations and teach-ins. The article features Mr Population Bomb himself, Paul R. Ehrlich, and reveals that he had a vasectomy to do his part to control the population explosion !

There's no mistaking the earnestness of the younger participants. One must remember that the Vietnam War still was going on, and thus there were causes competing for visibility on the campuses. So it's significant that attention was given to the overpopulation issue.

Paul Ehrlich, the Population Bomb, and ZPG reached their apogee around 1972 - 1973, after which they quickly receded due to the advent of other, more immediate crises, such as the Arab oil embargo of October 1973 and its consequent economic dislocation. But for a time, the overpopulation movement was very much in the public eye.

Book Review: The End Bringers

Book Review: 'The End Bringers' by Douglas R. Mason

2 / 5 Stars

‘The End Bringers’ (Ballantine SF, 1973), by Douglas R. Mason, features a striking orange-red cover illustration of a city’s destruction by well-known artist Chris Foss.

The UK's Douglas Rankine Mason (1918 - 2013), who also wrote under the name John Rankine, was a prolific author of science fiction novels and short stories during the 1960s and 1970s. 

'The End Bringers' is set in the future, where, in the aftermath of some undescribed cataclysm, the remnants of mankind live in high-tech cities maintained by robots. Most of the robots are fashioned to have a quasi-human appearance, and, referred to as ‘androids’, they handle every function of the city’s operation. 

The human population is left to indulge in every pleasure they may desire. ‘Mood-control disks’ attached to each person’s wrist display their emotional state; if things get too upsetting, androids monitoring the disk intervene to reduce tension and send their human client back on their hedonistic way.

Mike Finnigan, who resides in the city of Wirral in what used to be Europe, is a malcontent among this society of lotus-eaters. Rather than taking part in orgies, drug parties, or simple leisure activities like sailing or swimming, Finnigan likes to ask questions about how the city came to be........and what, exactly, the robots gain from the unusual socio-economic arrangement.

One day a large segment of the city’s population is summoned to be carted off for ‘medical treatment’ related to an outbreak of disease. Mike Finnigan is one of the selectees, but instead of going along with the group, he covertly leaves the roundup and observes from a distance as the monorail-load of people travels to the vast agricultural districts outside the boundaries of the city. 

There, he discovers that the androids’ rule is not entirely benevolent...........

‘The End Bringers’ is a workmanlike production from author Mason. Its 208 pages don't reflect the innovative mindset of the New Wave era then dominating sci-fi writing, but rather are more in keeping with the standard tropes (such as the 'Rule of the Robots') of the genre.

While the potting is reasonably well handled, I can’t say Mason's writing is stylistically impressive. ‘Bringers’ has too many passages where he employs a breezy, future-sounding argot that instead comes across as stilted and contrived:

“That Alex has a point. You’d be a hard case to share a pillow with. Questions, questions. It’s just a feeling. A sense of obligation. The again bite of inwit.”

***

Wanda said, “I hope to God these zombies aren’t just playing dumb and waiting for us to get well in before they do their thing.”

***

Finnigan said, “Where would the entrances be ? In squares like this, for a monkey.”

I can't declare 'The End Bringers' a classic of 70s sci-fi, but those looking for a fast-paced, pulpish SF adventure may want to give it a try.

Book Review: No Room for Man

Book Review: 'No Room for Man' by Ralph S. Clem, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander


4/5 Stars

‘No Room for Man’ , with its minimalist, abstract cover illustration and slightly larger-than-mass market-paperback size, was conceived and published for use as a textbook. Editor Martin H. Greenberg (University of Wisconsin) is of course the ‘Martin Greenberg of 1000 anthologies’ fame, while co-editors Ralph Clem and Joseph Olander of Florida International University also were / are active in producing SF anthologies for both popular literature and classroom purposes.

‘Room’ is a rather curious anthology; it was published in 1979, by which time the ‘Population Bomb’ phenomenon pretty much had run its course and was in fact rapidly dwindling. It could be argued that ‘Room’ appeared at least five years too late. By ’79 the impact of Paul Ehrlich’s work, and that of fellow Bombers like William Vogt, Garrett Hardin, William and Paul Paddock, and Hugh Moore, had receded from the public consciousness, although it still resonated in the consciousness of what is now called the ‘international development’ community.

Without bogging down in an extended treatise on political or social controversies, how does ‘Room’ stand on its own as an SF anthology about overpopulation ? Quite well, in fact. [All of the stories in the anthology previously appeared in print between 1955 and 1976].

The book opens with J. G. Ballard’s ‘Billenium’, still a very effective tale despite appearing way back in 1962. It’s a deftly written look at the sociology and psychology of overcrowding; in a real sense it is the precursor to Ballard’s later novel ‘High Rise’.

Brian Aldiss contributes ‘Total Environment’, in which 500 young Indian couples are shut away in a sizeable structure and left to their own devices for more than a quarter-century as part of a (rather unethical) experiment to see how humans adapt to severe crowding. As the first 25 years approach expiration, a scientist is sent inside the structure to investigate what appear to be ESP powers among the teeming, fecund inhabitants. Nowadays the story would be considered VERY politically incorrect and would enrage Indians (marasmic Hindus in particular) as much as the spectacle of Richard Gere kissing Shilpa Shetty . The narrative suffers from abrupt jumps from one set of characters to another, all in the absence of adequate exposition about the why and wherefore of the Environment experiment. Despite these flaws, it still has a kind of voyeuristic appeal…something that the tourists of ‘Slumdog’ Bombay (Mumbai) must feel !

Two of the stories in the collection served as the basis for later novels. Harry Harrison’s ‘Roommates’ was expanded into ‘Make Room ! Make Room !’ which in turn became the basis for the feature film ‘Soylent Green’. ‘Roommates’ is a great overpopulation story, that’s all there is to say. Robert Silverberg’s ‘In the Beginning’ was later expanded to the novel ‘The World Inside’. ‘Beginning’ deals with a far-future society in which 75 billion people live their entire lives distributed among the floors of 3 km – tall skyscrapers, or ‘urbmons’. The story focuses on the psychological trauma experienced by a young woman who faces moving from one urbmon to another. In my opinion the story was a bit too subdued; the almost-magical advanced tech of the urbmon world has the effect of depleting the narrative of any real tension.

Cyril M. Kornbluth contributes ‘Shark Ship’, in which the near-future earth deals with overpopulation by creating vast fleets of crowded ships that endlessly sail the seas harvesting plankton to feed and clothe the multitudes on board. For at least the first half of the tale it’s a well-envisioned setting, and the thin margin for life or death aboard ship is effectively communicated. Unfortunately, the story’s second half takes a rather bizarre and obtuse turn into late 50’s ‘beat’ phrasing and social satire. One of the weaker entries in the anthology.

Mr. Population Bomb himself, Paul Ehrlich, contributes ‘Eco-Catastrophe !’ in which he lays out a fictionalized course of events that sees the world going through mass starvation and ecological collapse in the 1970’s and Edward ‘Teddy’ Kennedy as President ! Whether or not one is a devotee of the Bomber philosophy, it’s an effective essay, and some might argue it retains its relevance today, forty years after first appearing in print.

Frank M. Robinson cleverly depicts an ultra-polluted LA megalopolis in the early 21st century in ‘East Wind, West Wind’. Things are so bad that smoking a cigarette is a misdemeanor and owning a carton a felony ! People lurch around the streets in the dim light of mid-afternoon choking and pulling on gas masks. Someone out in the Hollywood Hills is in possession of an illegal internal combustion engine vehicle and the narrator is on the case. ‘East Wind, West Wind’ effectively communicates pollution paranoia ca. 1970 and it’s one of the better stories in the collection.

Frederik Pohl’s ‘The Census Takers' deals with a near-future world in which overpopulation is solved via radical means. The main storyline contains enough inherent drama, yet Pohl subtracts from it by including a rather contrived Sci-Fi subplot that leads to a not-so-surprising ending.

Maggie Nadler’s ‘The Secret’ is among the best entries in the anthology. In a near-future, overcrowded world where parents are permitted no more than two children, can someone get away with breaking the rules ? ‘The Secret’ takes place entirely within the apartments and hallways of a dingy tenement, and involves a small cast of characters, but nonetheless delivers a harrowing example of how people under stress can commit the most quietly vicious of acts.

‘Statistician’s Day’ by James Blish deals with England in 1990, after the world-wide Famine of 1980 led to the implementation of mandatory birth control. It’s one of the few SF stories I’ve ever read that references the Chi-Square test - ! As is typical with Blish, the tale has an understated tone, and seems a bit lacking in energy compared to some of the other entries in the anthology.

How can an illiterate Third Worlder, whose single recreation in an otherwise drab existence is sex, be persuaded to remain chaste during his wife’s fertile period ?

This line of dialogue from ‘Triage’, by William Walling, unapologetically signals a story that bases its narrative on the Population Bomb ethos. Set in the near future, when Ehrlich’s Eco-Catastrophe has indeed come to pass, Dr Victoria Duino helms the UN Department of Environment and Population (UNDEP), where she is forced to make routine decisions as to whether or not to deliver food aid to starving millions in Egypt and other squalid hellholes. Duino is a sympathetic character despite having to play God on a continuous basis; her battles with factions on the conservative and liberal sides of responding to the Eco-Catastrophe define the story's narrative.

‘No Room for Man’ closes with two very brief (i.e., two-page) short-shorts. Theodore Cogswell’s ‘Probability Zero !’ is a humorous look at the statistical fallacy of back-calculating from one’s family tree in order to arrive at an estimation of the number of people alive in preceding generations. ‘Doll’s Demise’, by George Guthridge, examines the psychology of child-bearing in the context of population control efforts, and in its oblique way reminds the reader that appeals to common sense and logic may be fallible in the absence of an understanding of the whys and wherefores of reproduction.

All in all, ‘No Room for Man’ is a very readable and informative anthology, and it’s too bad it was never released in a mass-market paperback format. It’s an interesting take on the latter years of the Population Bomb era, and readers of SF at that time may find some nostalgia within its pages. And anyone curious about how writers dealt with one of the first ‘Eco-Catastrophe’ themes of modern pop culture will find worthy material here.

Book Review: Firelance

Book Review: 'Firelance' by David Mace


4 / 5 Stars

‘Firelance’ (1986; 314 pp) is a near-future military SF novel that takes place nine weeks after a nuclear war between NATO and the Soviet Bloc. The resultant devastation- billions dead, cities little more than mounds of ashes- is compounded by the advent of ‘Nuclear Winter’, with essentially the entire surface of the earth gripped by perpetual darkness, freezing temperatures, strong gales, and snow.

Nonetheless, elements in what remains of the US government are determined to continue the conflict and to do so, the ultra-modern battleship ‘Vindicator’ is dispatched to cross the Atlantic and loose volleys of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles onto the Soviet mainland.

The Vindicator is a 56,000 ton ‘Nemesis’ class ship, with advanced electronics gear for navigation, self-defense, and missile targeting; it comes with a complement of F-28 ‘Skycat’ VTOL fighters to repel enemy air attacks. In short, it’s the ideal ‘Doomsday’ weapons platform and needless to say, whatever remains of the Soviet armed forces are intent on sinking it before it reaches the cruise missile launch point in the North Atlantic.

The main plot line follows the Vindicator as it sets off on its mission and faces threats from Russian submarines, aircraft, and anti-ship missiles, with at-sea operations hampered by the abysmal weather and the knowledge that there are few, if any, allied forces left to offer assistance.

There is a large cast of characters, including Captain Bedford, commander of the Vindicator; Gloria Craze, the ship’s psychologist; David Drexel, a British contractor; First Officer John Boyce; and Bradford Kylander and Eileen Jenninger, members of the national security cabal that has given the ship its mission.

The narrative shifts from one character to another as a plot device to inform the reader on various aspects of naval combat, post-apocalyptic political maneuvering, the meteorology of nuclear winter, and the moral and ethical implications of committing what is essentially racial suicide.

Firelance is in many ways very similar to the technothriller bestsellers written by Tom Clancy throughout the 80s (‘Red Storm Rising’ is perhaps its closest analogue). Practically every other page contains a mini-treatise on some aspect of military technology; there are lots and lots of acronyms, and episodes of combat are relayed in a dry, quasi-clinical style. The prose is often dense and overly descriptive, and the insertion of numerous sub-plots and tangential incidents means the novel takes too long to get to the anticipated resolution of the main plot.

However, as a Britisher and a European, author David Mace is determined to avoid infusing his novel with the optimistic, ‘Team USA’ rah-rah spirit of the Clancy, Harold Coyle, or Larry Bond novels.

Firelance’s setting is unrelentingly bleak and depressing and is more akin to Ralph Peters’s novel ‘The War in 2020’. The Navy officers manning the Vindicator are by no means militaristic zealots, but they are so well inculcated in the military ethos of following orders that it takes some time for them to fully grasp what the Vindicator is designed to accomplish. By the time the ship is underway many of them begin to question the absurd nature of their mission, and their ambivalence contributes to the tension surrounding the action aboard the Vindicator. There are no real winners in what will be the last battle of the last war.

Firelance’s downbeat attitude will probably not have much initial appeal to the Clancy school of technothriller fans, but if they stick with it, I think they’ll find the book is rewarding in its own understated way.

Author Mace published a number of books in the 80s and early 90s. All are out of print but some, such as ‘Demon 4’ and ‘Nightrider’, are available for reasonable prices at amazon.com and other used book outlets. The author has an unpublished novel, ‘Celestial Rain’, available at his website.

OMAC by Jack Kirby (first issue, September - October 1974)

I remember buying the first issue of OMAC in a corner drugstore in the small upstate New York town of Hancock in the late Summer of 1974. All through the early 70s Jack Kirby had been producing some great books - such as 'Kammandi' and 'The Demon' - so I was interested in giving OMAC ('One Man Army Corps') a try. As with his other DC titles, Kirby's OMAC was ably inked by Mike Royer.

Along with the first three pages of the comic, I’ve scanned an advertisement for what appears to be a steal of a deal for some toy soldiers (in reality they were all 5 mm thick, super -cheap plastic things), and an essay (in lieu of a Letters Page) by Kirby in which he lays out the philosophy behind OMAC. It’s an interesting read, and a quasi – nostalgic look at pop culture in the ‘Future Shock’ era of the early 70’s. Kirby is channeling many of Alvin Toffler’s concepts with the scripting of OMAC, most revolving around Toffler’s contention that the pace of technological change was moving so fast that mankind would have increasing problems absorbing these events and handling them responsibly.

According to its Wiki entry, OMAC only lasted eight issues before being canceled. The hero / concept still pops up occasionally in various DC titles. A 200-page hardbound collection of the Kirby OMAC issues was published by DC in July of 2008 and is available at amazon.com.