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Slow Apocalypse (2012)

by John Varley(Favorite Author)

3.41 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0441017576 (ISBN13: 9780441017577)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Ace Hardcover

review 1: I fell in love with Varley’s short fiction when I first read some of it back in the 1980s, and his The Ophiuchi Hotline remains a favourite sf novel. I even sort of like Millennium, the film adaptation of his short story ‘Air Raid’, which he then novelised as, er, Millennium. Since 1998′s The Golden Globe (which I really must reread one of these days), I’ve bought his books in hardback on publication – he’s no longer published in the UK, so I’ve had to order them from the US. Sadly, none of his recent novels have quite matched up to those earlier works. And, unfortunately, Slow Apocalypse is more of the same. A Hollywood-based television writer, Dave Marshall, learns from a secretive ex-military contact that the US experimented with a bacteria to render ene... moremy oil fields unusable, but that the scientist responsible turned rogue and released the bug into the wild. Marshall thinks the story is excellent material for a movie, one that will reinvigorate his stalled career. Then oil wells around the world start to explode… Soon, there’s very little petrol available, and other resources – such as food – which rely on petrol for transportation also become scarce. A huge earthquake then strikes Los Angeles, near-destroying the city, and society collapses. Marshall and family join together with their neighbours in the canyon in which they live to safeguard their houses. Because he heard the story early, Marshall has managed to stockpile plenty of supplies, but he’s afraid his neighbours may soon want to him to “share”. Also, their current redoubt is unsustainable for much longer – especially after a huge brush fire sweeps out of the hills and renders most of the city uninhabitable. The government is proving no help, and aid is virtually non-existent. So Marshall agrees to travel south with a group of close friends and colleagues, in search of somewhere sustainable to settle. It’s plain that Slow Apocalypse was written as a commercial disaster novel, and if it gives Varley’s career a boost than that’s all to the good. But. I found it really dull. Much of the book consists of Marshall – with wife or daughter – driving about LA and witnessing the damage done to it by the quake and subsequent breakdown of law and order. The whole thing reads prescriptively. There are a number of quite good action set-pieces, but they’re not enough to enliven the narrative. There’s also a Heinlein-esque mouthpiece character, but Varley has always been able to make such characters more palatable than Heinlein ever did. The plot is as predictable as a Hollywood movie, and might well follow Hollywood’s over-used three-act arc. Disappointing.
review 2: It was all right but moved at a snails pace. Basically Kevin J. Anderson's "Ill Wind" but, without a climax and not as much character development. Most other books of this type focus on the clashes of different societies or restructuring society or how to survive, (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle do a great job of all of these things in "Lucifer's Hammer". If you haven't read it and you like these kind of books, Get It!), but Varley hammers the theme of needing to do the right thing and help others over and over and over... So much so, that it seems the only theme and everything else in the story is just something to carry it out. This book may have appeal to those that are very familiar with the L.A./Southern Cali area as it gives exquisite detail re: the area and the devastation it suffers in this slow-reading apocalypse. less

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