Customer Reviews

The Aftermath: A Novel of Survival

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The premise is great: cruise ship passengers survive the end of the world and start anew.
The author is an engineer and this book is written as only an engineer can: dry and boring.
There is no life in the characters (at least in the first couple hundred pages which is as far as I got). It reads like a college textbook.
At one point, the survivors have a contest to name their new city. The author has them choose: "Engineering Village"...Geez, how creative!
I will give this book praise on one point: It cured my insomnia on two occasions. This is the absolute truth. Couldn't sleep, started reading and after about 3 pages I was out.

Imagine a "Survivor" series, only this one is for life and half of the tribe members are engineers. Or "Gilligan's Island" but with a huge cruise ship instead of the SS Minnow. Or try this: Cross Disney's "Swiss Family Robinson" with the world's favorite PC game, Sim City. And launch any of these scenarios with an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it event, only without the music from REM.

A cruise ship of esteemed engineers survives a Christmas Day comet that lands off America's Northwest coast and pulverizes, burns or floods almost the entire globe, leaving only a tiny safe zone off the east coast of South Africa. The climate for survival here is ideal, given the abundance of natural resources. Too bad the ship sinks, no surprise given that the charts are worthless after this world-rearranging event. After a brief introduction to the disaster, the book covers the first year of progress in this new world.

Florman knows his technical details. The driving point of the book is the idea that after the world having been subjected to the equivalent of "being bombed back to the Stone Age", how would life recover if the survisors were technical geniuses? Would the last two thousand years of the world's technical progress be replicated in a much shorter time frame, since we already know all the answers, we just don't have the tools, people or resources to be there?

But the people are boring and as colorless as the sterotypical engineers Florman apparently wants to humanize. Even the "artsy" few, like the dance instructor from the cruise, are cardboard characters. Florman attempts to inject drama with a multicultural pirate leader attempting to pillage the island. The dramatic effort fails just as the pillaging attempt does.

This might make a manual for post-Apocalyptic survival kit, if this is it, we're in for a long, tedious repopulation of the planet.

Florman has taken a great idea and drained every drop of interest out of it. Apparently, his subtext was, "What if the world was destroyed except for several thousand really boring wonks? What kind of committees would they form?" Okay, I'm glad that I now know about the preparation of and uses for potash, but a lot of what this book deals with-- the interlocking web of technologies-- is much more entertainingly dealt with in James Burke's "Connections." If you want a good end-of-the-world novel, reread "Alas, Babylon" and give this one a miss.

The Aftermath: A Novel of Survival by Samuel C. Florman is a very well-written book, although not very attention grabbing. It provides information on how to survive with the natural resources in Southern Africa when the world has been wiped out. Much of the book is meetings between the engineers aboard the Queen of Africa, a ship that survived the impact of a massive comet on Earth. The people in the meetings debate on how to prioritize their goals. Said meetings go on for pages, causing the reader to lose interest. The repetitiveness of the book gets annoying after reading it for about fifty pages. Since the Earth has been destroyed, for the most part, and their ship has sunk, the people have to start life from the beginning. There is also another group of people, who became named the Focus Group. They met in a line-dancing class and eventually just ended up talking about what was going on in the community. Wil Hardy, a scribe for the secret meetings, is part of this group. The others are not and don't know what happen at these secret meetings. There are six in this group, three girls, three boys, and they end up pairing together and getting married. That's very predictable, which usually snags the fun right out of a good read. Pretty boring, huh? Things get a tad bit exciting, however. Soon enough, a mad pirate queen, who has renamed herself Queen Ranavolana, tries to conquer Engineering Village, the village of the Queen of Africa's survivors. There is about one page of suspense, for she attacks in the middle of a wedding, the Focus Group's to be exact, and then her plan fails. The one interesting character that gets things moving gets shut down. That's where the interesting but ends. I would recommend this book for someone that likes boring books or has nothing better to do.

This book has an interesting premise... our modern world is essentially destroyed by colliding with a comet. However, after The Event the story quickly turns into the minutes of an endless series of committee meetings. I don't know if I can force myself to even finish this one.

A pleasing writer of non-fiction, his fiction sounds like it comes straight out of a writing cookbook. All of his characters are as developed as extras in a TV mini-series, and the book reads like the inventory list for a survival kit rather than an adventure novel. Worse, for an engineer, his scenario for the destruction of the planet is scientifically problematic -- either there should be more damage to the planet or far less.

I so very wish this book had been better executed -- it was well conceived.

This book is beyond bad. The premise is interesting: how a cruise ship full of engineers off the coast of Southern Africa handles the aftermath of the end of the world caused by a comet impact.

Well, if this novel is to be believed, the engineers take the event and its effects quite well, brushing the end of the world and the loss of family and friends aside with the same casual disregard they'd feel if they lost their favorite mug.

Most end of the world style novels attempt to grip you with how an ill-matched band of survivors come to terms with the catastrophe. Here, they are all engineers, so they form a number of subcomittees. There's no conflict, no disagreement, and absolutely no grasp of reality on the part of the author.

At some point his editor must have told Florman that a book about the end of the world requires at least a little conflict and not just lengthy treatises on the history of South Africa and lists of committee meetings. So he introduces a mad pirate queen. OK - I won't go there.

This book is ideal if you need something to prop up your wobbly desk.

This book started out great - the world has ended and cruise ship passengers find themselves alone in the world. Finally they get to Africa, realize their ship is sinking and evacuate. Once on land they begin to try to reinvent the technologies and materials of the industrial revolution.

This book would have been great, but it gets stuck in boring committie meetings that go on for pages. While it is interesting for a chapter or two, the reader eventually wonders when these people will just get to work!

Another problem - many of the ideas here are sexist. Women are automatically deligated to being the "housekeepers" of their homes and men made responsible for tasks in the workforce. Stephen Healey, one of the characters of the book, tells the committie:

"the individuals that i call the housekeepers-- mostly the mothers of our families -- work extremely hard... we can't send them out into fields and the factories if we hope to maintain a functioning society...we need them in the home to care for their families and to help put their shattered households back in order." (p. 117)

When batteries finally run out, the commitie realizes that they should use candles, and turn to the "three women in Engineering Village" who know how to dip and make candles.

I am highly disapointed in this book. Not only could the plot have been better thought out and not lost in committie meetings, but I would have thought such intelligence of the "Engineering Village" would not be lost on reducing the role of women to "housekeepers." I would have hoped that a surviving people would take the chance to improve on the problems and discriminations of their previous lives.

Florman is a man of considerable erudition and has written several truly excellent non-fiction books -- indeed, his non-fiction work can reach poetic levels of elegance and I highly recommend it. Therefore, as a big Florman fan and a civil engineer myself, I had high hopes for this book.

Unfortunately, and somewhat ironically, this attempt at fiction is very dull and boring. I finished the book, but with considerable difficulty. As other reviewers have noted, the characters and plot are lifeless and lack any depth or power. Rather than give us any insight into the human condition, the best this book can offer is to present some snippets of technical and other information, but these things are much more enjoyably and effectively learned from appropriate non-fiction sources.

I wish I had listened to other reviewers and not wasted my time slogging through this book -- since I'm a big fan of Florman's non-fiction, I wanted to give this book a real chance. What I can do now is to urge others not to repeat my mistake.

This book does not deserve the bad reviews it recieved from other readers who have posted here. It is very well thought out (and it is obvious the amount of research that went into it). At the end of the book, I was wishing there was a sequel, because I was curious about what would happen next.

What kind of government would be set up? What would happen to the narrator, what happened to the two boats that went out in search of the rest of the world?

It is very intriguing.

This book is a good book- in its catagory. You won't like it if you expect it to be an adventure novel, or... whatever. It is what it is- the story of a bunch of people trying to rebuild a society. Their story is not glamourous, or rife with dangerous situations. It doesn't dissolve into a gory, bloody mess.

If you read it for what it is, and not what you think it might be, you will probably like it.