Customer Reviews

City Not Long After (Pan Fantasy)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Set in San Francisco "not long after" most of the population has died. Some of the survivors have decided to stay in the City they love and have established an odd community of hippies, artists and misfits.
The plot centers around their decision to resist militaristic invaders on their own terms.

This is a lyrical and entrancing novel with a solid plot and interesting charachters. The subject matter could easily dissolve into New Age sentimentality but Murphy comes through with shinning colors, staying true to the characters while delivering an original and fascinating story with a poetic and mythological feel.

If you live in San Francisco you must read this. If you don't live here it'll make you wish you did.

The author, Pat Murphy has been one of my favorites for years. Lately I got to tracking down all that she has written and came upon this wonderful gem.
Other reviewers have reiterated the story for you - don't believe any of it until you have read it for yourself. The tease I will give you - I could not put it down.
I think it is the best book I have read in awhile (maybe 2 or 3 years) and I am an avid reader; at least a book a week sometimes a book a day. And I have read some good ones.
This book filled me with unaccountable glee and random bouts of laughing and crying. It was philosophically intellectual, artistically rendered in joy and hope, intertwined with magic and possibility. But mostly it is a story of the absolute reality of art and the responsibilities of artists; to change the world, make it over in the image that delights them the best, and nothing is ever the same afterwards. That is what this book did to me, and I am grateful.
But I am not selling my copy; it goes into the save forever to read over and over group.

I first stumbled upon this book some seven-odd years ago, when I was just moving into the beginnings of a proverbial intellectual 'awakening.' I spent perhaps four months tracking it down, as it was out of print and not carried at my library; read it at least a half-dozen times while it was in my posession, and only begrudgingly gave it up when the time was due (though it was rather tempting to keep and fess up the library fine).

In hindsight, this book is idealistic in nature: It is a peaceful, love-beaded dystopian novel with more than its share of hope. It tells the story of a community of citizens who have migrated to San Francisco, in an event to both continue with their crafts (There are painters, sculpters, just plain tinkerers). They also attempt to organise themselves against the "General," a militaristic dictator-esque figure moving across America.

This settlement comes in the wake of an outbreak of plague, as a result of an altruistic attempt to bring peace to the world, and to the United States.

Although a children's book, this novel still stands out in my mind as being one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Rarely do a book's details stay with one for the better part of ten years, in the clarity that this one has. Well-worth tracking down, or buying used.

I've read this book a number of times since I first discovered it a few years ago. The story & characters stay at the edge of my memory and as the details get blurry, I take it out & read it again. Pat Murphy's description of San Franscisco as the artists transform it, is so vivid that I can see their art and understand its impact. It's an entrancing book -- I wish it had a sequel.

Following the Plague that destroyed most the inhabitants of America, the City of San Fransiscoe remains populated by artists, hippies and the like. An army general is on a course to re-unite the once great America and San Fransisco is the city next in line on his agenda - but the artists resist, not by military confrontation - but by 'fighting with their art and creativity.' The characters are so alive and energetic - the story is chilling, memorable and superbly told by Pat Murphy. This is one of the greats - not to be missed!!!

This is a wonderful and refreshing subversion of the post apocalyptical tradition, for which David Brin's The Postman stands as a paradigm for. Though at times The Postman is spiritual, it does portray the issues of national reunification after a catastrophe as a given and the achievement of that reunification (or resistance to it) as inevitably violent.

Though Kim Stanley Robinson's Wild Shore critiques this patriotic urge deliciously, only Murphy has managed to outright attack it. There are no natural or artificial forces making survival a struggle in Murphy's post-civilised Utopia. Instead, the San Francisco of this unspecified future is alive and well - albeit very underpopulated - and is in fact flourishing after a plague has indiscriminately wiping out all but an anarchic cross-section of artists. Cries for `Progress' and `Order' are the exception, and the majority feel "disorder works just fine."

Through her characters, Murphy could be imagined to be having an argument with other speculative fiction writers: "It seems we have very basic disagreement ... You seem to think that joining together into a larger and more powerful nation is automatically good ... Personally, I've always thought that nations were tremendously overrated."

The City, Not Long After asks what we would become outside of civilisation, and what San Francisco would be without the U.S. It provides a lovely answer.

So there's this plague, see, that wipes out about 99.9 percent of the population. San Francisco is a big artist commune - one group paints the Golden Gate Bridge blue. An army decides to take over. The ensuing war is one of the oddest battles ever fought - soldiers, cut down by tranquilizers, have the word DEAD painted on their cheeks, and are warned via a letter that if they don't consider themselves hors-de-combat, they may very well die for real next time. Other soldiers are dived-bombed with water balloons full of jasmine perfume and LSD. Probably the lowest body count of any book featuring battle scenes. I read this book on a whim and fell madly in love with it. I have to reread it again soon.

One thing I can say about this author, she sure knows how to belabor a point. She states and restates her points so much that I want to shake her and say "we get it!!" "you said that already!"
It is a very unfocused novel. It seems rather unsure of what it wants to be about.
Ms. Murphy seems primarily concerned with describing how people and events look and feel in detail, this would be good if it were accompanied with plot development and fleshed out characters but it isn't.
She appears to be trying TOO hard to make certain characters cool and describes how they look and act over and over again without actually adding anything to their personalities. Dialogue is incredibly cliched and lame and the characters are horribly 2-D.
Her main character about half way through the book suddenly becomes some worldly wise tough girl whereas a few chapters earlier she'd been someone who'd had very limited interactions with other people her entire life. Extremely incongruous.
There is too much description about unimportant things, almost the entire first half of the novel is about characters that matter little to the plot, and about the art that they do. Plot digressions abound.
There are many things that happen without any explanation at all, and there are repeated mentions of "the city" as an entity but no explanation as to how a city can act autonomously of the people in it. Various events happen and are described in detail but are given no explanation as to how or why they happened. For example: One day there is a rain of flowers from the sky that covers the city in a thick layer of blossoms. It is described in detail and one of the characters even attempts to identify the flowers - "ah!" you may think "this must be important!" but you'd be wrong to think that. No mention is made of this afterward at all.

If this novel has a theme it seems to be "make art not war" which actually is a quite lame idea around which to base a novel and even that theme is quite undeveloped. What is most disappointing is that it might easily have been quite an interesting book, but it was badly handled.

It is not fair to judge The City, Not Long After as a true post apocalyptic book. Frankly, most fans of the genre, as I am, will likely scratch their head after reading it with a confused look on their face (much as I did). While not going into much detail on the plot, which other reviewers have summarized done well, the basic idea is that funky artists and sculptors live in peace in a post apocalyptic San Francisco and a military guy from around Sacramento who believes he is trying to unify a "new America" wants to take over and fold San Fran into his ever growing sphere of influence. Start with the fact that the city itself is somehow a living being trying to look after the welfare of its residents, add a young woman (the main protagonist) who is a newcomer to the city and chases the spirit of her dead mother around the city, mix in a virtually bloodless war between the 50 city fighters and the squad of 150 military folks who invade, and perhaps you will get a clue as to how the book unfolds. Hey there, stop scratching your head, I told you it was confusing.

It is clear from reading the book that it was never meant as a realistic portrait of a possible post apocalyptic world. My gut feeling says to me that the author was trying to write a metaphorical story about the nature of peace and the consequences of actions. Do we fight and kill, or do we rise above it? Are good intentions enough to justify bad endings? On that level I give her some credit, but that credit can only be given when accepting that the story is pretty preposterous as a serious story. I can accept allegorical stories that are intended to teach a lesson, I just wish there was more to it than just that.

In the end I'm not really sure what to make of it. The premise seems interesting...years after a plague has wiped out most of humanity, a young woman who grew up in a remote mountain house flees the dangerous hill country after her mother's death and makes it to San Francisco only to find a group of new age artists and sculptors who control the city and are re-beautifying the city through graffiti and various large scale art projects. Strange, yes, but potentially interesting. However, just when I thought I might start to understand all the wacky and interesting folks who inhabit this particular San Francisco, the book devolved into a mystical but strangely preposterous military invasion book. The bad guy invades and the artists defend themselves in with their own non violent methods. The underlying themes of war and peace, of right and wrong, are worthwhile, but on every other level the book is just confusing and weird.

Rich with purple prose this dreamy hippy tale is inconsistant and overwrought.

A post-apocalyptic artist commune in San Francisco bands together to oppose a militaristic tin-pot general.

This could be a great story however the tale wanders aimlessly as other reviewers have stated. The protagonist suddenly changed from being an independant, adventuresome young women to swooning into the male character DannyBoy's arms! The only black character is noted for being beautiful with velvet skin, no other characteristics are worthy of discussing.

Characters are introduced with long backstories that add little to the story. Characters seem to wile away their time in beautification projects for the ruined San Francisco, living on the ruins of the town - sort of a post-apocalyptic social security cheque that allows them to paint and smoke joints! There seems to be no need for sanitation, housing works or food production.

A great idea that the post-apocalyptic landscape does not have to describe all the bleakness of books like "The Road" but maybe swings too far.