Customer Reviews

Dies the Fire (Emberverse)

5 star:		(61)
4 star:		(61)
3 star:		(48)
2 star:		(46)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

I'm a big fan of novels that take humanity and mix things up by altering the familiar scenario. Say by sending a community back in time with all their technology in tact, but with no access to the resources necessary to sustain that technology.

Well, Stirling has taken that premise and twisted it here. What if our modern day society was suddenly bereft of its technology? Anything powered by electricity, batteries, or gasoline suddenly useless? Gunpowder chemically altered to loose its highly explosive tendencies?

What would society do, without irrigation and machinery to run the massive farms, without refineries, and trucks, and refrigeration?

With six billion people on the planet, the resulting chaos is not at all cheerful. We never actually see the savage toll in a city larger than Portland (and even there not directly), but allusions to what it must be like in New York or Tokyo, and to what happened in St. Louis say plenty.

The story unfolds brilliantly, as people slowly begin to band together, and struggle to survive in this new world. They must learn how to farm, ride horses, make weapons, and then use them. And Stirling does an excellent job portraying the difficulty of each, with a particularly inspired source of metal for swords.

This book is one part nightmare, one part medievalist's fantasy, which makes its villain all the more fitting.

If you're wavering, pick up a copy, it's well worth the read.

There is an excellent half a story in this book somewhere. The problem is wading through the other half to get there. Our two main protagonist's Mike Havel and Juniper Mackenzie are quite interesting characters. But in some ways that is a bad thing. Why you say, "aren't interesting characters the reason you read a story?" Very true, but with any novel based on fiction there is a suspension of disbelief that an author must ask of his readers. Sometimes credibility is stretched and sometimes it is shattered - much like stepping on a tourist's snow globe of Kooskia, ID.

As a Marine and resident of western Montana I was predisposed to identify with Mike Havel the character, but then I found out that Mike was former Force Recon (Sniper qualified too!), Gulf War veteran, master of the Finnish fighting knife and raised as an Indian tracker/hunter. I am not quite sure if such a person exists in reality but I am willing to go with it if the author doesn't beat me over the head with it multiple times throughout his book.

This compounds with the problem that our protagonist's very survival isn't just a matter of elite breeding and an unlikely intersection of family trees but also they happen upon expert bowyer/fletchers, horse hand/blacksmiths, and SCA guru's not to mention library's containing everything you ever wanted to know about ancient warrior societies, growing crops and mounted combat. Maybe this is necessary for an interesting story, but couldn't they just get lucky killing people instead of getting lucky knowing how to kill people?

There is also the problem with explosives, electricity, and pressurized gases. Every author does some hand waving to sell a story, Stirling backs himself into a corner with his Change and barely goes through the motions to explain it. The problem arises when fire works, hot air balloons work, gunpowder doesn't work, electricity doesn't work, and steam power doesn't work. So, burning coal to produce steam doesn't work in the same way that burning propane heats air and causes that hot air balloon to rise? I think as a reader I would allow Stirling to wave his hands and say this doesn't work, that does work, this doesn't etc. But when this is added to the string of luck of our characters on top of their already .005% of the human population backgrounds it just becomes a tedious exercise.

The final nail in the series' coffin for me was the ludicrous timeline for the fall of civilized man and the "Woah" scary bad people dynamic. First of all it is going to take a whole lot longer than a few months for people to abandon all signs of civilization and start eating each other. Will it happen? Yes most definitely, but not so quickly and certainly not to the degree of rolling around in your own filth and eating other peoples feet that is shown in the book after a month or two. This certainly is a way for Stirling to point at "baaaaaad" people which need to be bumped off in mass, but I reject that killing in any piece of fiction needs to be dumbed down in such a way.

I certainly won't be moving on to the rest of these books and depending on your tastes in fiction if you must read something post-apocalyptic I would suggest Cormac McCarthy's "The Road".

Stirling devised an ingenious "sequel" to his Nantucket trilogy. In the latter, readers must have seethed with frustration at how limited the Americans were in their capabilities. Limited by their small numbers and the sheer complexity of 20th century society, they had to slip back to level of the early Industrial Revolution. But the trilogy shows them clambering back up the ladder of industrial progress. How some readers must have wondered - what if the Nantuckers had several thousand more Americans with them, or many more supplies and equipment. The road back would surely have been easier.

Here this book starts off a new trilogy, in the world left behind. Some 6 billion people on it. He puts a twist here. The modern chemistry is permanently squelched. People have to fall back centuries. So while there is this resemblence to the other trilogy, here the fall seems irredeemable. All the panoply of people and hardware, with most of the latter now junk. Very ironic.

The book is a darker vision than the Nantucket scenario. While the ending might be positive, the overall ambience seems negative. It invokes comparison to the dystopic Draka series, that made Stirling famous amongst science fiction fans.

I had just finished reading Sterling's book "Island on the Sea of Eternity" when I picked up this book.

I expected it (based on his previous series) to be a pulpy mediocre speculative look at the "end of the world."

Unfortunately the book was so poorly written and unbelievable that I couldn't get past the first 100 or so pages. At least with the Island series the reader is only expected to believe that the island of Nantucket is mysteriously thrown back 3,000 years in time.

In Dies the Fire, however, the reader is expected to believe that not only have all electronics been permanently destroyed, but the physical laws of the universe have selectively changed to keep gunpowder from burning, the internal combustion engine from working, and steam from creating pressure.

And this is all applied inconsistently as at different points in the story things that should be effected by this "magical" change in the laws of nature actually work.

Needless to say, I found it almost impossible to suspend disbelief while trying to read this book.

I also found it highly unlikely that within an hour of this "change" happening, people would be at each other with knives and weapons in the streets going at each other--as if people's immediate reaction to blackouts is looting and murder.

I could go on and on about how poorly I think the book was written, but I'll leave it there.

Most people who have an interest in writing know that there are several rules that you should not break in order to keep your writing on track and interesting. This book breaks them all, and unashamedly at that. A good book must develop conflict. The characters need to be under some kind of stress or the story isn't interesting. Not only do the characters seem happy about their plight, almost all of the characters possess archaic skills or traits that allow them to thrive in the post-Change world. This makes for incredibly boring reading, as the characters' actions are extremely predictable and little to no growth is shown.

Another big rule in fiction writing is to avoid digression. This book has entire chapters devoted to Wiccan rituals that add absolutely nothing to the plot. They seem to be there simply because the author really wanted the reader to become immersed in the Wiccan religion and the Wiccan practices, but those digressions are uninteresting and pointless.

The plot itself isn't anything new, and frankly, better authors have done better jobs of it. How this tripe got past any agent or editor is beyond me.

In this novel, the world Changes, with a capital C, literally in a flash, and the characters survive by going medieval. Although Stirling's workmanlike prose is no pleasure to read for its own sake, his attention to detail is painstaking and often edifying, and his premise holds the possibility of an engrossing adventure. Sadly, a few overarching flaws unsuspend my disbelief.

One nagging detail is Stirling's depiction of Juniper, the Wiccan point-of-view character. You know how you can forget a friend's religion for days or weeks at a time, until something suddenly reminds you of it? Stirling never lets us forget Juniper's religion for even half a page. He litters her every thought and utterance with "blessed be" and "by the Cosmic Sphincter" and so on. It's reminiscent of children's books by Richard Scarry, where you know you're in France because all the animals are wearing berets and saying "ooh la la" and running around the Eiffel Tower. Same with every major character's ethnicity. Instead of just showing us what Mike Havel is like, Stirling constantly reminds us that Mike is of Finnish descent. In real life, one might ask who gives a damn. In fiction, it comes across as a substitute for characterization.

Still, I don't read novels like this for the author's mastery of form, and so I'm willing to overlook some awkwardness. What I can't overlook is the incredible way the police and military simply evaporate after the Change. The last we see of the police as a social institution is some poor, clueless cop getting a beatdown from rioters in the first minutes after the Change. "Click click, oh no, my gun doesn't work! What ever shall I do?" That's pretty much it for the police, who are never mentioned again, except for a few perfunctory sheriff types who show up later, and this is because (if I follow the logic) police use firearms, and firearms no longer work. I have to wonder if Stirling ever met a cop, much less asked one what he'd do in case of, oh, I don't know, an emergency. Maybe some of them would think to rendezvous at, say, police headquarters. Maybe they would seek to control the rioters not with firearms, but-- and this is sheer speculation on my part-- with riot control tactics and materiel.

For that matter, since firearms no longer work, who in America might have things like helmets, body armor, shields, hand weapons, and even horses lying around? And who might be trained in the coordinated use of these things against superior numbers? I would say the police. Stirling would say Wiccans and the Society for Creative Anachronism.

Please. Cops have heard of weapons other than firearms. I'm sure they're on speaking terms with clubs, boot knives, machetes, and hatchets. I'll bet not a few of them have crossbows lying around the house. And it's not like they'd have to become hardened to full-contact mayhem. They're already into it.

It takes Stirling several hundred pages to get to homemade Napalm. I thought of it the first time Stirling showed some SCA clown ("the Protector") mustering armored footmen at a city building. The cops would be sure to think of Napalm, too, and they wouldn't be trying to arrest these guys. Martial law would be declared, and the Protector's men would be considered traitors to the US government (a concept that I think would survive a mere communications outage, at least in the minds of cops). I'm afraid it'd be summary justice in the field for the Protector, and strangulation in the cradle for his nascent army.

And where's the National Guard? Or any other established military force, for that matter? Oh, that's right-- they have firearms and radios, so when those cease to function, the armed forces cease to exist. So, too, does any pre-existing concept of nation or state. If something like this happened in my neighborhood, the first thing I'd grab is a copy of the Constitution and an American flag. I'd march under that and preach to recruits about how we're all Americans and we must preserve the Union and blah blah blah. Not one person in Stirling's world thinks of this. Instead they form groovy new cave bear clans and whip up banners and heraldry for them.

But I guess swallowing this logic is the only way to turn today's American West into feudal Britain.

Even having swallowed this logic, I wonder if the American West would look like feudal Britain. Britain in the Middle Ages was a crowded little island. The post-Change American West is a vast expanse of prairie and mountains, sparsely populated. Would armored heavy footmen be effective in such a place? Stirling correctly shows how mounted archers make short work of even armored footmen, and how swiftness and stamina are the deciding factors in such an engagement, and how armored riders negatively affect both. So I wonder if a successful military power in the post-Change West would resemble the Sioux nations more than the feudal monarchies of Europe. Indeed, it took the advent of the railroad and the repeating rifle to displace the Plains Indians. Why should Stirling's West be so different?

But that's a minor point compared to the instant disappearance of existing armed authority and the perpetually annoying characterization of Juniper. Strangely, I enjoyed the book more than this review might imply-I guess I'm a sucker for guys whacking each other with swords, and Stirling renders that element with precision and authority. But considering the parts that bugged me, I can't give it more than a mediocre rating.

You have probably read the character synopsis and storyline already, so I will save you that, my little rant focuses on the "Pfffftt" moments in the story which, sadly, are myriad.

This was easily one of the worst post-apocalypse books I have ever read in that the necessities for survival were
made conveniently available, so much so that you have to wonder how the author managed to keep the good guys from discovering alien technology that could render them invisible or something.

Where do I start?

Heroine Juniper and her merry band make it to her mountain hideaway where they discover that their closest neighbors are not only conveniently dead (no difficult problems about sharing their stuff) but left behind a house jammed to the rafters with everything from medicine to food to blankets. The barn is stocked with seed potatoes and hay (because surprise, the seed tater delivery guy was there the day of The Change), there are chickens and cows for meat and milk, and the deceased former owners even managed to make sure the pasture gates were closed so the critters couldn't wander away. Hooray! Bonus: Juniper's own nearby cabin can't be seen from the road and is conveniently located near a clear stream and wonderfully poetic meadows.

As for everything else needed to make make it in this exciting new world, have no fear, wonderful coincidence and a generous author will provide.

The party will need trained horses for transport and armored cavalry: Up walks Bob, the expert horse wrangler. I know I know, this isn't horse country so what am I doing here.

The horses and commune defenders need a blacksmith: Hi there, I'm Jim the real estate guy whose side hobby just happens to be blacksmithing, and yes, I can whip together a full suit of chainmail in about two days and a perfectly balanced morningstar in one.

The brave defenders will require non-gunpowder weaponry: Good morning everyone, I'm Tom, I was an interpretive dancer before The Change but luckily I dabbled in the art of creating professional-grade longbows by hand using all natural materials.

The party needs ammo for Tom's bows? No problem: Hey hey hey, Susan here, I'm a fantastic cook, former stay at
home mom AND I know the arcane art of fletching arrows using the feathers from local blue-breasted sparrows.

All of these historical artists just happened to be wandering around in the remote mountains and by sheer luck they ran into kindly Juniper. Why they didn't starve or freeze to death like everyone else, or get murdered by Christian survivalists found elsewhere in the book is never quite explained, pure good fortune apparently.

It doesn't end there though, because the brave Wiccan commune also has a mobile library complete with tomes on medieval war strategies. Pretty lucky that someone skipped the canned food and candles as they ran from the house to escape catastrophe, and instead grabbed the all-important "Janes Complete Guide to 14th Century Armored Cavalry Tactics". Yeah yeah, I know you kids are hungry, so here, satisfy yourself by reading about how to organize a proper wedge formation.

At this point in the tale I wouldn't have been surprised if Juniper & Co. broke into a neighboring barn and
stumbled upon a working trebuchet that the missing farmer was building just for the heck of it. Seriously, what are the odds that the perfect medieval skill sets are going to be found in a dozen people thrown together at random?

So the stage is set, the survivors have food, skills and shelter; clean water, livestock and a woman wonderfully
prepared to thrive as a combat leader after having lived her entire life as a timid, anonymous, gypsy folk singer.

Opposing them are former RenFair reenactors with stunningly murderous predilections, leading an army of Crips and biker outlaws, as if the Hell's Angels would willingly take orders from self-styled "Sigurd Redhand the Dragon Slayer" aka Howie the dentist. Then again maybe hard core gang-bangers really do have deep seated fears of slightly built weekend warriors wearing homemade leather jerkins and tin helmets too big for their heads.

The laugh out loud quality of the entire book can be summed up by referencing one early exchange between the hero, former Recon Marine Mike, and Eric the teenage boy warrior wanna-be. Mike makes himself a homemade spear using a butcher knife and a long stick, causing Eric to opine that it resembles a Naginata. Mike agrees and innocently asks Eric if he has ever trained with such a weapon, to which Eric replies....wait for it...wait for iiiiiiitt..."Just a few times".

WHAAAAAAATTT? This teenager from Portland just happens to have trained in the use of a Naginata? Not a common spear, not a sharp stick that he found in the woods while camping, a Naginata. Of course Eric doesn't have any other weapons training or martial arts skills, just some background in the use of an ancient Japanese halberd....and he comes from Scandinavian stock. I laughed so hard when I read that part I thought I would choke; I think the author has spent one too many Saturdays flailing around the backyard with a dull-edged, knockoff Katana while yelling "Kiii yaaaaaa!".

So...if you pine for the good ol' days of nerding around in your geek friends basement on Friday night, busy trying to hack your way through the next level of D&D while trying to convince yourself that girls aren't really all that important anyway, this book is for you. It's definitely a goofball's dream world, complete with the former jocks getting one-upped by the vengeful nerds, payback for all those high school wedgies. The only thing missing in this sad fantasy world is an army of orcs and a giant spider. Oh well, maybe in the next series. If you want something that isn't 500 pages of Wiccan propaganda and juvenile ponderings of how awesome things would be if only we could all walk around in chainmail and bearskin capes while carrying a rune inscribed broadsword, then you might want to look elsewhere.

P.S. Want a good read about average people dealing with the collapse of civilization, including characters that don't desire to build their own Helm's Deep one week after the fall? Try "Summer of the Apocalypse", a great book that won't have you saying "Cooooommee Ooooonnnnnne" every few pages.

Writing: competent and good.

Story construction: Certainly not good, nor fair. Neither is the plot poor or even bad- it is awful.

Summary: In 1998 an unknown sapient force [possibly an author?] cancels the laws of thermodynamics and the principles of electromagnetism using the Plot Device(tm), fomenting the collapse of post-modern civilization and a regression to medieval European social structures, with the absence of Christianity [note: the reader wonders what happened to any Buddhist or Roman Catholic monasteries]. A conflict arises in the Pacific Northwest between two factions- one is a communal quasi-Celtic agricultural society and the other a warlike fusion of criminals, police, and soldiers led by a former academic/athlete known as 'The Protector'. [Matriarchy vs Patriarchy- how original] This is a fun read, if you're an MST3K fan; after all, a book doesn't need power [take THAT, hateful electricity!]. The questions pile up enough that they would presumably make a good fuel source: are the kilt-wearers the only ones who remember agriculture? Have the 1930's (and the level of technology that most people could afford) been entirely forgotten? Have the Bad Men(tm) all remembered their "raincoats" whilst raping and pillaging? [syphilis, anyone?] Does the 'Protector' sleep in his armor, or will some relatively bright boy decide on grabbing the 'crown' for himself? Does the name 'Borgia' ring any bells for the communal faction in their conflict with the Bad Men(tm)?

Obviously this will appeal to RenFest twits who say "tis" instead of "it's" and speak with bad Victorian-era accents. They are quite welcome to it, as it is the closest such sorts will ever come to living in the world they dream of. This book is not bad because the author is a hack: this book is bad because the author is NOT a hack, and is & has been capable of far better.

This book is a complete ripoff of Steven R. Boyett's 1984 fantasy novel ARIEL, down to the SCA and hang-gliding attacks. Stirling even calls the event that destroys modern technology "the Change." Save your money and read the better, *original* version.

I'm a big fan of alternative history-Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South got me interested in the genre. I'd read S.M. Stirling before (Conquistador, The Peshawar Lancers) and really enjoyed him. So when I started his Nantucket series, I was expecting a good read. Which they are, and aren't. The premise of the Nantucket series is that the island of Nantucket is inexplicably hurtled back in time to the Bronze Age. The Islanders must figure out how to survive and interact with this strange new world.

Dies the Fire is a companion novel to the Nantucket series. You needn't have read the trilogy to understand what's going on-it just lets you in on a few characters mentioned in the other books. Dies starts the night of The Event, when Nantucket disappears (tho' these characters don't know that) and suddenly anything remotely electrical stops working. Batteries die, cars won't run, even gunpowder won't explode any more.

The hero, Mike Havel, is a bush pilot flying a rich family to their place in Idaho when their plane just quits mid-air. He manages to bring the plane down in one piece, but the mother is injured pretty badly. After discovering that nothing works, the party sets off in search of help/civilization. They've got two things going for them-Mike is a combat veteran and knows how to survive in the woods, and the youngest daughter, Astrid, is a fantasy-loving Tolkien freak who has her own extremely well-made bow and arrows, and knows how to use them.

Meanwhile, in Corvallis, Oregon, Juniper MacKenzie, a folk-singer/Wiccan priestess is performing in a tavern when there is a blinding light, and then all is dark. Except for the fires flaming out of control from a 747 that crashed in the middle of town. Juniper, her deaf daughter Eilir, and their friend Dennis realize something very wrong has happened, and head for the hills, literally.

The rest of the book is how the two groups grow in size, try to avoid plague, cannibals, and mad warlords, and eventually come together. A pretty good tale of survival.

But while the plot is sound, the whole book felt strained. One of an author's goals should be for the reader to connect with his or her characters. And I just couldn't. I cared very little for what happened to Mike, Juniper, or any of the numerous supporting cast. I think the only one I really felt anything for was Astrid, and that's mainly because I'm a Tolkien freak too.

Also, I understand that, in a post-apocalyptic world such as this, life is going to be mean, nasty, brutish, and short. But I don't need explicit descriptions of this every other chapter (sometimes every chapter). Most of the people who die (and trust me, a lot of people die), do so in extremely horrific ways, which the author seems to spend entirely too much time describing to the reader. Between the cannibals and sadistic biker (bicycles, not motorcycles) gangs, there's a lot of raping, blood, and body parts. And chalk it up to me being a new mother, but I got awfully tired of hearing about children being killed or dying in other ways. Maybe once, ok. Too often, and I started just skipping whole sections of chapters. I don't read horror novels for a reason.

Finally, there's the whole Wiccan storyline, which after a while started to sound more like proselytizing than part of the story. All the good guys are either agnostic/atheistic or pagan, the Christians are all bigots, or lapsed. Even the sole Buddhist ends up joining Juniper's coven. As for the epilogue, that just got a little too out-there, causing me to ask myself, "Is this book about an alternative history, or swords-and-sorcery fantasy?"

In the end, I'm not sure I can recommend this book. It left a rather sour taste in my mouth and mind. The Peshawar Lancers, sure (at least, I don't remember it being this gruesome), even Conquistador.

But let Dies the Fire die out on the bookshelf.