Customer Reviews

Y2K -- It's Already Too Late

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

As a Y2K remediation consultant, I was looking for a few laughs when I ordered this book. However, I didn't buy into the premise for one second, and I barely made it halfway through. What a waste. The book requires you to believe that no one has ever heard of the millennium bug until the clocks strike midnight, and that no work is underway to head off this problem. What bull! There may be some disruptions, but believe me we're not going to experience The Day the Earth Stood Still as Kelly predicts. The author is simply fanning mass hysteria to sell books. Had he done his homework, Kelly would have referenced the billions already invested and the countless man-hours spent by people a lot smarter than his hero to head off problems. But it's Kelly's writing style that finally gives him away: amateur. Obviously the book is self-published. No editor worth her salt would allow this self-indulgent prose to reach the printed page.

No vehicles work except 30-year-old ones, yet none of the roads are clogged with stalled cars? Everything's shut down, but there's almost no looting? Kelly needs to study his history.

Regardless of your opinion on Y2K this is very poor writing. Exploitative of people's fears, it vainly potrays tecnology professionals, the source of the Y2K problem, as if they are the single-handed saviors of the world. This is the author's first novel and it shows in virtually every sentence. I never thought I'd encounter a worse writer than Jimmy Buffett, but I have. It's obvious why he had to self-publish it.

Horribly written, laden with cliches -- Visionary businessman meeting resistance at every turn, security man yearning for love, kid genius, etc. -- and absurdly paranoid -- The company in the story is "the only company still operable after New Year's Eve 1999." The US will be invaded by China due to a traitor in our midst... -- , Nonetheless, a good book for it's absurdity value alone. I recommend waiting till after y2k though... It'll be in every used book store's $.25 bin come 1/1/2000.

This is the work of an amateur. No wonder this book is self-published; no legitimate publisher would ever touch it. And Mr. Kelly isn't fooling anyone by pretending to be an exited reader giving his own book high marks after each bad review. Child's play all around.

I tried to listen to this on audiocassette but gave up after 2 days. The writing is of poor quality and the story failed to grab me. A better writer really could have done something special with this material. By the way, in response to all those who blame the naysayers for being ignorant, they sorely underestimate America's ability to handle times of adversity. Of course there will be problems, but they will be dealt with by far less drastic measuers than rioting and war. If only Clancy had written this.......

Poorly written, unimaginative, and only thinly based on a Y2k scenario, this novel is the embodiment of a missed opportunity. Instead of really exploring the fascinating possibilities of a disaster story based on the worst case scenarios of Y2K, this is a silly exploration of the possibility that China would try to exploit our military lack of preparedness. Which might have been interesting had it been written better. Among the many irritating plot points: the ridiculous portrayal of a single Y2K-repair firm as the one and only salvation of the planet. An enormous disappointment, time completely wasted.

This was the first y2k book I read and I thought it was pretty good. Now that I've read two other y2k novels and suffered through the NBC movie last night, I return to this title with much higher praise. The first half of the NBC movie was taken almost directly out of this book but the last half was nothing but a nuke plant meltdown flick -- quite boring. This novel covers a wider spectrum of scenarios including military and does so with a more interesting mix of characters. While NBC shows a grandfather saving the nuke plant with the advice to "hit it with a hammer," this novel shows teams of people from all backgrounds using their skills in their one field of expertise. This is a good book to read in the final weeks leading to Y2K. It shines brighter than other attempts to fictionalize this problem.

Jason Kelly has written a novel about a topic he knows NOTHING about. No small wonder the book reads like science fiction (and BAD science fiction, at that). It is made up out of whole cloth, and all the "research" that supposedly went into it is undermined by the author's pre-determination to hype Y2K beyond all reason.

I questioned Jason Kelly on a radio talk show after the San Fernando Valley sewage spill (which was caused by the turning off of the power at a municipal facility, and was inorrectly blamed on Y2K), and could not even get him to understand the fact that attributing that spill to Y2K made no sense---it wasn't as though they set the computer ahead to 1/1/2000 and something went wrong. They simply SHUT OFF THE POWER. In other words, in order for Y2K to cause such a spill, it would have to eliminate the power---and there was NO reason to believe that would happen.

If fictional writing (and pretty lame writing at that) which ignores facts in favor of hype and the author's determination to make money are what you're looking for - - - - you could STILL do better than this book. (I'd give zero stars, but it won't let me.)

I picked this up as a summer read and found it engaging. I read it in two days, which is fairly fast for me. I'm not a Y2K nut in either direction. I don't think the world will end from it, but I also don't think the whole problem is concocted so that programmers and book writers will make a bundle. I enjoyed this book because it had decent characters and a fast story. By the way, the person who posted the review on July 2, 1999 needs to reread the book. Almost no looting? The entire Los Angeles riot chapter is nothing but looting when the lights click off and people panic. To say that the book overlooks looting is just wrong.