Concordian Review: End of the World

Last year I started writing a book review column for the Digital Concordian, the on-line version of a local paper.  What follows is a reprint of my very first column, which was published in June 2011.  The column was my clumsy attempt at a humorous reaction to the faulty May 21, 2011 Judgment Day hoopla brought upon by Family Radio's Harold Camping.  

This column is also the only column where I reviewed multiple books:

The End has always been on the verge of nigh for any number of reasons.  Which is why the popular End of the World genre offers readers so many great (and so many not so great) ways to enjoy the End of the World.  It is just a fun game of "What if...?"

My pick for the best of them is Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer.  A comet slams into the Earth and causes earthquakes, tidal waves, torrential storms of saltwater rain, and massive flooding.  The novel also spares none of the more unpleasant details of what the End of the World would really be like.  It's a smart and scary book.

S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire, however, rushes past most of the unpleasantness brought on by its intriguing End of the World scenario (an as yet unexplained "Change" in the fabric of space and time renders all of modern day technology inoperable) and instead the story focuses on how the survivors turn their post-apocalyptic world into one big Renaissance Fair.  It's for Fantasy fans only, obviously.

The unexplained "Change" in Dies the Fire reminded me of Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason's novel Ill Wind, which has an oil-eating microbe getting loose and turning everything plastic into useless glop.  Ill Wind does an entertaining job of covering the disaster ground that Dies the Fire skipped over.

Two horror genre apocalypse stories of note are Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and Philip Nutman's Wet Work.  Both books find a fresh and inventive way to tell the now far too familiar story of what happens after the dead get up and start to eat the living.

Whether you are a Global Warming denier or believer, there is no way that you will not start giggling while reading Art Bell and Whitley Strieber's atrocious The Coming Global Superstorm, which warns that a mysterious "superstorm" is going to flash freeze our planet into a new Ice Age.  Insert summer reading joke here.

Being an almost life long fan of The Omen trilogy, I had to read some of Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's best-selling Left Behind series.  I really wish I hadn't, though.  The books are filled with the laziest writing and plotting that it has ever been my displeasure to read and, after suffering through a few of them, I wanted the world to come to an end sooner, rather than later.

You have been warned.