Below The Beltway

Imagine if, in a split-second, every piece of technology that you depend upon stopped working. Not just televisions, computers, and cell phones. Add in cars, trains, and anything based upon electricity or the internal combustion engine. To make things even more interesting, let’s add in firearms and gunpowder too.

What kind of world would result, what kind of people would it produce ?

That, essentially is the question that S.M. Stirling sets out to answer in Dies The Fire. In a split second on a day in March, 1998, with the flash of a blinding light, everything that man has developed in the past 500 or so years simply ceases to function.

Left behind to try to survive is the mass of humanity, most of whom, to be quite blunt about it, will not survive. It’s easy to imagine what would happen to people living in urban areas who didn’t try to get out in time, but Stirling doesn’t dwell on the doom-and-gloom that would might expect from a novel with such an apocalyptic premise. Instead, he focuses on the efforts of isolated groups, located primary in the Williamette Valley in Oregon, to first survive and then, to the extent possible rebuild.

I’d never read anything Stirling had written before this, but the writing here is so well put together it makes me eager to discover his other works. The characters, big and small, are handled with care, are his painstaking descriptions of a natural environment that, slowly but surely, reclaiming areas once dominated by a now largely depleted human population.

The story follows two principle groups — the Bearkillers and the Mackenzies — as they pull together to survive, fight off enemies who have taken it upon themselves to take all they can see, and grow as their success attracts others in what, by the end of the novel, are clans that one can clearly see evolving into nations, or kingdoms.

There is brief discussion, mostly though speculation, about what the nature of the Change might be, but that’s not really the focus of the story (perhaps Stirling will get to this in a later novel). Instead, Stirling’s focus is on the people and their story, and that’s what makes it entertaining.

There are some nitpicks — Juniper Mackenzie, one of the main characters, is a Wiccan and Stirling seems intent on reminding us of this fact every single time she appears in the plot. Now, I can understand that people might become more religious when faced with something as momentous as the Change, but there are parts of the Wicca-related stuff that probably could have been left out because they don’t seem to add anything to the plot.

On the whole, though, this is a great start to a tale I look forward to seeing unfold in future novels.