Dies the Fire: A Novel of the Change

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.

"Dies The Fire", "Conquistodor", "The Island in the Sea of Time Trilogy", are all the same books with different names. Anyone can write a Stirling alternative history novel (or novels) if they just follow these steps:

First, since modern society and the people who live in it are in the way, get rid of them all through some poorly explained and very implausible event. You can watch them all starve to death, or just leave them behind, whichever works best. Just remember to let your complete contempt for them guide your decision.

Next, create the hero of your story as a thinly desguised tribute to yourself. Remember that you (or he, or she) need to be a serving military officer or distinguished veteran, accomplished in some obscure martial art, wise beyond your years, and be an outdoorsman more skilled than Daniel Boone. And remember, you have no weaknesses, fears, or capacity to make incorrect decisions.

Every hero needs a villain, so create a bad guy who is inexplicably sociopathic and unnecessarily cruel and is bent on conquest and domination. Remember that your villain is just bad because he is, not because he is mentally ill. Mental incapacitation would mean that he couldn't organize, arm, and lead thousands of people quickly and efficiently with all of the difficulty of a veteran drum major leading a professional marching band.

Now add secondary characters. The villian will need bad guys who are like him, again, for no explained reason - they are just bad guys. They will have no conficting ambitions and will follow their bad guy leader with complete blind obedience. The hero will need some help though. Since the hero isn't interested in power, he gets things done by stumbling across exactly the right people. For example if your hero finds himself in a world suddenly without technology or the ability to reproduce it, have him happen upon a master horse trainer and blacksmith, a family with several skilled archers, a highly skilled bowmaker, and an freindly SAS officer who just happened to be in the area.

Once everyone is in place, spend the next several hundred pages describing in detal the miserable death or suffering of the society you have so much contempt for, and the atrocities committed by the bad guy and his henchmen. Then have the hero describe in mind numbing detail the foliage, fauna, weather, or whatever else you are interested in that your reader probably isn't.

When it's time to wrap this novel and set up the next, be sure to position the hero and villian for a showdown (which will not occur for at least two more books, so take your time), add some complicated and poorly explained twist (remember you have to stretch this story into a trilogy some how), but most of all remember that the hero winds up with the hot girl (regardless of the hero's gender).

Write this all up, find a publisher with nothing better to publish and presto - an AH novel by S.M. Stirling.

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.

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.

I just did NOT like the book.

For a post-apocalypse book, there are much, much better

alternatives -- try Alas Babylon, or Earth Abides or

The Postman or Canticle for Leibowitz, or When Worlds Collide

It's not the writing skill but the content that's the issue...

The premise is awfully weak

"what if one day all the machines stop working".

And the response seems even worse, more like a stereotypical survivalist fantasy of "we'll be in charge and everything will be great, yeah" -- except this is the renaisannce fair model,

with the SCA substituted in for who saves the world, and there

is a lovingly describe feast every 10 pages...

I had enough of that with There Will Be Dragons, and this one

is even worse for SCA-worship, and not as good a book in other ways.

It really bugs me that there's no pain or grief or suffering

as 99% of the world starves to death conveniently out of sight

to make way for a lovely horseride across the country. Also, no competition really or alternative survivors from oh, say some National guard unit or the civil war re-enactors or anything like the government because anyone not in the SCA is obviously incompetent, right.... Except add in some gratuitous jabs bya few sterotyped straw men individuals of church, government, and business....

It also seems absurd how much time is spent describing food in this feast or that one -- the food just seems never ending, luxury goods, and no problem at all to getting farming going. Try the Dragon Knight series for a more plausible view of unmechanized farming and unrefrigerated days: mostly gruel, and nothing green for 6 months. Or try the Flint series 1632, or Ringo's There will be Dragons for views of manual farming being tough to do. Maybe even read Little House on the Prairie.

Oh, and let's throw in that Wiccan magic works now while we're

at it -- and about 99 coincidences of just happening to find extremely rare things or people they need every 5 pages, like a collectors copy of Tolkien or a swordmaster or someone who can

make wood bows by hand.

Then there are the wierd bits that only bug me a bit. Like they are making swords from car springs -- not the right steel for that and by the way isn't there several million hunting knives and actual swords around in collectors and re-enactors and military dress uniforms and history exhibits ... Or that they

are making medieval gear -- would think a car spring = crossbow

is more obvious a reuse. Or that getting information from the

library is more plausible than stumbling across someone who is an expert every five minutes.

It's not a bad premise for a "What If?" book. But Stirling's book becomes really irritating very quickly.

Every character (even whole-foods, health-conscious, hoodoo-voodoo females) is a medieval weapons expert!

Whenever someone brandishes a blade, we get a paragraph on the shape, the tang, the grip, the historical uses, etc., etc.

Sheesh, this guy needed an editor, badly -- someone who could have told him "Stirling, leave the knife hobby at home !"

I only got about 2/3 of the way through this one, then gave the book away.

Once again Steve Stirling has proven that in his mind, the vast majority of people are hopeless cattle, waiting to be herded.

Stirling, a firm believer in the "great man" theory of history has written yet another exposition of that position. Lord Bear and Lady Juniper are examples of GOOD herders, while Duke Iron Rod and others are examples of BAD herders, but the vast majority of the people in Stirling's world are scarcely worth the trouble of feeding, much less expecting them to make a rational decision.

It's a very dark, sad depiction of humanity, entirely consistent with his Draka stories and the "evil man" Walker thread of the Nantucket stories.

In an on-line review of another book here on Amazon, Stirling wrote: "People in the past were _different_. By our standards, they were mostly villains and thugs, and they really _believed_ in the things that made them burn witches and heretics." This book proves that Stirling thinks the same of people now. His view of the past and the present really aren't different. Most people are villains and thugs, or sheep.

Like Nantucket, Stirling "just so" positions the resources, human and material, to allow his plot to follow without putting in much of the complexity of the politics of real history, or real humanity.

The "great man" and his slaves or followers accomplish incredible, unbelievable things overnight, while the rest of humanity sits by the roadside and just waits to die.

This is probably the last of his books I'll read. The willful suspension of disbelief is just too hard, the outcome too sad, and the apparent hatred or dismissal of the common man is too disturbing.

A caveat -- for better, or worse, I am not a regular science fiction reader, reading maybe one or two books in the genre a year, so I do not have the background or biases that a regular reader may have. I am also a little biased, because I sold a used book to the author and that made me want to read (and like) his latest book. I found this a good, fast read. Stirling came up with an interesting premise, a real twist on the post-apocolypse novel, and wrote it well. The action moved fast and it was compelling. A lot of the criticism of the book attacks the unreality of the premise, but as I see it, it is science FICTION, not, science fact. If you accept the premise the gunpowder, batteries, etc., do not work, then you also have to accept the consequences that spring from this unreal situtation. I picked this up expecting to be entertained, and I was, which is praise indeed.

That said, there are serious flaws in the book. Like every other naysaying reviewer, the level of coincidences just gets too much. Every person that our heroes meets is helpful. A stay at home mom is also an archer. An injured hiker is a master bowman, etc. Presumably at least one of the Bearkillers or Mackenzies could also be an overweight accountant who would not know how to light a match, let alone fricassee a wild animal. I could understand that these skilled people might be the survivors after a period of time, but, at least initially, there would be lots of people without survivalist skills who would in fact survive. Similarly, the Protector, who is arguably the most intriguing character in the book, is given the least press. How does a professor manage to become the most powerful person in the world? How does this intellectual suddenly gain the ability to control every warring gang in town and have an empire? We are never told, or shown this, only directed to accept, on faith, that this has happened, and this is a real mistake. I am willing to accept that the laws of physics have changed, but not the laws of good writing, and this takes away a star.

And, of course, echoing the critiques, unless you are a member of the faith, you will quickly sicken of the Wiccan, which is enough to remove another star. I do not care that Juniper is a Wiccan, and as a person of faith, I respect someone's deep belief in their own faith. I also accept Stirling's premise that in a world where the rules have been turned upside down in an instant, people who are "odd" and never followed the old rules, may have a better chance of adapting and surviving. However, nearly every thought from Juniper is a dissertation on, and an ode to her faith. If she coughs, she goes "Praise Goddess for letting me expectorate". If she sneezes, she comments "O great horned one, thanks for helping me dislodge that bothersome snot". It does not matter whether you substitute the word "Goddess" for the name of Jesus or Allah or Abraham or Buddah. this is an attitude that grows tiresome really, really fast.

Overall, three stars, and a recommendation to do what I did and read the library's copy and enjoy.

I don't believe in destroying books. When I'm finished with a book I normally give it away unless it was so good that I want to hang on to it. Alas, "Dies the Fire" is sitting in my garbage can, 200 pages in. I've never done that before, but I can't think of a more fitting place for this piece of trash.

Other people have spoken about the sheer implausibility of the entire premise. Deus Ex Machina doesn't even begin to describe the chain of unlikely circumstance and happenstance which all conspire to bring Stirling's characters into a position where they're suddenly useful.

See, I've met a lot of people in my life who are eerily similar to the characters presented in this book. I've known people who, in 2008, still continue to bang away at making 'battle-ready' swords, people who practice Wicca and claim to be witches, people who try to show off their mastery of Gaelic at every chance they can get, I've been to Rennaisance Faires and marveled at the people who seem to take it all just a little bit -too- seriously...

The major thing that this book manages to completely ignore is that the rest of the American population, the 99.9% of us who don't cry out for people to pay attention to us by acting like an anachronism, would not simply roll over and die and allow the psuedo-feudalism to return to the countryside after two short weeks.

There's a memorable scene a quarter of the way through the book where a history professor - yes, a history professor -, dressed in scale armor and toting a shield demonstrates his fitness to rule over all of the gang bangers, mafioso and other unsorted criminal element of Portland, OR by taking on four fully grown men - two policemen and two U.S. soldiers - in hand to hand combat. This scene is a turning point for the whole novel, but not in any literary sense. It's the scene where the reader realizes that Sirling is not trying to carry on the legacy of extrapolative end-of-the-world scenarios in the tradition of Larry Niven's "Lucifer's Hammer" and David Brin's "The Postman" (sidenote: if you're looking for great post-apocalyptic tales, pick those up before you bother with this one), but rather desperately trying to convince himself and anyone that will listen that beating your friends up with plastic foam swords on alternate weekends is going to prepare you to kill trained, professional combatants and rule the world when the lights go out.

Your odds are even better if you speak some Gaelic and make sure everyone you speak with knows you're a Wiccan pagan witch. It's always a teeth-grating experience for me when characters in books speak foreign languages and then immediately offer the translations in the same breath. Main character Juniper Mackinzie does this with alarming frequency in "Dies the Light", to the point where the average redneck denizen of upper Oregon (you know, the rough, outdoorsy people conditioned by a life of labor who are used to doing things like -hunting with bows- that the author conveniently forgets or has us assume have died in a dramatic turn of stupidity as soon the power went out) would slap her and remind her that it's more effective to communicate with people if you just say what you mean and get it done with. Anyone as desperate for attention as Juniper presents herself to be doesn't last long in a leadership role, yet Stirling sets her up as not only High Priestess of her Wiccan coven, but the leader of a prosperous and powerful commune whom everyone loves, reveres and practically worships because, get this, she knows how to sing. Brittney Spears knows how to sing too, and she's not allowed to be in charge of her own family much less anyone else's.

Things just line up in ways that are harder to swallow than broken glass in this novel. From the sheer happy happenstance of finding an Englishman adventurer stuck in a tree who just so happens to know how to make longbows, to the three missing members of Juniper's coven just so happening to be the captives of a band of cannibals they encounter (hooray, a joyous reunion and foreshadowing avenged!), everyone who makes an appearance seems to be gifted with some incredibly rare and, it's worth nothing, prior to the Change totally useless and self-indulgent skill which makes them invaluable to the new medieval society and technology base that springs up overnight. The trouble stems from the fact that Stirling edges dangerously close to attributing it all to magic but never fully commits. If it were magic, if it were presented from the start and explained and accepted as magic, the whole book would have been easier to read. It wouldn't have made the characters any less irritating or any less annoying as their real-life analogues, it wouldn't have made the dialogue any less stilted or queerly expositional (at one point, a 14 year old girl gushes, at great length, about the composition and manufacture of her bow in a conspicuously un-teenage-girl-like way, made all the more conspicuous by the fact that her bow was made by the same bowyers that the author thanks in his acknowledgements - kindly leave the advertisments out of your narrative, Mr. Stirling), but it at least would have made the setting bearable. I've read Tolkien, I've read George R.R. Martin, I've read Moorcock - I have no problem with flying castles, invisibility rings and enchanted, soul-sucking swords. I do have an issue with mindless, ego-stroking tripe however, and this book firmly rates as such.

Never have I been more appalled by an author's blatant efforts and making himself and his friends appear cool through dogged artifice and a precarious house-of-cards scenario carefully constructed to put them in the only position where they'd, at long last, be as superior to everyone else as they richly believe they should be.

If you're thinking about reading this book, try these instead:

"The Postman" - David Brin
"Lucifer's Hammer" - Larry Niven
"World War Z" - Max Brooks

I haven't written a review on amazon before, but this book is so bad that I felt compelled - if I can save even one person from having to read it, my efforts will not have been in vain.

I picked it up in an airport bookstore before an international flight; the premise seemed interesting and I had a vague recollection of good press from instapundit.com, whose opinion on SF I now value dramatically less, as a result of this stinker.

The basic problem with the book is that the way that events unfold, and the main characters and their portrayals, are so unrealistic as to be laughably unbelievable. I found myself wincing and rolling my eyes fairly continuously. Wiccans who aren't naive and socially inept? Other people taking the things they believe seriously? SCA people with a talent for becoming the heads of street gangs? College professors who understand gang dynamics? The unrealities get piled thicker and thicker. Eventually, I flipped through the book to the end where the author's picture is - and it made sense. He looks fairly socially inept himself; and just as colorblind people can't tell red and green apart he seems quite tonedeaf as to the reality of standard human interactions outside the social circles he must inhabit.

Anyway, the book was so irritating I stopped about 2/3rds of the way through and refused to read any more, even though I had NOTHING ELSE to read on the plane. Unless you're someone who enjoys feeling irritation and contempt when you read a novel, stay far, far away from this book.