One Second After: It Fried and Then Died [Spoilers]

Have you ever read a book and realized it was the worst you've read in over a decade? How about two decades? I only finished One Second After because I wanted to give an honest review. Or was it because I hoped it would finally redeem itself? Or was it the train wreck syndrome?

In a nutshell, the writing was boring, the plot was convoluted and predictable, the science was iffy, and the behavior of civilization was entirely unbelievable. After I deliver one more paragraph of a brief intro, I will be dropping spoilers throughout the rest of the review, so if you plan on reading this book, you may want to stop now and run for the hills.

John Matherson is a resident of Black Mountain, NC. While talking to his military friend on the phone, and right after said friend says, "Wait. Something big is happening," the power goes out -- everything stops working, including things not plugged in, such as most cars, phones, and other handheld devices. The entire US had become the victim of an ElectroMagnetic Pulse (EMP). John must work with others to help the residents of Black Mountain survive without electricity.

This actually sounds exciting, and I must admit that I was grabbed at first. This book was recommended by people at work, and I love a post-apocalyptic scenario. I also enjoyed the book's coverage of the Black Mountain and Asheville area -- an area I've visited a few times.

Okay ... got the "good" things out of the way. So, what didn't work?

I already mentioned the boring writing. It was flat and relied mostly on dialogue. Yeah, most of the book read like meeting notes as people stood around arguing about what to do next. Even when the book attempted to build to a big battle of baddies coming into town, it ... (I can't believe I'm writing this about a professionally produced book) ... it skipped the whole battle and went right back to people standing around talking about what had just happened. Noooooo!

The science is based loosely on fact. If one were to explode a sufficiently strong nuclear weapon above our atmosphere, the resulting radiation burst would interact with our atmosphere and magnetic field to create a large EMP current, which can damage equipment (anything in the line of sight from the explosion). This happens through something called the Compton Effect.

Though the Compton Effect is real, William Forstchen, the book's author, overestimates the damage that can be caused. You can check out the wiki on nuclear electromagnetic pulse for more detail.

Summarized here:

Small electronic devices (like phones) are likely to survive because there is probably not enough circuitry to resonate with the pulse. This would also be true of pacemakers, most cars, watches, and so on. (Though, the phones would have no service.)

Planes flying at high altitudes would probably survive, as the main effects of an EMP is at the lower altitudes.

Things that are not plugged in at the time are believed to be more likely to survive an attack.

A couple of tests were conducted in 1962. One over Hawaii, which burned out some street lights (but not all), and set off burglar alarms; and one over Russia, which probably caused more damage.

The higher the weapon is detonated, the weaker the effects are due to the inverse power law. But higher explosions can reach further (line of sight).

The stronger the weapon, the stronger the effects.

Could terrorists pull off such an attack? As per One Second After, the enemies attack with the intention of killing off all the inhabitants while preserving the land and infrastructure. But there are problems with carrying out such an attack. The bomb has to get to an ideal altitude, which is difficult and expensive. It also has to be strong enough do a lot of damage, also difficult and expensive.

In fact, it would be so expensive that many experts believe that it would be much easier for terrorists to just nuke the people outright.

Also, should someone launch such a weapon, its signature would be picked up, and we would know where it came from. The retaliation would quickly destroy the parties that launched it.

In other words, there just wouldn't be enough incentive for anyone to pull off such an attack.

Would the US civilization fall apart as rapidly as it did in One Second After? I doubt it. We humans are pretty resilient and can remain good-natured even in the most dire situations. When we're all in the same boat, we tend to come together and work things out. Look at when New York City had an extended blackout a few years ago. On the most part, the people evacuated the city in an orderly manner, shooting the breeze with perfect strangers while crossing the bridges leading out of the city.

Early on in the book, we read that a Black Mountain old folk's home is utterly abandoned. Seriously? People are going to be that selfish and not go out to check on the elderly and sick? Look at hurricanes that recently devastated parts of the southeast, and look at how many volunteers stepped up to help with the cleanup. Something that not even one person thought of in Black Mountain?

I get the part about how sick people (who need electricity to survive) would die quickly. Not much could be done about that. I get that there would be challenges, such as how to keep everything sanitary, but there exist people who know how to handle those types of situations. We'd figure things out.

Not only that, I think we'd get our power generators back up and running much faster than how it does in the book. Our lives would be wrecked big time, but we'd quickly rebuild. It's not like we smart people would lose the knowledge we had before the blast.

And get this ... near the end of the book, John learns that due to his awesome leadership and know-how, his little town of Black Mountain is the only city within thousands of miles to have any kind of survival success. John is just that smart while everyone else in the world is selfish, or idiotic, or just simply unknowledgeable. And believe it or not, this wasn't the most arrogant thing I read in the book.

In real life, Forstchen really is trying to prepare us and encourage us to EMP-proof all of our electronics. I don't think this is too difficult to do to any one piece of hardware, but overall it could be expensive across the US, and in many cases unnecessary. Forstchen has many dealings with Congress, trying to get them to pass legislature. He wrote this book as an example of what WILL happen if we ignore him. Yes, I really mean "WILL" and not "COULD." If you read his book, you'll see what I mean.

Since Forstchen is the author, you'd never guess, but everything proceeds EXACTLY as Forstchen predicts events would proceed in real life. Thus, at the very end when John's daughter dies from diabetes when they run out of insulin, we're supposed to be flowing tears and saying, "Screw us all for not listening to Forstchen. Our ignorance killed this daughter! Wait -- we're not really dead yet. We still have time. We can still fix this."

But instead, I ended up thinking: "Screw you, Forstchen, for creating such a convoluted story that ended up killing this perfectly good daughter, whom I never really got to know throughout the book, since the writing was so bad."

Here are some actual quotes from the book where Forstchen has his self-fulfilling told-you-so moments:

"The crime, the real crime, was those who truly knew the level of threat doing nothing to prepare or prevent it. Bitterly he wondered if they were suffering as the rest of the nation now suffered or were they safely hidden away, the special bunkers for Congress, the administration, where food, water, and medicine for years were waiting for them ... and their families?"

"Remember Jonestown. ... nearly a thousand of them committed suicide on account of some d*** nutcase who told them to drink Kool-Aid laced with poison because God had ordered them to. Look, you get people scared, then you knock out every prop that we've taken for granted. ... [there] will still be hundreds of thousands of barbarians on the march and the rest of us running, scared ... D*** our enemies who did this to us, they knew us well... They knew human nature too well, and just how fragile civilization is, and how tough it is to defend it. Something we forgot."

The sad part is that if you go read reviews on this book, you're going to see a whole slew of 5-star reviews. What this book does well is to give a semblance of teaching something "no one else knows," but needs to know. Readers talk about how this book completely changed the way they look at life, and I'm like ... really? Is it really that simple to believe what one man writes and not do any quick independent research on the web? And not to mention ... is no one else phased by the terrible prose and contrived plot and the terrible way that civilization reacts to the attack? And if I write my own book where people just stand around talking to each other, it'd sell well?

Perhaps I should just give up now. Go read this best-selling book.