Dale Pendell (1947–2018)

As a native Californian whom is also a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, I was hoping for a great read. What I found was an interesting premise with a one-two punch. First you have the massive die-off of civilization due to the release of a biological agent; then you have the rising sea levels due to global warming. Instead of mankind maintaining or recovering his technology-based society, it instead devolves into a culture of gangs, tribes and religious groups. Not a pretty picture. The rising seas changes the geography of California where once inland towns become coastal or bay-side. Instead of a continuous story line, this book is more of a collection on vignettes as time marches on. An okay read.… (mer)

There are three different reasons post-apocalypse novels get written: warnings about some impending danger, describing some better world that comes about after destroying ours, or appreciating our world by fictionally dissecting its corpse. This book mostly falls in the first two categories.

The danger, as Pendell sees it, is corporatism, the God of Hoarding - it says so right on p. 40. Corporations lead to wage slavery and worship of money and government thuggery to enforce corporate interests. In the year 2021, this escalates into a massive dieoff via bioweapons released in a war for oil in Central Asia. Even with billions dead and industrial civilization at an end, manmade global warming continues with the seas eventually rising 160 feet. The few survivors can't maintain civilization's infrastructure. Literacy declines. Technology is more scavenged than created. It's not all bad, though. Humans, at least the ones in California, have developed a suspicion of central government and the idea of property beyond chattels that can be carried on the body. We members of the "pre-cle" (pre-Collapse) set eventually become a subject of awe, wonder, and contempt.

Now how seriously you want to take Pendell's diagnosis of contemporary ills and their remedies is a personal matter. (Not very seriously is the answer for me.) However, plenty of post-apocalypse stories are entertaining and thoughtful despite absurd or questionable starting premises.

Pendell's novel covers 16,000 years of time and reminded me of several fine post-apocalypse works. I've always had a fond spot for novels made up of fake documents whether letters, government reports, journals, oral and narrative histories. This book, with the exception of the omniscient third person Panoptic sections, uses that technique. In that, it reminded me of Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka's classic post-nuclear war novel Warday. Its pastoralism and humanity's inability to hold on to its learning and technology reminded me of George R. Stewart's Earth Abides while its dabbling with new, collectivist orders after the convenient killing off of millions reminded me of William Morris' commie utopia News From Nowhere.

However, this book is nowhere near as good as any of those. Pendell is at his best in the opening chapter, and he does bring some nice understatement to individual tragedies usually glimpsed through the lens of a distant historian. He even manages to work in a future homage to Otzi, the famous Iceman. And his maps showing California's new coastline are neat. But he never really creates unique voices for all the many people who tell us their stories in oral histories and diaries. They all sound very similar in tone and style and cadence and vocabulary. And, sometimes, those Panoptic sections aren't much more than a description of altered coastlines elsewhere in the world. Why not give us some more maps instead?

So the entertainment value isn't all it could be. As for thoughtfulness ... Well Pendell doesn't turn a blind eye to the problems of his new societies. The survivors mostly swear off the sins of corporatism but they have plenty of other shortcomings. I do think he is overly optimistic in his speculations as to how long certain technologies could be maintained. On the other hand, I think he is fairly realistic in eschewing the cyclical story of Walter Miller, Jr.'s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz. In Pendell's novel, there is no distant return to our level of technology and civilization.

In short, this one is not in the top tiers of post-apocalypse fiction but an obsessive fan - or citizen of California - might want to give it a look. And it's short enough that a reader not in those categories might not consider it a waste of time.… (mer)