SHTF Fiction: Alas Babylon

Alas Babylon by Pat Frank was written in the late 1950's and describes the effects of a massive nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Specifically, it details the life in small town, Fort Repose, Florida during the first year after the war.

Lauded as one of the best SHTF books written, Alas Babylon follows the life of Randy Bragg, a single lawyer and Army Reserve officer as he pulls together his disparate community following the events of "The Day". Bragg organizes his neighbors on River Road including a retired company president, two spinsters and the ever more useful clan of African-American neighbors, who in a time of segregation and organized prejudice, are more prepared than most of the other townspeople.

Frank accurately describes the possible scenario which leads up to the nuclear war in Alas Babylon. The Soviet Union, using the pretext and cover story of an in accidental attack on a Syrian port by the US Sixth Fleet leads them to launch a pre-emptive strike on the United States with ICBM and sub-based missiles. The US military, at the time of the book's writing, was dependent primarily upon land based bombers carrying nuclear weapons as part of their defensive strategy. The result being World War III lasts several months rather than the few minutes described in most stories.

But readers of Alas Babylon only hear snippets of the big war outside the borders of Fort Repose. The real war for residents is starvation and depredations by raiders and disease. Only a couple of characters fall victim to radiation poisoning while far more are done in by simple violence or abandonment.

Frank covers the immediate effects of a nuclear war on small town America; an out of town visitor upon learning of the destruction of New York City keels over of a heart attack, the bank president whose bank is cleaned out of cash by panic stricken residents commits suicide, vandals from the city attack the towns only medical clinic for morphine, and nearly every business in town, grocery, gas station and hardware store, are emptied of supplies in one day.

The story's hero, Bragg, is given one day's advance notice (actually about twelve hours) of the impending
attack by his brother who is a high ranking officer in the Air Force. Told to expect his sister-in-law and her children, Bragg is given a check for five thousand dollars and told to obtain supplies for the duration. In one of the most frustrating scenes in the book, Bragg manages to make only one trip to the grocery store (to pick up about three hundred dollars in food), fills up his car with gas and picks up a case and a half of liquor. All the rest of that cash becomes nothing more than toilet paper. Readers like me were screaming at Bragg wanting to know why he did not hit every store between Orlando and Fort Repose.

Further, it is not until after the day after The Day that Bragg realizes he better get some more ammunition for his guns, that he did not obtain salt, paper products, more canned meat, toothpaste and so forth. All that cash his brother gave him went to waste.

To their credit, the characters do get inventive when it comes to making do. They find a salt lick several miles upstream of their home. They make and trade moonshine from their excess corn production. They get rid of their gas guzzling 50's cars in favor of the petrol sipping Model T hidden in a barn. They make medical instruments out of steak knives and fishing line.

By the time the US government arrives, in the form of a single helicopter one year after The Day, Fort Repose is limping along but better off than most of the rest of the country. They have food, trade, law and order and some sembelence of normalcy.

Read this book if you have not yet. Before all the other SHTF fiction came along, Alas Babylon was first. It's a great and compelling read.

You can get Alas Babylon on Amazon of course. It is also available in abridged format online on some websites.

Prepare: One Second After Review

So this week, I finally sat down and read One Second After by William Forstchen. This is a work of fiction about an EMP (Electro Magenetic Pulse) attack on the United States. One Second After made it to the NYT Best Seller List earlier this year which shows Americans have an appetite for this type of work. Sort of like making a list before Christmas gets here.

The synopsis -

Small town, Black Mountain, North Carolina outside of Asheville, population about 6,000, is where the story takes place. The main character is John Matherson, a retired U.S. Army colonel turned professor at a small private college in the hills. The good professor is also a widowed father of two girls, one a teen, the other a twelve year old who has Type One diabetes.

On a normal afternoon, the U.S. is plunged into darkness when the EMP bust takes place. Suddenly, all modern electronics, cars, phones, power, water and everything related is shut off.

Within four days, Black Mountain is suffering. There are thousands of stranded motorists from the nearby interstate in the town straining the few resources they have. The hospital no longer has any functioning equipment. The nursing homes patients are dying for lack of air conditioning, water, medicine and trained staff. Without vehicles, the town's fire department, police and ambulance are unable to send help. There are no shipments of food or medicine coming into town and an unsuccessful trip to nearby Asheville lets the town's residents know not only are they on their own, they actually have to fear their larger neighboring cities.

Matherson, well respected in the community, steps up to a leadership role and describes events over the critical first year. It is not a pleasant picture. Without spoiling the story too much, there are a lot of hungry people, a lot of dying from basic illnesses and injury and a bunch of nasty events including a massive battle against a roving, brutal gang.

How did I like it?

I am a big fan of survival fiction. One Second After is sort of like a modernized version of Alas, Babylon, without all the conviniences. In Babylon, Randy and family pretty much get off unscathed. Sure, their clothing and cars are falling apart, but they still have a secure home, food, and organization.

Not the same in One Second. Things don't go so well for Black Mountain, North Carolina. There are no happy endings. Just one sad event after another. One Second After made me think I was reading a prequel - "What happened five years before the events in Cormac McCarthy's The Road take place".

The purpose of this is very clear from the author's standpoint; Forstchen wants to literally scare the pants off readers so that they will insist their elected representatives do something about this very real threat.

One Second After is also the complete polar opposite of the similar EMP attack story, Lights Out which can be found online. While the characters in Lights Out are dominated by local politics, rescue missions and vengeful neighbors, they never go hungry and even have time to take a daily shower and get medical attention. Forget about that in One Second After (at one point, many of the central characters go a number of months without a real bath. Think lice. Yuck).

OK, so what were my frustrations with One Second After?

First, when the lights go out, when the cell phone dies, when the car does not start, don't continue having a bar-b-que. Get to the darn store and buy everything! The main character allegedly wrote, while in the Army, a paper on the threat of an EMP attack and its affects on the U.S. He should have known better than everyone else. Yet after the attack, he is no better prepared than the town's insurance salesman.

Second, if your kid is sick, don't wait two days before going to the pharmacy! What was the main character thinking?

Third, why is it in books that the main characters can't wait to have a formal meeting with as many other characters to discuss what happened? Sure enough, Day One after the EMP attack, there's Professor Matherson having a meeting with the town mayor, police chief, etc. What's there to talk about? Get to the store!

Not me. Day One, Two and Three after the event are going to be spent getting my hands on as many resources as possible and securing my location. "Sorry, my calendar is full tomorrow Mister Mayor. I will be at the Food Lion buying all the rice and peanut butter before you folks figure out there won't be any more groceries coming in. I will be happy to pencil you in a week from Tuesday though".

Fourth, it takes the town about a month to realize they better start growing some Victory Gardens for food. Duh.

Fifth, chickens are for eggs. Get all the chickens together. Put them in one spot. Guard them and feed them. Let them lay eggs. Make many omlettes. Do not start killing the chickens to put them in a pot. Same with cows and milk.

Cigarettes are a good thing to stock up on now for trade and barter. So is a 50 lb. bag of rice and extra dog food.

There are some very poignant moments in One Second After. The scenes with his youngest daughter. The death of a couple of central characters. The sadness which becomes every day life.

Everyone should read One Second After. Everyone should start getting prepared today for this event. Unlike nuclear war from the 1980's, there won't be a build up of hostilities or even twenty minutes to take cover. Just the whole world different and backwards in time in the blink of an eye.

Note: One more thing that occurred to me since writing this review. i would love if someone like Jerry D Young or Gary Ott (online SHTF fiction writers) would take a swag at a story like One Second After. Often, both writers write much more optimistically than I think reality would be. I would be neat to see one of these writers take One Second After from the middle of the story and look at the ending from a different perspective. Worth a thought.

SHTF Review: Alas Babylon

In high school, I think sophomore year, I was in American Lit or some similar named course. We were given a reading list of 7 or 8 books which during the year we would read and discuss (and write papers!) about in class.

During those wonderful, non-PC, heady days of the 1970's and 1980's, reading lists would invariably include "Alas Babylon" and/or "On the Beach", both post-nuclear war fiction accounts.

I don't know what encouraged the reading expert to high schools in that era to add those titles to the required reading list, but I appreciated it. I was always a fan of science fiction and gravitated towards end of the world stories in particular. I would gaze over the paperbacks in B Dalton or Walden Books at the mall and search for covers with nuclear bombs or pictures of a ruined city or something.

I had never heard of Pat Frank's "Alas Babylon" before I was handed my reading list in high school and probably because the cover of that book often featured a) no picture or b) a group of mismatched people staring at what looked like a sun on the horizon. Nope, I probably thought it was some "literature book" like "East of Eden" or "Grapes of Wrath" and promptly ignored it at the time.

"Alas Babylon" takes place in late 1950's Florida and follows one Randy Bragg, a playboy middle aged attorney minding the aging family home and orange groves and keeping the local bourbon and scotch trade going briskly. Bragg's big brother, the responsible one, is an officer at Offut Air Force Base in Omaha and sends Randy a cryptic telegram - Alas Babylon. Turns out this is their code word for "The big one is about to happen".

Fortunately, along with the telegram comes a check for five grand for "preps" and after a humorous run in with the local banker cashing the check, Randy starts stocking up. The problem is three fold.

First, Randy lives in Fort Repose, a town of only about ten thousand and with it the limited resources available such as only one grocery store, gas station and (yikes!) liquor store. Randy's ten full grocery carts attract some attention.

Second, Randy only has about twenty four hours to get ready. Part of which he devotes to a nap!

Third, with the check and the warning comes big brother's wife and two kids who need to be collected at the airport in Orlando before the bombs go off.

Top things off with Randy forgetting some important things like laundry detergent but remembering some decent 1950's trade goods later like lots of coffee and booze.

Family arrives, bombs go off and chaos ensues. Randy is transformed from mildly alcoholic recluse to head of household, militia leader and the face of law and order in Central Florida. He collects a motley crew at his rambling home including a humane doctor, a crusty old admiral, jack of all trades Air Force sergeant, a successful retired business man and his lovely daughter.

Besides having to figure out where water comes from, food production, the value of salt and how to perform surgery with steak knives and fishing line, Randy takes on highway men, edgy neighbors, lonely housewives, radioactive jewelry and a dangerous black marketer lady with eyes for him.

"Alas Babylon" was penned during a crucial time for atomic America. The Russians had launched Sputnik and were going toe to toe with the U.S. in the development of ballistic submarines and transcontinental bombers. Most of the actual war described in the book takes place over months, not hours as it would happen today. There were no satellite communications in this time, so radio and TV were line of site and once gone, leave the residents of Fort Repose in the dark information wise.

However, the characters in "Alas Babylon" still had useful skills reflective of the time period, such as Malachi and his family next door who raise their own crops, livestock, make moonshine and keep the Model T running. Also, seems everyone knows how to can, hunt, fish and keep a household running without a microwave, refrigerator or working air conditioner.

"Alas Babylon" has one thing over much other survival fiction these days; its a good story. The characters are real, the events range from frightening to hum drum. Maybe it was the way people conducted themselves in the 1950's, but there is no need for long blab fests or group meetings symptomatic in survival stories online. Responsibility is thrust upon individuals and they accept it with stoic silence and resolve. The characters are modeled after the same people who fought and won World War II; life is tough and getting tougher.

"Alas Babylon" is a great story and belongs on everyone's survival bookshelf. I have seen a copy available for reading online for free, but Alas, Babylon is available in paperback still. Hopefully, for the high school reader, though I doubt it. It might be too relevant.

Good luck,