by Whitley & James W. Kunetka Strieber ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 1984
Though billed as a ""novel,"" this imaginary documentary--about 1993 America, a few years after nuclear war--offers little in the way of story or character. The alternating narrators are Strieber and Kunetka themselves, supposed survivors of the 1988 conflict with Russia. The two Dallas-based writers decide to travel around the country, observing and interviewing--despite the fact that Strieber, exposed to radiation during the '88 war, is ""on the triage, waiting for the inevitable outbreak of cancer."" From Texas they go first to ""Aztlan,"" a new Hispanic Free State on the US/Mexico border--where the people are trying ""enlightened socialism."" After a distant glance at the remains of vaporized San Antonio (their hometown), they head for California, which escaped the radiation--and has now become an independent, luxurious police state, hostile to radioactive outsiders. (""The current California immigration laws are an affront to the very memory of the Bill of Rights."") Traveling east across America there are scenes of devastation, pockets of industry, a visit to surprisingly active (if frantic) Chicago. And finally comes the familiar sci-fi vision of an eerily abandoned New York--followed by the return home. Throughout, the narrative is interspersed with documentary materials on the state of 1993 America. There are polls on the mood of the post-Holocaust population. There are statistics on fallout, repetitious reports on radiation-caused diseases and mutations. Other documents relate to governmental changes (breakdown, decentralization), some postwar history, and economics. (""The following three documents illustrate how we have refocused to microeconomics because of the suddenness with which the macroeconomy disintegrated and the deep consequences of the shortages that resulted."") Interviews provide data on the 1988 war (causes, strategy), on the spread of underground medicine (and witchcraft), on guerrilla activism, funerary practices, and (most intriguingly) salvage operations in N.Y. And the closing chapters offer predictable sermons about the apathy, complacency, and xenophobia that led to disaster: ""We are all accountable for our era. . . The Soviets were punished without surcease for the whole sixty years of their existence. It would have been a remarkable adventure to give up our punitive habits and try to view them as one does a friend who has fallen from the grace of accepted ways. . .To decide that a given war can be endured and survived is to let oneself come that much nearer to fighting it."" As a speculative panorama of life after The Day After, then, this is heavily detailed, appropriately grisly (though not without upbeat touches), and reasonably persuasive--if rambling and haphazardly organized. As fiction, however, it lacks narrative and emotional texture (despite the first-person gimmick) and is more likely to be skimmed than read straight through.
Pub Date: April 16, 1984
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: N/A
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1984
Categories: FICTION
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