They Were Right About Without Warning, but now You've Been Warned!
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Author: John Birmingham
Title: Without Warning Genre: science fiction America - or the vast majority of it - disappeared off the face of the world on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in this overblown thriller by John Birmingham. Some inexplicable... something... covered most of the North American continent, and - in the wink of an eye - all mammalian life within the continental US except western Washington (along with hunks of Canada and Mexico) turned into small splotches of stinky goo. The next few weeks find hardy - and, of course, violent - folks collecting themselves to build some kind of new world order. What that might be, readers of Without Warning will not know until (at the very earliest) 2010, when Birmingham churns out a sequel to this wad of rubbish. In deference to my library, I didn't write all over the book; but I did write a warning to all and sundry on a PostIt® and pasted it to page one. Never let it be said that I don't try to help out my fellow man (and woman). On its surface, Without Warning appears to be about the lives of a widely-scattered group of survivors - Americans in Gitmo, Iraq, Paris, Seattle, and Acapulco - who (according to the unwritten rules of bad post-apocalyptic fiction) will most assuredly meet up somewhere in Book Two to form a perfect society. Or maybe it'll be in Book Three - all I know is that I won't be there to see it happen. Instead of an interesting novel about the near end of the world (like, for example, Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, or Pat Frank's Alas Babylon), Without Warning is little more than 512 endless, gut-wrenchingly dull pages of gratuitous violence; pneumatic (and ultraviolent) women; and drool-splattered, ultratech descriptions of weapons ranging from handguns to triggers for nuclear device. As far as the people themselves might be concerned, however, their backstories are non-existent and the various characters are about as well-developed (not to mention stereotypical) as they might be in a kindergarten fairy tale. Consider, for instance, the violent redneck Fifi, daughter of Larry Flynt's first "Hustler" girl; whose idea of a good time is firing RPGs at cigarette boats. And then there's Jules (Julianna, mind you), every bit as beautiful, stacked, and brutish as Fifi - and Caitlin, a spy / assassin / whatever, fully capable of kicking the hineys of half a dozen snipers even with a tumor growing inside her brain. Oh, yes, Birmingham's nothing if not realistic. I should've known: he thinks Corona is good beer. Besides a slate of characters lacking any redeeming value, Without Warning also trots out some of the most dreadful dialogue since Bulwer-Lytton. Characters mumble to themselves. Juliana (daughter of an Earl - or maybe a Duke; who knows) finds and then loses her British accent again two or three times per page. Peckerwood Fifi talks like a Yale graduate. Birmingham also likes to drop in the occasional "big" word to show his erudition - such as in this fine example of Birminghamian (accent on the "ham") prose: "Hell yeah," enthused Fifi. "Time for a little redneck persuasion." She let rip with a short snarling burst of her heavy Russian machine gun, firing into the windows of an abandoned building overlooking the parking lot. The sound was scarifying, and the small horde descending the slopes stopped and dropped immediately." "Scarifying," Mr. Birmingham, is not a portmanteau of "scary" and "terrifying." It has nothing whatsoever to do with either; and as for "enthused"? shudder... For my money, however, the most unforgivable sin that Birmingham (and publisher Del Rey) commit is found on page 513: "The excitement will continue in the next book AFTER AMERICA. Coming in 2010 from Del Rey Books." For that I have but one thing to say: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." To quote The Who, I "Won't Get Fooled Again." Take my word for it, please: I found Birmingham's writing to be leaden, his characters to be pancake-like in their flatness, and his plot to be sloppy and ill-constructed and stretched far too thin by his pathetic attempts to pad half an idea to two (or maybe more) books. By about 200 pages I was beginning to wonder if he would ever get to the point - and when I looked at the last page, I realized why. This piece of tripe is chock full of filler. Don't be fooled: it's not worth it! |