I Read Books: Dies The Fire
Sterling’s first novel of The Change, where on the same night as Nantucket goes back to the Bronze Age (see Island in the Sea of Time et al) all powered machines, electricity and explosives stop working.
Things fall apart fast; without machines there’s no way to transport food, and growing it requires back-breaking work by unskilled people. Areas near big cities become Death Zones in which starving refugees strip the land for up to 200 km around before dropping dead, leaving tiny cannibal bands behind.
Anyway Sterling sets this in Oregon where several characters have ideas of how to survive when guns don’t work. Mike Havel creates an outfit of armoured horsemen called the Bearkillers which is sexed up by a Tolkien-mad teen, Juniper Mackensie forms a clan of longbow armed faux-Scottish Wiccans. Various ranchers create neo-feudalist states in the centre of the state. Norman Arminger, the villain of the trilogy, doesn’t bother with the neo-feudalism; a professor of history of the 11th and 12th centuries and a medieval re-enactment enthusiast he forces criminal gangs and historical society members to work together to make a chivalrous state in Portland. Of course to do so he has to clear out many inhabitants to die and keep the rest as bonded labour.
Anyway there’s fights, and farming, and crafting and adventures and the usefulness of bicycles and also how a muscle-powered society might use modern materials (if they had any spare time from trying to survive).
Read This: For a pacey adventure story against a dark background of an unusual apocalypse
Don’t Read This: If mass death makes you sad
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