The book Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse
was listed in Amazon’s Movers and Shakers on Amazon when it jumped in sales yesterday and had a sales rank in the 110 range.
Today the book is #12 at Amazon. If you read the reviews on Amazon you will see that many people are buying this work of fiction as a guide on how to survive if society collapses. Amazon indicates that people buying this book are also getting Crisis Preparedness Handbook: A Complete Guide to Home Storage and Physical Survival
Here is the book description on Amazon: Part novel, part survivalist-handbook, Patriots tells of a small group of friends facing every American’s worst nightmare—the total collapse of society. … Evading mobs of desperate, out-of-control citizens who have turned Chicago into a wasteland of looting and mayhem, this novel’s protagonists make their way to a shared secure ranch in the wilds of northern Idaho. Here the survival-driven group fends off vicious attacks from the outside and eventually assists in restoring order to the country.
Ancient tripe
It was published in 1999 and has been around earlier than that under other names. The author (who spells his name with a comma to distinguish between his family name and the part of his name that is “his property”) has other recommendations for fiction, including “Lucifer’s Hammer”.
http://www.rawles.to/appb.htm
Lucifer’s Hammer
What’s wrong with Lucifer’s Hammer? It’s great scifi by a classic scifi author?
crap, we just weeded our “end of the millennium”
survivalist garbage… isn’t this all the same stuff? learn to hunt. dominate weaker people. take stuff by force. play God.
Balanced
There’s nothing wrong with survivalist fiction. Just make sure your collection is balanced by purchasing French History.
I rather enjoyed
Lucifer’s Hammer. Great book. It didnt actually describe how bad things would really be under similar circumstances, but pretty decent.
Almost as good as Pat Frank’s “Alas Babylon”. Both were based on very sound scientific and sociological ideas.
Lucifer’s Hammer was based on a very good work by the Italian author Roberto Vacca called “The Coming Dark Age”, who has a degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in Computer Sciences ( gotten very early in the computer sciences game)
P.S.
It not by mistake that one of the primary characters in Lucifers Hammer is a U.S. Postal worker. Vacca’s book does a rather interesting comparison of the U.S. and Italian postal systems.
And basically he states that after a civilization threatening event, society will rebuild itself around the same principals of governments getting larger and larger to protect larger and larger areas, with larger and larger populations, around the previous areas in which the last civilization’s technoligies still survived.
this is a critical book
it is a preview of what will happen to this once great country once obama has a few more years in office. that’s why he’s trying to eliminate the 2nd amendment, so we will all be at mercy of his “civilian national security force” that is just as “powerful and well-funded as our military”.
A Good Read
The book made it to #6 on Amazon on April 8th. It was ranked #1 in Thrillers, and #1 in Contemporary Fiction.
I read the earlier edition, at it was a good read. Some of the characters are a bit wooden, but I think that Rawles intended it to serve as a survival manual as much as a novel. The new edition has a Glossary and Index (a la Tolkien), and perhaps that is indicative of intent.
Insane people at it again
Obama has no more desire to eliminate the 2nd Amendment than Nixon did.
Notice almost every right wing assertion over the decades has proven false. The Soviets and Red Chinese wanted to launch a nuclear war. Didnt happen. Every assertion they have made about the Democrats has proven false, while their maniacal assertions have proven not only false, but wasted 90 percent of every dollar of taxes in the process. Diplomacy has always been more effective, hard power threats have been ineffective.
The reason Obama is so popular is that the right wing insanity/inanity has proven so false, time and time again, and the last decade of their almost total control of the country has turned out so badly for so many people that nothing they say will be believed for many generations.
Survivalist Fiction
There are a number of good books in this genre. I especially enjoyed “Malevil” by Robert Merle, about the end of the world from a French perspective.
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart is another good one, about a college student out in the field doing research when disease kills off almost everyone else.
Almost anything from Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone were good, especially if it had Burgess Meredith in it.
out of the ashes series by william johnstone was really bad. Good story line and lots of action, but basically self righteous bastards doing in liberal commies and minority crimanl hangs who wanted to control their lives. Sex and violence and the wild west.