Category Archives: Speculative

Holding Their Own II by Joe Nobody

I’m a TEOTWAWKI/post-apocalyptic fiction fan going way back, to when I first saw The Road Warrior.  For many years, it seems like there hasn’t been a lot in the genre that’s well-written, unless you want zombies.

I’m working on such a novel myself right now, and wanted to keep my mindset grounded in the genre. So I’ve been listening to a lot of late ’60s rock (it works for me), and have tried a few TEOTWAWKI series on Netflix (all of which became overbearingly stupid after a few episodes).

I had some extra Audible.com credits this month, so I went shopping for a recorded book. And, being stung too many times by both tradpub and indie authors, I perused the reviews before taking a chance. I’ve been at this long enough that I usually know which reviews to ignore and which to pay attention to, and author “Joe Nobody” seemed to have a lot going for him. Also, his blurbs were competently written. (You might be surprised how many authors expect you to take a chance on their books after posting poorly written descriptions.) This is why I started the Holding Their Own series with the second novel–opinions were just about unanimous that the narrator for #1 was too awful to endure for hours.

So in this one, subtitled The Independents, the SHTF already, and folks are surviving as best they can.

The hero’s name is Bishop. Not sure whether that’s a first or last name, but it doesn’t really matter. He and his wife have a small ranch hidden in a canyon in Texas, surviving and minding their own business. The story kicks off when a former military/intelligence colleague of Bishop’s crash lands in a small plane after buzzing the hidden ranch.

“The Colonel” is seriously injured in the crash, and a whole bunch of other stuff is triggered as well. The plot involves a Colombian drug lord , a kidnapped girl, a treasure in gold, and a frustrated doctor without the right tools and materials to help his patients…just to name a few.

The adventure factor made this the most fun I’ve had in the genre since reading The Last Ranger and Doomsday Warrior series as a young man, though there are no radioactive mutants or B-movie villains in this one.

Where the author shines is in his characters. Bishop is smart and skilled. Not invincible, but he doesn’t cause me to groan like so many heroes in the genre, either. He faces some pretty intimidating odds at different points, and enjoys good luck for sure, but his triumph is entirely plausible as written. What’s more, I actually liked the character of his wife in this book. Most female protagonists in the genre are written in a way that causes me to roll my eyes and skip ahead. But this one is the kind of woman you’d want to have in such a situation.

Well, frankly she’d be a prime catch for any man in the western world these days, but especially in a frontierish survival scenario.

Mr. Nobody has made me a return customer with this book.

Post-Apocalyptic Affirmative Action: The 100

You can find this series on Netflix or Amazon.

The scenario:

Earth was destroyed in a nuclear war. Hundreds of people survived in space stations orbiting the planet. The space stations were sent up by different nations.  They eventually found “unity” and combined all their stations into one impossibly gigantic station called “the Ark.” Cute, huh?

This multinational colony all speaks English. No biggie–we can accept that, as it makes it easier to tell a story. There is artificial gravity everywhere in the Ark, too–even the sections not spinning. The ace mechanic (a woman, of course) manages to fix heavy machinery on a regular basis without even getting her hands dirty, and while maintaining a perfect manicure. Because booty. (That’s right, this actress, though typically skinny, has the nicest rump you may see on TV, and she’s also smokin’ hot above the shoulders. But you’ll only get treated to the full package when she’s first introduced.)

So much for technical realism.

Air and resources are running out on the Ark, so they send 100 juvenile delinquents down to Earth to both get them out of the space station, and to serve as lab rats and demonstrate whether the environment is survivable. There are some legitimate criminal types mixed in, but most are just misunderstood teens.

It turns out the Earth is survivable (or there would be no series). In fact, the “Grounders” (a primitive society descended from survivors who never left the planet) are doing just fine, biologically. They also speak English with no dialectic variation from the multinational space station contingent.

So what we have here is potentially a TEOTWAWKI survival story with plenty of conflict within and without the “100” culture for a competent writer to work with and keep interesting.

PC Utopian tweaks:

Every single leader of import is either a woman or a minority–with occasional antagonistic exceptions like a white male who leads a sort of lynch mob. And of course the best leaders are the females. Even the Grounders–a hunter-gatherer society where survival depends on physical prowess–have a female leader and plenty of pixie ninja “warriors.”

Ri-iiiiight.

There are a couple bad-boy types. One becomes the bleeding heart pacifist “voice of conscience” type after the ship lands. The other was a janitor on the Ark, and becomes co-leader with a Strong Female Character who is star of the show. Of course she is the stronger, wiser, more rational leader of the two. Bad Boy #1 has, as his girlfriend, the hottest chick on the show (the aforementioned “mechanic”), but, in a society where females are apparently in short supply, he ditches her for the plain-faced blonde protagonist with the body of a teenage boy.

In fact, within a couple episodes, the show began to resemble a soap opera. The question the audience is prompted to ask is not “How will they survive this catastrophe?” but “Who’s sleeping with who this week?”

Maybe that’s the root problem: Much like what feministas and SJWs want to do to video games (what #gamergate is all about), they have invaded genres like TEOTWAWKI/post-apocalypse and have twisted it into just another pop culture tool to sell their agenda and condition an audience that would rather just be entertained.

They weren’t content to have their own gynocentric gathering places and their own gynocentric entertainment. They have to take over what few male sanctuaries are left and ruin them, as well.

If you want to watch something in this kind of modern-people-dealing-with-prehistoric-challenges flavor, a much better choice would be Terra Nova. It only lasted one season, and is certainly not perfect, but is far superior to this flotsam.

Badasses of Dude-Lit: Number Four

The countdown continues…

4. The Last Ranger

Here’s another hero that’s probably a beta male, but he ranks this high mostly because I enjoy the post-apocalyptic genre.

Whoever wrote under the name “Craig Sargent” was probably a peacenik from the Vietnam era, because that’s how Martin Stone comes off–despite being raised and trained by a Special Forces officer. The series was published toward the end of the Cold War and left-leaning nuclear disarmament sentiments permeate.

Yet despite the political proclivities and the beta nature of Martin Stone, he’s forced to act decisively and heroically due to the environment and the characters who inhabit it. He also gets his wick dipped on a regular basis, because there’s an average of one damsel-in-distress in every novel.

Major Clayton Stone wasn’t a Ranger, and his son was never even a soldier, so I’m not sure how the series title was justified.

I own all 10 paperbacks in the series. The plotting really goes downhill toward the end, like the author(s?) lost interest and were just typing words for a paycheck. But it’s a lot of fun prior to that. If I have to face a post-nuke future, I’d want to start from a secret mountain bunker full of automatic weapons, with a Harley and a loyal fighting dog to scout with.


I just found out these books are being released for the Kindle. And with the original covers! It looks like they started with the series finale and are working their way back to the first one for some reason. It’s great news for readers in any case.

Castigo Cay by Matt Bracken

Matt Bracken is a former SEAL with what seems to me an obsession about sailing. You’d think, when someone like this becomes a novelist, he’d try his hand at writing high seas thrillers after the manner of Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt.

That’s not quite what he does.

Like a lot of us, Bracken is bothered by a government that views as it’s primary enemy the very citizens whose rights it was established to protect. Up until Castigo Cay the backdrop of his stories was almost entirely comprised of the efforts of renegade public servants hell-bent on violating a specific article of the Bill of Rights they swore to uphold. I’ve read and reviewed the first novel in his Enemies series.

Castigo Cay is a bit of an adjustment from his previous work–more of a straight-up adventure–with a point of view decidedly unorthodox, as you might imagine.

Dan Kilmer is a USMC veteran of the Iraq deployment who escaped the near-future dystopia in a 60-foot schooner, making a living as a sort of modern day privateer. His gorgeous, sexy girlfriend leaves him in the first act to chase her ambitions inside the economically ruined USA; specifically in the de facto fiefdom of Miami. Dan is sorry to see her go, but prepared to move on with his life, when another expatriate sailor brings him news about the shady billionaire who enticed Cori (the ex-girlfriend) away.

The billionaire is one of the amoral corporatists who has profited from the dismantling of the republic. He’s a real sicko, and has hired a crew of fellow sickos. On his private island in the Carribbean (ostensibly a “game preserve”) he brings young attractive women to be raped, tortured, then hunted and killed as if big game.

Dan spends a lot of his private savings (in the form of gold krugerands–the universal barter currency in the wake of the US Dollar’s obliterated facade of worth) and spends most of the novel on a sort of goose chase, but meets some helpful friends along the way.

Bracken really hooked me at the beginning with the strong characterizations. The story did bog down a bit, however, during the second act in the Miami area. The third act poured on the juice, though, with a return to the eponymous locale and a showdown between Dan and the sickos.

As apparently is SOP with Bracken’s novels, this one is packed with a lot of information, most of it about sailing. I didn’t always know what the names of different equipment referred to, but it was never so thick that I got lost, either. It reminded me a bit of The Sand Pebbles in that regard. I got the gist of it enough to follow the flow of the story weaved through this maritime universe.

Regardless of how right or wrong the worldview behind an adventure story is, or the technical details, what makes it sink or swim are the characters. Bracken batted it out of the park in that regard. Dan Kilmer is flawed to be sure, but he kind of knows it, can admit when he’s wrong, and when given the chance to redeem himself he charges straight for it at flank speed.