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A review by rickwren
Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling
2.0
I had high hopes for this book after the premise, that civilization collapses because of a change of the laws of physics. This post-apocalyptic idea really set the stage for what promise to be a challenging and dangerous world. But instead it became some sort of fantasy for a repressed nerd with Renaissance Fair Sword Play ambitions.
This book was written with an end goal in sight. It was written as a moral of the story. That end goal and moral was that it's not a waste of time to play sword fighting games dressed up as medieval characters with your friends. And that is true, it is not a waste of time to develop friendships and do the things that you like to do no matter what Society thinks of it. But to go around pretending that you are preparing for survival in a dangerous world is ridiculous.
I don't care how much Sword Play you practice on the weekends in your fantasy camp, you aren't going to defeat a combat Marine in combat. Nor are you going to set up a kingdom because you play acted a Dark Age hero.
Also, there is no point in faking an Irish brogue or having a random English Woodsman happened by in your fantasy Tale. Just because you like accents doesn't mean that they are going to naturally occur in a post-apocalyptic world.
The job of a writer is not to justify his Hobbies, but instead to put his characters in very troubling positions and then have that story play out as realistically as possible no matter how unrealistic the setting. This author does not do that. Everything coincidentally falls together when needed most. If you need archery skills, and expert Archer happens by. If you need to make your own longbow, a person comes out of the crowd who just happened to work in a factory that made longbows. If you need to know whether the plants are medicinal, an indigenous botanist wanders on by. When you need a doctor, of course you rescue one from the clutches of cannibals. None of this is realistic in an unrealistic world, it's just the writer giving us to that morality play that he's so longs to achieve.
This book was written with an end goal in sight. It was written as a moral of the story. That end goal and moral was that it's not a waste of time to play sword fighting games dressed up as medieval characters with your friends. And that is true, it is not a waste of time to develop friendships and do the things that you like to do no matter what Society thinks of it. But to go around pretending that you are preparing for survival in a dangerous world is ridiculous.
I don't care how much Sword Play you practice on the weekends in your fantasy camp, you aren't going to defeat a combat Marine in combat. Nor are you going to set up a kingdom because you play acted a Dark Age hero.
Also, there is no point in faking an Irish brogue or having a random English Woodsman happened by in your fantasy Tale. Just because you like accents doesn't mean that they are going to naturally occur in a post-apocalyptic world.
The job of a writer is not to justify his Hobbies, but instead to put his characters in very troubling positions and then have that story play out as realistically as possible no matter how unrealistic the setting. This author does not do that. Everything coincidentally falls together when needed most. If you need archery skills, and expert Archer happens by. If you need to make your own longbow, a person comes out of the crowd who just happened to work in a factory that made longbows. If you need to know whether the plants are medicinal, an indigenous botanist wanders on by. When you need a doctor, of course you rescue one from the clutches of cannibals. None of this is realistic in an unrealistic world, it's just the writer giving us to that morality play that he's so longs to achieve.