Genre: Literary, Apocalyptic

Publisher: Random House

Released: July 2010

Reviewed by Jonathan Schindler

America’s financial system has collapsed, the country is on the brink of becoming a dictatorship, and High Net Worth Individuals are able to live forever—if the technology advances as it should, that is. The world is at war, consolidated corporations are scrapping over the last pieces of American civilization, and a person’s credit score can cause deportation. And in the midst of all of this, a love story develops between Post Human Services geek Lenny Abramov and spendthrift drifter Eunice Park.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart is set in a near-future version of New York, where every person is plugged into their äppäräts, texts are scanned, books are smelly artifacts of the past, and everyone is always connected and streaming someone else. What makes Gary Shteyngart’s vision of the future so engaging—and so terrifying—is how believable it is.

The story is narrated through the diaries of Lenny Abramov and the GlobalTeens (a far more comprehensive and less private version of Facebook) account of Eunice Park. Lenny is nearing his fortieth birthday; Eunice is in her twenties. The way they experience the world—Lenny almost an outsider, Eunice completely immersed—helps the reader to navigate the strange events that must have occurred to bring the United States from the present into this dismal future. Shteyngart is a great writer, and he masterfully creates a new world for the reader without being heavy-handed or intrusive. The characters tell their story in a believable manner, and the details are slowly revealed to the reader as the story unfolds.

I mentioned that the book takes place in the “dismal future,” but it is to Shteyngart’s credit that the book does not become bogged down with ominous predictions. The book is, as its title suggests, primarily a love story, even if it is a love story gone awry (that is, super sad). The dark future is the setting, but the characters carry the story. The book does not feel like an excuse to give the author’s vision of the future, the characters and plot an afterthought to serve these greater ideas. Rather, Super Sad True Love Story feels like a good story first, its characters well-defined, its setting incidental. The plot, characters, and setting work well together, forming a cohesive unit that is surprisingly light.

One thing that provides the levity is the main narrator’s (Lenny’s) voice. He is an optimist and seems undaunted by the new ways of the world. He owns an old version of the äppärät (“What is this, an iPhone?”), his prized possessions are his books, and he still keeps a private diary despite the world’s demand for full exposure (literally and figuratively). He thus represents enough of what we’re used to that becoming accustomed to the story’s setting is a gradual revelation (as opposed to, say, A Clockwork Orange, which works in a different way by completely disorienting the reader). The reader feels as though Lenny is discovering this brave new world too, and that makes the reading experience more immersive and less like a high school homework assignment.

The book is well-written, but readers should be advised: Shteyngart’s vision of the future has, like the source material in the present, a good deal of sex and profanity. The future, according to Shteyngart, is a time when women are degraded to sex-object status even more than in the present, and while these details are key to creating the atmosphere of the story and rarely seem gratuitous, sensitive readers may want to pass on the book.

But for readers who can stomach those details and who like well-written, intelligent fiction; believable predictions about the future; commentary on the way technology mediates our relationships; or a good love story, Super Sad True Love Story is sure to please. I can’t be certain of this, but I predict it is a book that will stay with me long after having read it, and that is not a bad thing.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Genre: Apocalyptic

Publisher: Forge Books

Publication Date: March 17, 2009

Reviewed by Jeremy Taylor

In this timely, well-written, and extremely frightening book about the effect of an electromagnetic pulse bomb (EMP) on American society, Forstchen uses fiction to bring to light a very real threat. What would happen if, in the blink of an eye, all electronic devices, systems, and infrastructure ceased to function? How would our comfortable lives change if, with no warning, we no longer had electrical power, functioning automobiles, medicine and food delivery, computers, or a hundred other things that we take for granted and have come to depend on?

One Second After is a new take on what has become a classic theme—survival in the aftermath of complete societal destruction. Drawing heavily on books like Alas Babylon and Lucifer’s Hammer, as well as movies such as On the Beach and TV’s Jericho, the book somehow presents a fresh portrait of life after the end of civilization as we know it. It is the story of how a small-town university professor, his two daughters, and their formerly cozy North Carolina community deal with the end of the world.

Forstchen does a good job of creating sympathetic characters and, through them, exploring the increasingly disconcerting realities of everyday life in a post-apocalyptic world. The characters wrestle first with relatively simple inconveniences like the lack of running water and no Internet. But with no medicine or transportation, they soon face increasing hunger, illness, a rapidly growing body count, and violence. Through the characters’ and the town’s experiences, the reader gets a glimpse of the harshness of the reality that we have managed to mostly cover up with our technological advancements.

The story is interesting and well-paced and almost completely apolitical, though it succeeds in provoking the reader to wonder what could be done today politically to prevent such a thing from occurring tomorrow. Objectionable material is minimal, though the realistic nature of the threat and its disturbing implications make the book difficult to get through at times.

Through it all, the truly frightening thing is not so much that a weapon exists that could wreak the kind of havoc described in the book but that our seemingly civilized culture could so rapidly disintegrate under those circumstances. Sobering, compelling, and at times heartbreaking, One Second After is well worth reading for anyone who has ever thought life was difficult when Facebook was down for a few hours.