reviewed by Lyn McConchie.
some time back I purchased “Wizard’s Bane,” the first in this six book series. After that I was very busy revising several of my own books, but with those out of the way I discovered that the next two in the series were available. So I bought them. This on its own says a lot about the first book. I liked it sufficiently to buy the next – not one but – two.
I moved on after re-reading Wizard’s Bane, to Villenspell: City of Wizards. This picks up immediately after the first book, it adds several new characters in the course of the story, but all are fleshed out in depth, and have a distinctive voice. The books are “science fantasy”, with the background roughly corresponding to our 1700s.
Briefly, the main character, Dale, made an error when attempting to close a warp rift and landed on this world. In book one he acquired a boy, Kheri, a thief, as a combination of friend/trainee/servant. He added Faran, 27th child of the local Baron, a sixteen-year-old who is ignored by his father, has no mother, and is rapidly going to the bad with no good role model. Dale becomes mentor for both lads and the way their characters changed was very believable.
Along with Galdur, the young son of a bandit leader, Aerline, a sorceress, and Dale’s friend, Jarl, they travel to the city of Villenspell to find the College of Wizards and ask a few pertinent questions, while also getting a major spell on Jarl removed. They arrive, the spell is removed, the bandit’s son who has a talent for healing decides to remain in the city and train his ability, and Dale marries Aerline before they pack up and leave the city again.
All of which sounds if it wouldn’t fill a book, but it does so very pleasantly. There is Kas, a trainee assassin who bounds into the middle of events, is caught, and decides that he’d be better off with them. There’s the startling transformation of purple syrup by symbiotic magic into Kaowin, a younger brother for Kheri. And then there is a bully, Rik, who finds himself bound to Faran after he fails to kill Faran in a fight to the death. There is also Aerline’s problem with her prejudices against something that apes human life. The ultimate disposal of the College’s pizza transporter, and the incident at the Redhorn Tavern.
Villenspell is the second book in a series that I think of as a “road trip”. You have someone who is traveling down a very long road at the end of which they will have to do some major deed of great importance. Along the way they pick up companions, some stay for a while then leave, others will continue to the end of the road and help in the final denouement.
The main question is, can the author make each book in the series interesting enough? And the answer to that, in this case and so far, is – yes, she can. The characters have in-depth backgrounds that make them come alive, and render their actions believable and understandable. The gradual revelations are very well done, just enough and no more.
There is the occasional minor event I disliked, but that was a personal preference, and it certainly wasn’t sufficient to put me off. I look forward eagerly to reading the next book, WIZARDS AND WANDERERS, which I bought at the same time, and I have ordered the remainder of the series. If the author keeps up this standard of work I’ll be re-reading the six books, once I have them all, for many years to come.
One warning, read the books in order, they don’t read so well either out of order or as standalone volumes. But that’s something that applies to many series, and I don’t feel that it detracts from this one.

ONE SECOND AFTER by William R. Forstchen. Published TOR March 2009
reviewed by Lyn McConchie.

Maybe because I’m aware that if civilization collapses I’ll be dead with it shortly thereafter even if I survive the initial event, (I have pernicious anaemia) I have a liking for most post-holocaust books. However I’m fussy about those I keep. I have a shelf of them, ranging from such classics as Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, and The Furies, to the more modern destruction of Cold Sea Rising, and the John Marsden series of Tomorrow When the War began. I keep an eye open for new additions to the shelf, and, having been disappointed this year with The Mission and Outpost both good read-once books but not keepers. – I pounced by William Forstchen’s book, One Second After.
I ignored the various accolades and introduction by a prominent Name and went for the throat, starting the book mid-morning, and remaining glued to it for the entire day, despite some interruptions, until, some four hours worth of reading later when I closed it with a sigh of satisfaction. For those who know this sub-genre, it can be likened to Pat Frank’s work, Alas Babylon. It has a similar family plus dogs, a village atmosphere (in the North Carolina hills) where being a neighbor is important, and where the inhabitant knows almost everyone, and Forstchen has been quite graphic in places about what the destruction of a key component in a civilization would bring to those who survive.
The village is Black Mountain, set in a beautiful scenic area of mountains close to Ashville, (The author lives in this area too) The village is mostly peaceful, the people are mostly generous and honest, and it’s a good place to live, raise children, attend the small Christian college, or retire. Until three nuclear devices are detonated high above the United States and produce not fallout but an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) which in a second fries almost every electrical item in the country, including power stations, car computers, phones, and medical equipment.
And the fact is, that this scenario is one of the most likely to end up as a reality if some lunatic dictator with nuclear capacity decides to take his enemies with him. As in Forstchen’s book, it can be done in such a way that no one but the perpetrator knows who was responsible, and the area affected can be targeted with reasonable precision not affected by wind direction, or other natural phenomena. It would be excellent as the advance for a planned invasion since the victims would be too busy with survival, rescue, and coping with those who had relied on electrical equipment to live, and who would have lost in the single second, many military capabilities to fight back effectively.
It has puzzled me ever since I heard about EMP many years ago, why more has not been done to guard against such a scenario but it seems to have gone, for most countries, into the ‘too-hard basket’ and left ignored for the most part. Some modern military equipment has been ‘hardened’ against EMP, but little if anything of civilian items and if such a strike was made today, the events in One Second After would be all too probable and not merely in America, but in all the city areas of any first world country where it occurred.
This book is brutally realistic, something many of the older ones in this sub-genre were not, or were not able, to be. (Publishers don’t always like over-brutal realities graphically written.) The EMP strikes Black Mountain as John Matherson prepares for his younger daughter Jennifer’s twelfth birthday party. John’s wife Mary died of breast cancer four years earlier, and he lives with Jennifer and her elder sister, Lucy, and their two much loved dogs, Ginger and Zach in a pleasant home some distance out of town. In that second his discussion with a friend on the phone is cut off, his daughter’s CD player dies, the ceiling fan whirrs to a halt, the home security/fire alarm chirps that it is off-line, and the computer in the room shuts down.
Even Matherson, once an army officer, doesn’t realize what has happened, assuming that it is some sort of ordinary power outage. It takes him some time to become worried, more time to decide that he should investigate, and only gradually does it dawn on him that his life has gone from comfortable, predictable and safe, to uncomfortable, difficult and possibly lethally dangerous, for his children, loved parents-in-law, and for everyone that he knows.
This book is a progression as the country – in the form of Black Mountain as its microcosm – comes to see what has happened, and to deal with it, each in their own way, or within the groups they join or are swept into. Beginning with John Matherson’s discovery of all traffic broken down on the local throughway and some of the drivers already becoming dangerously belligerent since Jen (his mother-in-law’s) car, an ancient Edsal, is the only vehicle running so far as they can see.
Events move into the initial die-off when those dependent for life on electrically operated medical equipment die without it. Then those who rely on medication to survive and without the transport that regularly stocks their pharmacy, there are now no resupplies of heart pills, High Blood Pressure tablets, insulin, and pain medication. There is a wave of suicides at both times as well, as those who are ill or damaged understand what will happen to them. Famine is starting, disease breaks out, and attacks begin from communities that see Black Mountain as having more than others do.
In that one second, American civilization has been flung back, not just to the 1800s, as Matherson explains, but to a far earlier time. Because in the 1800 they had an infrastructure solidly in place. Now they don’t, they have to build it from the beginning again, and they can’t support much of the population they have while doing this. At the end of the book, only 20% of Black Mountain’s population have survived, and, while the book appears to then sound a cautious note of hope, John Matherson is unconvinced and, as a realist, so am I.
The characters of One Second After engaged me completely, and the background is that of any rural town. Throughout the story John Matherson has to make hard choices, as do the mayor, police chief, medics and those responsible for the running of Black Mountain’s college. Some find themselves unable to do so, while others break under the strain but I never felt that any of that was unlikely or contrived. The book has gone straight to my ‘keeper’ shelf of ‘post-holocaust’ books, and I look forward to reading it again in another 3-4 years – so long as an EMP doesn’t get here first.
This work is a chilling forecast of something that is far more likely to occur than many other doomsday scenarios, and it should be required reading for government and military personnel in countries such as the USA, UK, Australia, and my own New Zealand, where such an EMP would have the effects described. (It is true that here with our very low population density, fertile lands, and high agricultural production, we’d do better with maybe 30% surviving long term, but I doubt that the other 70% would see this as much of an improvement.) I strongly recommend this book to those who enjoy the sub-genre, but also to survivalists, governments, the military, and all realists everywhere.

1634:The Bavarian Crisis by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce.
Published BAEN SF (hc-2007, pb-2009) Reviewer Lyn McConchie.
I keep waiting for this series to fall over, others of the same type have done so, and this series has immensely complicated story lines, with a massive cast of characters, and spreads over politics, (incredibly entangled) practical considerations, (confusing) and masses of ordinary people who are caught up in it all (bewildered.)
The books tend to the tome too. It isn’t that I mind that, but you have to be very good to sustain a reader’s interest over 1,000 pages of book. Let it be known that thus far they’ve managed that for me at least.
However as I started reading I was initially worried about this one. Effectively this volume is a continuation of 633 and I liked that, but the blurb was very non-committal not really surprising I suppose. It’s virtually impossible to sum up a book like thisstoryline in a paragraph. But the blurb made no attempt to try. However I bought it and dived in.
It was then, maybe 50 pages in that I started to wonder if this was going to be the book that fell over. I wasn’t been drawn in as I usually am. It was okay, but not great. I kept reading. And around page 150+ I found that I was becoming engrossed. I chuckled aloud at some events, nodded at political points, turned back to check something, and dived back in again avidly. I read all day, half the night and shut the book around 1.30am still smiling. Oh yes, this is a good book!
I can only note two flaws, one mechanical it seems to be badly put together. The spine broke as I read the paperback (possibly because 1014 pages isn’t small) perhaps also because in the section where it broke, that portion appears to have been printed right to the edge of the page in error and hence may not have been inlaid correctly when the volumes were bound.
The other flaw is the slow start. I am a very fast reader. My standard fiction-reading speed was measured in a study in the early 1970s, as 600 words per minute. And even at that speed I’d reading each word, not skipping. So the slow start to this book meant it took me just over an hour before I was into the good stuff. I can live with that, but many who read far more slowly may not persevere. Mind you, they’ll be missing something, but they may choose to do so.
And the theme? Well, you could probably say that this book is about Maria Anna, Archduchess of Austria, and all the political discussions, decisions, and controversy that swirl about her proposed marriage to her uncle. Some of the described events had me laughing aloud, there were some great moments, and very human ones, and in the end when I put the book down I felt as if I’d eaten a large satisfying meal. I wanted to wander off and digest it.
So, 1634:The Bavarian Crisis upholds the honor of the series, and I really recommend it. I just suggest that IF you can afford it, if as I am – you are keeping the books in the series to reread many times, then buy the hardcover. It’ll be much better value. I don’t think my paperback will stand up to more than two readings before it comes to bits in my hands and I didn’t find that value for the money.