Short version: The lights go out, all over the world. No one knows how or why or who, they just know that nine out of ten of them die almost immediately, after which the rest are starving and very few of them know how to farm or hunt. The ones who do form nuclei, small outposts of humanity dotted around the earth. Islands, it turns out, are a good place to be at the end of the world. Cities emphatically are not. But mostly what you need is a safe place to grow food and someone to show you how.

I’ve read the first three in this Emberverse series now, after reading the first three books about What Happened on Nantucket at the same time as the Change, as the day everything did everywhere else is known. Stirling has given a lot of thought to how humanity would react to this scenario. It ain’t pretty. Guns don’t work and gang bangers turn on the cops and everyone else. Phones don’t work so you wouldn’t be able to call them anyway. 747s fall out of the sky. Dams fail and breach. The Black Plague returns, and there is nothing at hand to treat it or anything else, like a splintered bone or cancer. You just die. Zookeepers love their inmates and so set them free before people break in to eat them. Which of course means hippopotamus are now living in rivers in England and Bengal tigers are thriving in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, and all of them consider humans a tasty little snack.

In the Willamette Valley of Oregon three charismatic, capable leaders, one a Witch, one an ex-Marine, and one a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism create communities in their own images and gear up to defend their territories and their ways of life from conquering armies, raiders, Eaters, and other yrch. I’ll get to that last in a minute.

By far and away the most fun part of these three books are the Dúnedain, a, I guess, light cavalry or maybe mounted infantry force along the lines of Tolkien’s Rangers, made up of teenagers from the Kilties and the Bearkillers. They speak in Elvish and then have to start making up words for “pee” and “shit” because Tolkien didn’t. Beyond the first hilarity, though, it’s hard not to take them seriously, because they take themselves very seriously indeed, and it cannot be denied that they are an effective fighting force Aragorn would have been grateful to have at his side at Minas Tirith. Oh, and yrch is Elvish for Orc.

What will keep you up nights is how effectively Stirling demonstrates just how fragile civilization is, how delicate and interconnected is the construct that supports all of our lives, how susceptible it is to collapse, and how desperate we would be in the absence of everything we thought we knew to find something or someone to believe in. Absorbing and sobering reads, all of them. Recommended.

Book Review Monday Emberverse S.M. Stirling