In the above YouTube video, Prepper Potpourri, a very practical-minded prepper, put together a list of apocalyptic fiction to consider. In her video she collaborated with some other preppers in the YouTube prepper community about their favorites in the dystopian genre.
One of the other YouTube preppers in her video, Cold War Prepper, offered a great tip for reading dystopian novels and it’s actually the way I read non-fiction books too. He suggested having large index cards, post-it flags and a pen handy, to mark pages and jot down notes. This is how I’ve been reading for decades.
This year has turned into a departure from my usual type fiction reading choices, as I’ve wandered into some dystopian fiction this year, which I’ve generally skipped. I’ve also been reading a lot of non-fiction on totalitarianism, Mao and Soviet communism and other serious topics, trying to make sense out of our rapidly changing world. I even watched the first season of The Last of Us, an apocalyptic series about most of the world being wiped out by a rapidly spreading fungal infection, that attacks the brain and leads to, well, a zombie apocalypse.
I prefer happy endings and historical romances have always been my top fiction choice, but I’ve taken this reading detour lately, as I realized how many things I don’t know about preparedness and other very serious topics. I vaguely knew what an EMP event was, but once I learned more, well, that led to the William R. Forstchen novels and more reading on that topic.
Back in March I wrote a blog post about reading William R. Forstchen’s 2009 novel, One Second After (the John Masterson series). I then read his follow-on novels, One Year After and The Final Day. I also read his novel, 48 Hours. I recommend all of these, because even though a few things in the plots seemed unrealistic and a lot of Masterson and the town doctor dialogues often sounded more like they were regurgitating some “worst case scenario” information from some government report, overall I learned a great deal. The 4th book in Forstchen’s John Masterson series, Five Years After, was released in hardcover a couple days ago. The paperback will be released in May of next year and on Amazon, there is a Kindle version available.
Last year, I reread, George Orwell’s 1984 and a lesser known 1960s dystopian novel, A World Without Men, by Charles Eric Mann, which I saw mentioned at some conservative site several years ago, so I had ordered it and read it. Orwell’s masterpiece continues to be the easy go-to comparison for every extremist thing happening in the world.
The Mann novel delves into some of the extreme societal shifts within a world that, over time, through man-made reproduction problems, becomes literally without men. It’s a world maintained via artificial insemination using harvested sperm from males, as male babies were dramatically decreasing. Then male babies stopped being born and the last male on earth died off, leading to a secret global race for scientists to get male fetuses to survive. The story begins far in the future, then jumps back in history to set the stage of global events that explains how this all-female world came about. All of the characters felt hollow and forgettable to me. As the story returns to that future world, the protagonist figures out some important truths and she starts making waves.
The Mann novel would be totally forgettable, except some of the criticisms of early modern feminism the author touched on are worth considering, especially since modern feminism has moved into some very extreme mutations (they refer to them was “waves) with #MeToo and the ever-expanding gender movement. Seriously, LGBT is now 2SLGBTQI+ in Canada. The Canadian government explains: “2SLGBTQI+ terminology is continuously evolving. As a result, it is important to note that this list is not exhaustive and these definitions are a starting point to understanding 2SLGBTQI+ identities and issues.”
I developed an interest in all the Cold War era stuff back in the 1980s. Then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 and most people brushed aside all the things we had learned. Back then I had developed an interest in learning about propaganda and as we moved from one Army post to another, one of the many blessings of life around the Army was Army post libraries. Those libraries catered to military-themed topics and I found piles of interesting books to read. Perhaps, that earlier interest in propaganda is what sparked my interest in the American spin information war developing in the 1990s.
Recently, I read Reagan’s favorite dystopian novel, The Journal of David Q. Little, about the US falling under the control of an international organization controlled by the Soviet Union. Although the Soviet Union is long gone, many of the themes of Marxist ideology and Soviet operational methods described in this old 1960s novel, didn’t feel so antiquated when thinking about all the Marxist-tinged ideology that’s taken hold in America in recent years, especially among the far-left and in academia.
Now, we keep hearing about Russian and Chinese disinformation, AI generated information, fake news, digitally-altered images, bot attacks, algorithms used to distort perceptions, etc. and I’ve realized that I need to, not only try to understand the new things, but go back and brush up on older history. Influence operations went from being a thing government intelligence agencies or big corporations masterminded to now being a social media influencer” is a coveted career path and anyone with an internet connection can become an “influencer.”
Many people don’t enjoy reading non-fiction books, that’s why a dystopian fiction list like Prepper Potpourri put together can come in handy. While some of the plot twists and events may be unrealistic, the authors generally put a lot of effort into research and present scenarios, you might never have considered.
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