Great What If Story: What if the USA ceased to exist | Without Warning

Entertaining, thoughtful, and action packed | Without Warning | John Birmingham

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	• Without Warning John Birmingham Del Rey, 2009 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 65 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Book with no coherent plot

First, I would like to state that the action sequences (most of the book), are well written, and flow cleanly. The characters are quite well fleshed-out and they do connect with the reader at various levels.

However, the fact that the author does not even attempt to explain the central event of the story, an energy wave that obliterates the USA, is a huge disappointment that deprives the book of meaning. The separate threads into which the characters are woven almost never intersect, and so we are left with an overly-prolonged collection of separate tales that have no greater context. Imagine a version of The Lord of the Rings within which the stories of the Frodo and Aragorn, of Gandalf and Saruman, of Arwen and Boromir, have no point of intersection: they simply fight their own wars for or against Sauron, who suddenly disappears as suddenly as he appeared. This is an extremely weak story-telling technique.

I have awarded three stars to Without Warning in recognition of the author's fairly accomplished writing style and his ability to move a story forward and grip the reader's attention. But I won't be buying any more of his work.

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Great What If Story: What if the USA ceased to exist

The book was a page turner. The action takes place in Alaska as people soon discover that the most of the United States and a great swath of Canada and Mexico have been cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious electromagnetic field.

The most interesting thing to me about the book is the creation of a world where America suddenly disappears. Interestingly, the world does not instantly go into chaos because the US military because of its large overseas commitments is largely intact. The USA, despite its radically reduced nature, also keeps the rule of law and the Constitution as intact as possible and establishes a government in the Pacific North West.

The characters were interesting and the good guys were likable without being pasteboard stereotypes. The same goes for the bad guys. The book is no award winner but it was a good read and I look forward to the obvious sequels.

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Entertaining, thoughtful, and action packed

Birmingham can write. His punchy yet descriptive style carries the multiple plot lines to satisfying "conclusions" by the end of the book. Each of the main characters is engaging in his or her own way, and the author does an excellent job of speculating at what the new "big boy rules" world would be if the U.S. weren't around. One could argue ethnocentrism, but instead I'd make the case that Birmingham starts with an event and then follows it with logic based on man's checkered and militaristic history. Great read.

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Good book - but not great.

Decided to purchase this book after reading a sample on my kindle, despite its high price. The beginning of the book was excellent, with an exciting premise. I shall leave the summarizing to others. A bit too much action for me, and not enough fleshing out of the characters. Also, a seeming rush to the end (which left me a bit unsatisfied and wanting more).

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In Kuwait, American forces are stacked up, locked and loaded for the invasion of Iraq. In Paris, a covert agent, a woman who inhabits a twilight of lies and death, is close to cracking a terrorist cell. And just north of the equator, a forty-foot wood-hulled sailboat, manned by a drug runner, a pirate, and two gun-slinging beauties, is witness to the unspeakable. In one instant, all around the world, for politicians and peasants, from Gaza to Geneva, things will never be the same. A wave of inexplicable energy has slammed into the continental United States.

America, as we know it, is gone. . . .

WITHOUT WARNING

Now U.S. soldiers are fighting a war without command or control. A correspondent records horrors for no one. Washington is gone and the line of succession is in tatters; the functioning remnants of government are in Pearl Harbor, Guantánamo Bay, and one desperate, isolated corner of the Northwest. For the jihadists, it?s Allah?s miracle. For Saddam, it?s a chance to attack. Iran declares war on an America that doesn?t exist?except in the hearts and souls of the men and women who want it to.

In this astounding work of alternate fiction, John Birmingham hurtles us into a scenario that is unimaginable but shatteringly real: a world of financial ruin where a cloud of noxious waste?from America?s burning cities?darkens Europe, while men and women in offices around the globe struggle to make decisions that cannot hold and opportunists unleash their secret demons.

From a slick Texas lawyer who happens to be in the right place at the right time to a hard-working city engineer in Seattle who becomes his terrified city?s only hope, from the cancer-stricken secret agent to a drug runner off the Mexican coast and a U.S. general in Cuba, Without Warning tells a fast, furious story of survival, violence, and a new, soul-shattering reality. The first in an epic trilogy that will leave readers breathless and astounded, Without Warning offers a world without its policeman, its Great Satan, or its savior?as an unknowable future struggles to be born.

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