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BLURB:
With the world ending
around him, Ward flounders for purpose and survival. Resources are gone,
disease is rampant, and governments have all but dissolved. The only way off
the broken planet is with the Order. Obsessed with technology, the Order is a
cult that has developed the means for faster-than-light travel. They claim they
can populate the galaxy and save humanity.
Ward joins the Order,
inspired by sudden and irrational love for a mysterious beauty named Kansas who
saves his life. But quickly, he finds out Kansas and the Order want him to kill
adults and kidnap children from across the country. With impressionable youth
filling their starships, the Order hopes for their tenets to be spread to all
future generations of humanity.
The Order is Ward’s only
chance for survival in the wreck the earth has become. Worse than that, those
in the Order come to accept him and value his skills for their nightmarish
quest across the dystopian landscape of America. But, somewhere inside of him,
still, is the strength to strike out on his own and protect whatever good he
can find left in the world.
*
Being a history buff, I was curious how this story compared with the real Dust Bowl. Here's what the author had to say:
So I have written a book, Dust Bowl. It is pretty good and I feel like you should go out of
your way to buy it—but of course, I am biased because of how all my opinions
are completely correct one hundred percent of the time, no questions asked.
There was also a very real event/area/historical-type-thing
that happened called the Dust Bowl. And any
time that you write a book named after an enormous historical thingamajig,
there are bound to be correlations made. I think that this is a reasonable
thing to do; my task here is going to be to elucidate for you the sort of
conceptions I had in mind for correlation as I wrote the novel.
The actual Dust Bowl, for those of you who don’t know, was
(or is) this enormous patch of land covering the Northern part of Texas, much
of Oklahoma, and substantial parts of Nebraska and Kansas. All of this land was
made completely non-arable due to poor farming techniques, overuse, and (to my
limited recollection from research I did five or six years ago) in large part
because of the volume of cattle traveling via cattle drives from Texas to
Kansas. This all came to a head during the Great Depression (another horror
created by overconsumption and poor business techniques), and as a result
enormous portions of rural workers were left without work. Giant dust storms
filled the middle of the United States, sometimes shifting over into unaffected
areas.
There—that’s roughly twenty years of history in five
sentences! My history teachers would be proud. Maybe. They were always sort of
ornery.
The problem today, in our very real life, is that the Dust
Bowl is still basically there. We use better techniques on the land, and
irrigate it a whole hell of a lot better, but that top soil never fully
recovered. So, my novel, among other conceptualizations of our future, imagines
what it might be like if that same Dust Bowl extended out—to approximately twice
the size it once was.
Anytime a person is writing a dystopian novel—which Dust Bowl most certainly is—there are
going to be a lot of responses to the societal current of the times. So, I
wasn’t just examining the historical Dust Bowl and applying it to a dystopia,
but also making comparisons to the historical Dust Bowl, the state of the world
now, and then finally all of that to what I conceived as a possible route for
the future.
So, the historical Dust Bowl gave rise to a lot of desperate
people doing desperate things to survive. Government intervention was difficult
because with the land being non-arable, it was hard to justify trying to fix
the problems that were there. I think both of these things arrive in various
forms today (desperate people acting desperately and the difficulty of
governmental intervention—for whatever reason—for various problems) and they
certainly are present in my novel.
Currently, huge portions of the world are in the middle of a
drought (there are portions of the Southwest that have been at drought-levels
for something like twenty years), and we keep being told that the Great
Recession is receding even though full-time jobs are just as hard to find as
they have been since the beginning of the crash. Both of those things were going on during the
Depression. We’ve already looked at the former, but for the latter, Hoover
would constantly come on the radio and talk to people about how bad the
Depression “was.”
So, the “Dust Bowl” referred to the title of my book is both
physical and metaphysical. It’s very physical in the sense that most of the
book takes place in where the historical Dust Bowl was located—in the Northern
tips of Texas, through Oklahoma and bits of Kansas. In all of these places, the
Dust Bowl has come back with a vengeance, producing horrendous dust storms and
making the land non-arable. People survive by the skin of their teeth—outside
of cities with special wind-shields and enclosed neighborhoods and the like,
life is extremely hard and largely goes without assistance from anyone,
including any kind of government (which all have sort of withdrawn like some
ignoble tortoise within their shells).
It’s also used in a sort of metaphysical way. Ward, the main
character, is an addict and so leads a kind of barren emotional life most of
the time. But, his emotions are all still there, they’re just not attached to
anything very well, so they swirl about his consciousness, and occasionally
come down in these huge storms of love or violence or attachment that are most
destructive. So the Dust Bowl is a nice sort of metaphor for that.
I can also view it in the sense of how we have all these
underpinnings of society that help us work together and bring us closer
together, and when a society isn’t working toward common goals or looking after
each other, all you’re left with is wreckage that isn’t really useful for
anything. That’s not a particular focus of the book, but it’s always there in
the background, like the dust.
I sincerely doubt that what I write about will ever come to
pass in the form that I write about it—I am not so very lucky (or possibly cursed)
to be a prophet. But I do think that there are portions of history that are
rather cyclical, and so as I formed this novel I tried to pay attention to
history to make sure that I wrote with an aura of verisimilitude. But even with
all this attention to history as a backdrop—ultimately this is a story all
about characters and how they try to make their lives work in an increasingly
tough world. I think that’s something anybody can relate to. Those characters
and their decisions—often self-destructive and (I hope) exciting and
engaging—that’s the main event for this tale.
Excerpt
“Would you be willing to kill a thousand parents
so that there might be a thousand million more in the future? Would you orphan
a thousand children just so they could foster thousands of their own? That is
not a name put to courage. That is not something you don’t understand. That is
something very simple to understand, you just don’t have the will to do it yourself.
That is a name put to strength. To resolve. That’s what a set is.”
There was a light in the office behind the booth,
flickering every so often and casting strange, tentacled shadows into the room.
Joe looked at Ward and his face was sagging with fear. Maybe understanding had
not quite dawned in the liquored canals of his mind but it showed in his eyes,
and Ward felt satisfied for the first time all day.
Joe shook his head. “Why you telling me this?”
“I thought you should know what’s going to happen
here.”
“Just what exactly is that gonna be,” asked
Joe. “Or have you told me already?
Ward looked at him for a moment and took his gun
out of its holster. He laid it on to the table with his hand resting on it,
just in case he needed it. In his imaginings, usually people tried to run.
“Every adult here is going to die. One by one,
mostly. Some of this will be done by me.”
The eyes of Joe stayed fixated on the gun on the
table.
AUTHOR INFORMATION:
J.P. Lantern lives in the Midwestern US, though his heart and probably some
essential parts of his liver and pancreas and whatnot live metaphorically in
Texas. He writes speculative science fiction short stories, novellas, and
novels which he has deemed "rugged," though he would also be fine with
"roughhewn" because that is a terrific and wonderfully apt word.
Full of adventure and discovery, these stories examine complex people in
situations fraught with conflict as they search for truth in increasingly
violent and complicated worlds.
Links:
www.jplantern.com
www.facebook.com/jplanternbooks
Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/J.P.-Lantern/e/B00E46H16C
***
Now, please follow this tour and comment often!
12/16/2013
SECOND STOP MichaelSciFan
12/17/2013
Andi's Book Reviews
12/18/2013
Long and Short Reviews
12/19/2013
Bunny's Review
12/20/2013
It's Raining Books
12/30/2013
The Cerebral Writer
12/31/2013
Musings and Ramblings
1/1/2014
Straight from the Library
1/2/2014
Unabridged Andra
1/3/2014
Kit 'N Kabookle
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