Okay, the first thing I would like to say is that I am very sorry. It has been about six months since I’ve written anything. I did not expect the hiatus to be this long, but real life got in the way. But since you were all looking forward to this, I decided to take your advice and continue the spork, just in time to begin the second book in the late R. J. Rummel’s Never Again series— Nuclear Holocaust Never Again.
Now, wait just a minute, you might say. This is a sequel to the first book, is it not? And didn’t the first book end with world peace? So how could there be a nuclear holocaust in the series? Well, there is actually an answer. It is extremely poorly thought out, has loads of Unfortunate Implications, and is just plain stupid. But enough pussyfooting around the subject, let’s get started!
Just like when I began the spork of the first book in the series, so long ago, I will show you the cover:
Well, at least Rummel didn’t joke around when it came to the title. It’s not like anyone could pick up the book and think, “This must be a story about fluffy bunnies!” And I will admit, the picture is more connected to the book that the first book’s cover than the first book was, though the images were still quite crudely done. There is also that stupid picture of his “heroes” in the corner, as though we did not know which series this is a part of just from the title and author’s name on the cover.
Of course, if I judged this book by its cover this would be a very superficial and unhelpful spork, so let’s get into the writing, shall we?
Just like the first book, this one has a page with heavily quote mined sources giving praise to Rummel’s nonfiction books, but no indication made that the praise (which is dubious at best because of all the ellipses) is actually for something completely different that he wrote. That’s just dishonest. This time it goes on for two whole pages. Then we get a list of his nonfictional oeuvre (which the first book did not have for some reason) and then… a completely blank page. What was the publisher thinking? You don’t just include completely blank pages in an online book. It’s a waste of bandwidth.
It turns out that this volume has a dedication:
To the unknown Joys and Johns of this universe that fight and die so that others may live in freedom (page 7)
What? I dunno what Rummel’s trying to say here. He can’t possibly be referring to the military, because John and Joy are not in the military. They’re civilians, and when civilians do the things that John and Joy do, they’re called terrorists. And I don’t think that he believed that there were actually time travelers secretly interfering in history to ensure that things turn out okay, so that eliminates that possibility as well. Then there is another blank page, before we are treated to an Acknowledgements section, even though that usually only appears in nonfiction. Apparently Rummel does have an editor, one Marg Gilks. Rummel also mentions that he took to mind the feedback he got for the first book, and corrected some errors of historical fact. As we will later see, this is in fact the only reason that the sequels even exist. Now, you would think that would mean that this book is better researched, but don’t get your hopes up. As least Rummel acknowledged his own flaws, which is better than I can say for most authors sporked here. It’s a shame that he died.
Apparently Ms. Gilks decided to separate Rummel’s sections with blank pages, because there is yet another one dividing the acknowledgements from the foreword. Admittedly, that probably looks much better in a physical copy of the book, but this is the online version, which I am actually amazed is still available. The conversion to PDF was a bit clumsy. But maybe I’m just nitpicking. The foreword is basically two paragraphs of pretentiousness that could have been eliminated entirely, and then, after another blank page, we arrive at Chapter 1.
It opens with a caption revealing the setting: the New Universe’s version of New York, in the year 1994. Well I suppose this beats a bunch of “As You Know, Bob” speeches made by the characters to reveal when this takes place. Unfortunately, we don’t even get two sentences into the body of the work before Rummel forgets that a new paragraph must be made every time a character speaks. This is so basic that I have to wonder about the extent of his editor’s job.
Behind Lora, a sudden, blazing-white light cast everything into stark black and white, like a photographic negative. “What the . . . ” Lora blurted, just before a thunderous blast pushed her into the earth. (page 13)
Yes, this a sequel set in the late twentieth century, John and Joy are long dead, and the book is focusing on new characters. We don’t know anything about Lora as of yet, but it’s not going to matter because she is pretty much a flat character anyway.
The bigger problem is this narration. First, Rummel describes the light as “blazing-white” but then, within the same sentence, uses “black and white” as an adjective, repeating his words when he could have said something more like “monochrome”, which would have flowed better in the sentence. Also, there is pretty much only one thing that could possibly push somebody into the ground after a bright white light: a nuclear explosion.
Oh my God, there was a nuclear attack? Well, it’s in the title, so of course there’s going to be one. Rummel fails on making there be suspense here, but hey, maybe he was intending for it to be a First Chapter Spoiler kind of thing. Well, he says that Lora was not looking in the direction of the blast, explaining why she didn’t go blind. She must also be far enough away from the epicenter that she isn’t vaporized instantly. That’s kind of convenient, isn’t it? And as we will later find out, she isn’t just some random bystander. She is actually a person of importance, so this is in fact a Contrived Coincidence and not just Rummel choosing to focus on a character who can actually have her story told.
After getting little more than the wind knocked out of her, Lora rather foolishly looks back only to see a huge mushroom cloud standing over the ruins of Manhattan. Now, you know how badly Rummel failed in accurately depicting the aftermath of 9/11? Well, here he’s just as bad as portraying what people’s reactions would be to a nuclear strike. We don’t see any of the destruction, only here about it from afar. The viewpoint character is far away from the scene of the disaster now.
Lora’s first thought is denial, and that an asteroid hit the Earth. There are so many things wrong with this. First, assuming that a counterpart of NASA exists in this timeline, wouldn’t they have noticed that Earth was on a collision course with an asteroid big enough to wipe out a major city? Considering that the government of the New Universe is supposed to be benevolent, I don’t think they would have hidden that information. Instead they would have warned people and told them to evacuate Manhattan. So it isn’t an asteroid collision. However, Lora is naïve enough to believe that John and Joy completely eliminated international conflict once and for all, so there is definitely no way that they could have been attacked.
And already we have a major plot hole. Two of them, in fact. The first is that John and Joy’s mission was secret. Yeah, John kept a diary, but no one would believe him.1 There is a Hand Wave for this later, but it’s really kind of stupid, especially considering that according to John’s diary, Joy went completely crazy, so why would they still honor her? Secondly, according to the first book, world peace was achieved some time in the 1930s, before nuclear weapons were even developed. Therefore the very fact that they exist in the New Universe is proof that there still was international conflict, as countries still felt the need to develop nuclear weapons, and therefore that John and Joy did not succeed in their mission. In fact, Lora herself should realize this is a fallacy, especially considering something that is revealed later. There is an even bigger problem with this, but before the reader can figure out what it is, Lora’s inner monologue shifts to worrying about the fate of her boyfriend, Mark.
Now, it is perfectly natural, after a disaster, to be concerned about your loved ones. What is not natural is not to realize that your arm is broken. Yet Lora doesn’t even notice this until after she gets up to try to find Mark. Wouldn’t she have felt the searing pain before? Not only that, it’s a compound fracture; her arm bones are sticking out at a ninety degree angle. It’s amazing that she hasn’t passed out from shock.
She says that she has to go find Mark, and a paragraph later, he’s with her. There’s no suspense or anything. Considering that in a tragedy of such magnitude, thousands if not millions of innocent bystanders would lose their lives, this seems a little cheap. At least make it so that she needs effort to find Mark! Mark has a broken arm as well, but only minor injuries compared to Lora. It’s a good thing they were both far away from the blast radius, eh?
The two of them head for a hospital, and as it turns out, their car is still functional even though it was thrown into a telephone pole. Now, when I first started driving, I got into a serious car accident, in which I hit a sign. Fortunately I came out of it without a scratch on me, and nobody else was in the car, but the car itself was completely totaled. And I had slammed on the brakes as soon as I realized what was happening. For the protagonists’ car to have been thrown onto a telephone pole, it would have needed to be hit by hurricane-force winds, which themselves should have been noticed by the heroes, and the car would have impacted with much more force than my car did. There is no way that it is still drivable. But it’s just a convenient plot device for Rummel to get his characters to a hospital without them dying on the way. For the aftermath of a nuclear attack, he’s depicting awfully little of the damage that would realistically ensue.
It is only after they get to the car that the fallout starts dropping. If they are that close, then both of them should have radiation sickness by now, and there is nothing the hospital will be able to do about that. But neither of them realize that they are being hit by nuclear fallout, and Lora only cares about where her purse is. That would be the least of her worries. Rummel should have just stayed away from writing disasters. So like an idiot, Lora goes deeper into the disaster area, exposing both herself and Mark to even more fallout, to retrieve her purse. On the way, she finds a stray dog that is blind and bleeding from the mouth, and takes it in the car with her. First of all, that dog probably does have an owner, and secondly, there is nothing they can do for it. There is nothing they can do for themselves, either, but they’ve deluded themselves into thinking there is. If they are that close to the fallout, then they have received a lethal dose of radiation and will die slow and agonizing deaths within a few weeks.
The narration devotes much of the page to Mark trying to get the car started, and then they drive to a hospital in Brooklyn which should be completely overfull because of the disaster. But of course it isn’t, because the protagonists’ needs trump everyone else’s.
It isn’t until they are in the car that Lora suddenly realizes that it wasn’t an asteroid, but a nuclear bomb. You’d think she’d have come to this realization sooner. This leads to some of the most unrealistic dialogue I have come across in this series:
“Shit. Shit.” Mark almost drove into a three-car pileup in an intersection. “Jesus Christ, a nuclear bomb! Who could do this?”
Lora moaned, “Goddam, I’m too messed up to even guess who did it. It has to be the worst monster that ever lived.” (page 17)
I’m just going to ignore the obvious spelling and punctuation errors in that. The editor really didn’t pay that much attention to the manuscript. Also, the heroes are surprisingly calm for what has just happened. I’m surprised they’re willing to talk about it at all. And if they did, wouldn’t they use stronger profanity than that? It’s not like Rummel is shy about depicting his characters swearing.
When they arrive at the hospital, Lora leaves the dog behind, making it pointless and only present so that the readers know that Lora is kind to animals. Even though she pretty much left it to its own fate after all. It will be trampled when all the victims arrive. Which, I point out, should have already happened, since the duo took their sweet time getting there.
Rummel describes the appearance of the hospital, even though that doesn’t matter, and once again reminds us how lucky the heroes are to have gotten there first. Nobody else’s suffering even registers on the characters’ radar. For some reason, Lora refuses anesthesia during the surgery, but it’s never explained why. It’s an attempt at characterization that fails.
The hospital staff doesn’t seem to realize what is going on. Because of their broken arms, Lora and Mark have to dictate their medical information to a nurse. As it turns out, their full names are Lora Joy Reeves and Mark John Docker. Yes, it’s exactly as infuriating as you think.2 Even worse, it turns out that Lora is the president of the Joy Phim Democratic Peace Institute. (Mark is her second-in-command, and actually her husband and not her boyfriend.) So yeah, that’s why I said it was rather convenient that they did not die instantly. This may have been mentioned in the last book, but I still think it’s crazy to name their benevolent organization after Joy, since she was a proven psychopath. Also, why is it that only Dolphy and Hands’s descendants are known to be in this organization? Nepotism, ladies and gentlemen!
Even though they just got nuked, the hospital staff just lets them go because Lora says they have to leave. Don’t even think about performing further tests to see if they have radiation sickness. Just leave them to themselves! Never mind that even their stay in the hospital, they look extremely ill.
Then there’s some lovey-dovey stuff, immediately before the deluge of survivors flows in. But they don’t matter to our heroes, who leave and find the dog right where they left it. It somehow avoided being trampled to death.3
It is at this point, and no sooner, that Lora finally realizes that all of their employees were probably killed in the attack. She name-drops a bunch of people whom the readers will never know about, meaning that we can’t really feel anything about their deaths. While Lora is grieving, Mark rather callously points out that if they hadn’t overslept, they would have been in the blast radius too. If only they had, then this book would have ended. After all this angst, Lora decides that they have a duty to fulfill, and must go all the way across the country to Santa Barbara. Why would they have to go that far? Surely their organization has more headquarters than just one each on the East and West coasts, and, for all they know, other cities were nuked also.
Their car radio still works, and they use it to get fragmentary news about what exactly happened. One (clearly unreliable) pundit claims the attacks were divine punishment. It’s nice to know that even in an alternate universe, the United States still has religious fundamentalists in a position of power. Meanwhile, on a talk radio show, the host insists that it was an attack by the Russians, because even though the Cold War didn’t happen, the Cold War happened, apparently. To his credit, Rummel has Lora point out how stupid that conspiracy theory is, but it doesn’t change the fact that this conspiracy theory shouldn’t exist in the first place, because, according to what happened in the previous book, Russia became a democracy allied with the United States, and the Soviet Union never existed. The only logical explanation is that Russian democracy collapsed and the country became autocratic anyway, which would mean that, once again, John and Joy failed their mission.
Speaking of John and Joy failing their mission, the third news source the heroes listen to, which they can somehow access despite it being a TV station and they’re listening to the radio, is of a Strawman Liberal claiming that the U.S. brought the attack upon itself because of its aggressive foreign policy. Ignoring the fact that nobody would have said such a thing if God forbid there were a nuclear attack, if John and Joy had succeeded in their mission, then America should not have a belligerent foreign policy. Also, there is apparently still a developed/developing country divide. So much for utopia, eh? Rummel basically wrote a whole book to set up his alternate history timeline, and then when the time came didn’t even bother to recognize the logical consequences of his changes.
The fourth news broadcast basically confirms that not only was Manhattan nuked, but so was Washington, D.C., and the entire U.S. government was killed. The only survivor, and therefore the new President, is the Secretary of Agriculture. The only response the heroes have to this is a “Holy Jesus.”4 One would think they would be a lot more worried, since the government collapsed and all. And if that weren’t bad enough, it turns out that most countries of Europe were nuked as well. This is not a mere terrorist group, this is an actual, hostile nation at least as powerful as all of NATO put together. How could any political analyst in the New Universe have possibly overlooked this? Especially since they go on and on about how they successfully democratized the world and established world peace.
And all Lora cares about is that her organization is gone, not that the world has pretty much been destroyed. She certainly lives up to her namesake, that’s for sure.
As for the crazies on the radio, one of them still thinks that Russia did it even though Russia was one of the nations bombed. If this book were a satire on the media, this would be one thing, but this book is not a satire on the media. It makes no sense in context. That said, we do get a line from Mark that states that the Russia of the New Universe only became a democracy in the 1960s. Already Rummel has started to Retcon things, but I’m saving the biggest of his retcons for last. One theory that floats around is that the attack was committed by Islamic extremists. Now, I will spoil something right here, because there is no way to discuss this otherwise. (Don’t worry, it’s properly revealed within a chapter anyway.) In the New Universe, China was taken over by Muslim extremists.5 So when the book states that no one could figure out where the Islamic extremists obtained the resources for an attack of this magnitude, they had to be willfully blind— especially considering that China was the only nation not to be attacked.
In any case, Lora gives a speech about how, in the absence of a war, all the democratic countries just let their national security programs wither away. I highly doubt that this would ever happen, especially considering that there is still a powerful dictatorship in the New Universe, that is run by fanatics, no less. Of course, this is just an excuse for Rummel to preach his own political views, no matter how little the chance that the scenario in the story would ever actually happen.
Mark and Lora contact the families of the deceased, that are totally irrelevant to the story, and then there’s some nonsense about the dog. Then, they finally start their journey. Yes, the writing was so ambiguous that it wasn’t clear that they hadn’t gotten into the car until now.
Starting on the next page, there is something that the readers of this spork series should have become intimately familiar with: a line break. Rummel is still obsessed with them. There is some exposition about how Lora moved all her scientific stuff to Santa Barbara instead of New York6 and then Rummel wastes more time with the characters discussing their travel route, and generally underestimating just how difficult it would be to travel across the country if the government were to collapse. Apparently it’s hard for Mark to drive because of his broken ribs, but he does so anyway.
And with some banal narration about everything inconveniencing our heroes on their travels, the chapter ends. We haven’t even gotten to the biggest retcon yet.
Footnotes
1 Speaking of that, this is the first book in the series to do away with the idea that the whole thing is just John telling the story after the fact.
2 That’s our Hand Wave, by the way—that throwaway line about John and Joy’s assistants discovering their secret.
3 Though that would in all likelihood be a better fate than dying of radiation sickness.
4 page 21
5 I’ll go into how ludicrous this is once the spork properly gets to that point.
6 Where is San Francisco in all this? Wasn’t that the original location of the headquarters of the Tor Import & Export Company?
swenson on 9 May 2014, 15:21 said:
The biggest recon is that Our Heroes are still alive, right? Or something?
The Smith of Lie on 9 May 2014, 16:53 said:
In the great tradition of “sporked books have potential that is totally wasted” this one could work. I imagine a sequel to time travel book similar to Rummel’s first work (only written better) – set up few decades after original characters die sure they’ve done good job by preventing wars and making world better, peceful place, just for that pesky human nature to rear its ugly head.
But I guess that would require the changes in the first book to actually make sense and not be based on author’s pet theory.
lilyWhite on 9 May 2014, 21:08 said:
All I pictured for this was a nuclear explosion in the distance, followed by Lora suddenly sliding vertically into the ground with the most amusing sound.
I’d bet that the “biggest of his retcons” is reversing John’s murder of Joy somehow. Especially if it means undoing Joy’s established sociopathy.
Brendan Rizzo on 9 May 2014, 21:22 said:
These are all interesting guesses you’ve got there. Some of you are quite close, but at the same time, really far off. You will all be infuriated once the retcon is revealed: it is REALLY stupid.
Asahel on 9 May 2014, 21:52 said:
Ok, I’m going to come up with my own amazingly stupid guess in the hopes that it will make the actual retcon look better by comparison. It turns out that Lora “Joy” Reeves and Mark “John” Docker are clones of the original Joy and John intended to carry on the mission when world peace is threatened once again.
Surely it can’t be that stupid.
Fireshark on 9 May 2014, 23:13 said:
Okay, here’s my guess: Even in the drastically different new timeline, John and Joy are still born, and still look and act exactly the same, making it so that they can be reused as protagonists over and over for the rest of the series.
Also, flipping through the series page, it turns out that a later book has a three-way sexual tryst between John, Joy, and a clone of Joy from another timeline.
swenson on 9 May 2014, 23:43 said:
Carrying on the fine tradition of this series, I see.
PLEASE TELL ME THIS IS A REAL THING THAT HAPPENS.
The Smith of Lie on 10 May 2014, 02:48 said:
This is another cool way to go about time travel story. John and Joy from original timeline go back and muck around with history. By some strange, contrived coincidence John and Joy are still born in new timeline, but are different persons (namely – they are not murderous sociopaths), they discover the strain of madness released into the timeline by their sociopathic, evil versions from the original timeline and set off to the past in order to stop “themselves”.
To make it more interesting, let’s go through the process few times and have six or seven paris of John and Joy from different futures – utopia, dystopia, original timeline, post-apo, theocracy, post-humanism world government, secret Illuminati cabal ruled one (ok, I know that this is the same as reality/original timeline, but for sake of fiction we can pretend Illuminati do not rule the world) – all running around in the past at the same time at cross purposes, trying to push the world in their direction. One could add interludes through the book, showing how the future looks “at the moment”, before another pair of JJ Sues (dare we call them a Suesome Twosome?) from another timeline changes something else.
LoneWolf on 10 May 2014, 05:12 said:
You know what, while the first book was all kinds of ridiculous, I don’t think that it ended too badly. It had a certain poignancy to it.
Of course, Rummel couldn’t just stop. He had to write moar and moar sequels, making the whole thing totally unredeemable.
lilyWhite on 10 May 2014, 12:59 said:
Holy shit this would make an awesome story (at least, if it was written about characters other than Politic-Spewing Self-Insert and Fetish-Fuel Asian Sociopath).
Brendan Rizzo on 10 May 2014, 17:48 said:
LoneWolf, I basically agree with you. The first book was apparently written as some kind of therapy, because Rummel’s profession required him to study the worst acts of humanity. Since he was a political scientist/historian rather than a fiction writer, it’s understandable that the first book turned out the way it did. That said, there really was no need for sequels, and most of them wind up worse than the original book, since he wasn’t intending to write a six-book series in the beginning.
Juracan on 11 May 2014, 16:50 said:
On the one hand, these books look awfully written. On the other, that just sounds like a bucket full of wonderful craziness that is so much fun to dig through. Good luck with this sporking!
LoneWolf on 13 May 2014, 07:26 said:
@Brendan: Rummel was a pretty bad political scientist, also. Still, like I said, there was a certain poignancy there.
Tim on 15 May 2014, 18:54 said:
I still think the best and funniest time travel plot twist was the part in Singularity where it’s revealed the thing you’re attempting is something you’ve tried many times already, you try something else and warp back to an identical world and the villain rather wearily says “you already tried that.”
Tim on 15 May 2014, 20:23 said:
Also, it’s kind of amusing that Rummel doesn’t see the obvious irony in that “worst monster who ever lived” line. He did know what the US did in 1945, right?
The Smith of Lie on 16 May 2014, 07:39 said:
Oh, but you see US only dropped the bomb on “those dirty Japs” and everyone know they are not human anyways. Dropping the bomb on US on the other hand is an atrocity in comparison.
And now I will forever imagine Rummel as Father Comstock…
Brendan Rizzo on 16 May 2014, 08:07 said:
Whoa, let’s not cause any flame wars here, okay? Also, I would say that there is a difference between dropping the bomb in wartime (what the US did) versus doing the same in peacetime (what Rummel’s villains did).
Tim on 16 May 2014, 13:26 said:
I don’t think its anything that’s going to cause a flame war, it’s just really weird and oblivious of him to talk like that about something that’s been done only once, by a representative democracy.
The Smith of Lie on 16 May 2014, 13:50 said:
I guess it was me who went too close to inflammatory. My previous comment was probably a bit too much of a potshot at idea of American exceptionalism and the casual racism of the past. And not in very good taste.
Sorry, being from completly different country with completly different background (up till 88 we were all dirty commies here) my japes are sometimes inappropriate. I’ll try to do better in future.
Asahel on 16 May 2014, 13:58 said:
I’m pretty sure if a representative democracy had ever nuked multiple cities in multiple countries all across the world during peacetime, I’d have heard about it, so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it’s not something that’s been done only once—it’s something that’s been done exactly zero times.
Tim on 16 May 2014, 14:30 said:
The line occurs before they know about any of the other attacks, though.
Tim on 16 May 2014, 15:56 said:
In fact, at that point they don’t know the enemy hasn’t declared war on them either, so the line is literally “anyone who would deploy a nuclear weapon against a city must be the worst monster in history.” Which…yeah.
Asahel on 16 May 2014, 21:48 said:
To be fair to Lora, neither America nor anyone else has ever deployed nuclear weapons in her timeline, and the villain country has basically just combined Pearl Harbor with Hiroshima by sucker punching her city with a nuke, so, yeah, I’m not going to disagree with her assessment of the situation.
I just don’t find it very equivalent to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their own contexts.
Tim on 16 May 2014, 23:22 said:
Yeah, but then you have the problem that she has a modern person’s knowledge of the effects of a nuclear weapon and what one would look like, even though one would think they’d be far less part of the public consciousness without the Cold War. It seems like her universe’s perceptions of nukes are identical except in the one way that means that Rummel can use that line, in fact.