In keeping with the whole plague and war theme, I finally finished Dean Ing’s Ted Quantrill trilogy having read the first two books years ago.

A novel from the 1980s with a nuclear world war and survivalists – I feel like I’m poaching on The Books That Time Forgot’s territory.

After writing the first draft of this, I checked out Ing’s Wikipedia page. He died on June 21, 2020.

Review: Systemic Shock, Dean Ing, 1981.

As Spider Robinson once noted in a review of an Ing work, Ing’s something of a moralistic writer. And there’s no doubt about the main moral of this story. It’s right there on the front page quote in the original Ace paperback:

Governments across the globe ducked for cover. Long-drilled and partly prepared, millions of RUS urbanites sealed themselves into subway tunnels, then slid blast-and-firestorm-proof hatches into place to ride out the blast-furnace interval. Most Americans were asleep, and in any case had only the sketchiest notion of adequate shelter. A few city dwellers – the smaller the city, the better their chances – sped beyond their suburbs before freeway arterials became clots of blood and machinery.

The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its Cassandras, who had warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. We had always found some solution to our problems, often at the last minute. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.

The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it.

But this isn’t a Third World War fought with nukes. It’s the Fourth World War fought with nukes.

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