The novel is more than an entertaining read; it is a plea for our society and our government to safeguard our infrastructure from a possible Electro Magnetic Pulse attack, which would leave all unprotected transistorized and microchipped devices useless, including modern cars, planes, trains, ships, refrigerators, insulin pumps, pacemakers,TVs, radios, telephones, computers, shutdown systems at nuclear power plants, etc. The entire electric power grid and practically every device connected to it would be fried, including water and sewage treatment and pumping facilities, elevators, subways, cargo cranes, and ATM’s.

Our just-in-time inventory and delivery system, our total dependence on infrastructure, even our vaunted lifesaving medical/pharmaceutical interventions that keep the diabetic, the heart diseased, the kidney diseased, and the mentally imbalanced functioning as productive members of our society have all set us up for a massive die-off should an EMP attack occur. We would be suddenly thrust 150-200 years back in technology but without the tools we relied on back then: horse-drawn wagons and carriages, horse-drawn plows, draft houses, mules, ice houses, wood or coal stoves in every home, hand-cranked devices, treadle sewing machines, outhouses. Even if we did have all those survival tools, most wouldn’t have the skills to use them. And even if we had both tools and skills, our population is too great to be supported by the land without the annual use billions of tons fossil fuel products that could suddenly be neither created nor transported.

America would be years, decades from recovery, all the while vulnerable against rampant disease, pillaging criminal gangs, and conventional attack and invasion by countries that were not affected. America could cease to exist, conquered with little resistance by outside interests such as China, Canada, Mexico, and the EU. The Russians might reclaim Alaska.

An EMP attack is just one of many potential events for which prepping is needed and many of the preparedness measures against it are the same as we would follow prepping for some other calamity. One difference is that electronic devices would be stored away inside nesting Faraday cages to safeguard them from EMP effects, a step I have already taken with some of my gear.