Sometimes you win a few…
Despite the attacks from Bezos and his bots that screwed up the Amazon listings of the first two novels in the series, the post-apocalyptic novels found in “The Last Humans” trilogy don’t do badly at their job in portraying a possible and terrible future most of us who are sane wouldn’t want. In that sense, they are a warning of things to come.
Consider the worldwide contagion that wreaks havoc in the first titular novel The Last Humans (Black Opal Books 2019). Readers won’t learn its source yet, but it’s bioengineered by a US adversary (readers find out which one in the second novel), That lethal contagion that first hits the west coast of the US propagates around the world like Covid did. (After the book was published. A beta-reader even a year earlier thought that was unlikely, but then Covid came along and supported my thesis! And Covid might have been bioengineered as well in that lab in Wuhan, most recently posed by the US CIA! We’d have to grill fascist President-for-Life Xi about that…as if that SOB would admit the truth!) That’s the first prediction for the future this post-apocalyptic sci-fi trilogy posits..
In the aftermath of the apocalypse in that first novel, my protagonist Penny Castro travels around SoCal trying to survive attacks by feral humans, wild dog packs, and the fascist remains of the US government. (They’re bent on retribution in the second novel; and in the real world, we now know there might be a lot more fascists who’ve come out of the closet since 2019.) That SoCal landscape is mostly an arid and fire-burned inhospitable place. I don’t mention how those fires occurred, but the recent ones in SoCal propagated by 100 mph Santa Ana winds certainly qualify. And Penny and her newly acquired family’s trek from the coast over California’s coast range of mountains to I5 was the same one I took many times going home from college to my parents’ home in the Central Valley for the holidays. That’s the second prediction for the future.
What hasn’t yet come true in that first book is the takeover of the desalination platforms by fascist villains who want to control California’s water. As far as I know, these platforms haven’t even been built yet or even planned, but lack of potable water will soon become critical worldwide. (Our fascist president might even support such a measure since he’s so damned worried about water!) California, SoCal in particular, has a huge population, and most of the state would be a desert without irrigation. In fact, the air force base, where Penny’s family ends up as refugees seeking asylum (labeling them criminal migrants and refugees wasn’t even considered because the agri-workers the state’s economy needs died from the contagion as well), sends out tanker trucks to transport water from the San Joaquin Valley’s irrigation pumps.
The other two novels in this trilogy have “predictions” that might come true as well, but those first two mentioned here from that first novel (i.e. two out of the three) isn’t a bad start. Just a sci-fi author’s luck…and my desire to tell a few good post-apocalyptic tales. Sci-fi predictions can also be warnings, of course. Future plagues and consequences of global warming (including blizzard-like snowstorms in southern Texas and Florida!) are clear and present dangers that we shouldn’t ignore (unless you’re our repeat fascist president)..
But back to Amazon’s screw-up: If you go to my web page “Novels and Short Fiction,” you will be able to read about what happened to those first two novels in this trilogy, thanks to the fascist oligarch Bezos and his bots. To this date, Amazon has never fixed this problem despite my pleas to do so. Until they do, readers will have to work a bit harder to buy and download these ebooks. This cock-up is one reason I no longer list my new ebooks for sale on Amazon. In general, your best bet as a reader is to use Barnes & Noble or some other online ebook distributor, not Amazon. (With Bezos joining the other oligarchs kissing the president’s fat butt now, you’ll be a lot more patriotic if you don’t do business with Amazon at all. Your choice.)
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“The Last Humans” trilogy. In the title novel (paperback and ebook published by Black Opal Books), Penny Castro survives an apocalypse. It’s a worldwide bioengineered pandemic that kills millions. She also manages to create her adopted family and unreluctantly fights for what’s left of an ineffective and fascist US government. In A New Dawn (ebook published by Draft2Digital/Smashwords), what’s left of the US government seeks revenge against the plague’s creators, forcefully recruiting Penny and her husband for their plans. In Menace from Moscow (ebook also published by Draft2Digital/Smashwords), she and her husband are forcefully conscripted again, this time to recover nukes from a US submarine in a watery grave just off Cuba…but the surviving Russian government also covets them. (All three ebooks are available wherever quality ebooks are sold, but the third novel isn’t on Amazon.)
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
