The Final Day
A John Matherson Novel
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4.5 • 651 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A major release in the New York Times bestselling One Second After series, set in an alternate America rebuilding after an electromagnetic pulse, this is William R. Forstchen's The Final Day.
Since the detonation of nuclear weapons above the United States more than two years ago, the small town of Black Mountain, North Carolina has suffered famine, civil war, and countless deaths. Now, after defeating a new, tyrannical federal government, John Matherson and his community intend to restore their world to what it was before the EMP apocalypse. For the most part, they are succeeding.
This period of relative stability doesn’t last long. A new, aggressive government announces that it’s taking over and ceding large portions of the country to China and Mexico. The Constitution is no longer in effect, and what’s left of the U.S. Army has been deployed to suppress rebellion in the remaining states. John fears he and his town will be targets.
General Bob Scales, John’s old commanding officer and closest friend from prewar days, is sent to bring John into line. Will John and his people accept the new, autocratic regime? Or will revolution rip the fledgling nation apart at the seams?
Months before publication, William R. Forstchen’s novel One Second After was cited on the floor of Congress as a book all Americans should read. This third book in the series immerses readers once more in the story of our nation’s struggle to rebuild itself after an electromagnetic pulse wipes out all electricity and plunges the country into darkness, starvation, and death.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pompous, windy political discussions swamp the few effective action scenes in bestseller Forstchen's conclusion (after 2015's One Year After) to his trilogy set in a United States reeling from the effects of a devastating electromagnetic pulse attack. John Matherson, commander of the independent State of Carolina, spearheads efforts to reconstitute pre-attack technology. Meanwhile, Gen. Bob Scales, Matherson's friend and former commanding officer, offers Matherson and his community an ultimatum: they must unite with a shadowy reconstituted federal government or die. But Scales can't fool his old friend. Matherson and his followers eventually uncover a conspiracy of governmental elites, who violated their oaths to the Constitution and saved themselves before the attack, then held on to power at the people's expense. Needless to say, "the criminal entity that claims to be the federal government" comes to a bad end. Those who buy into right-wing wish fulfillment fantasies will be enthralled.
Customer Reviews
An outline if ever there was one…
In the 1980s, I was employed by an aerospace company that won a contract to study the “hardening” of military hardware and facilities against the effects of an electromagnetic pulse weapon. Many of us considered and debated the effects of such a weapon on the infrastructure of the United States, primarily its aging and decrepit electrical power distribution system euphemistically called a “grid.”
We set about parametrically estimating the effects on the populace, a single weapon that could reduce our electrical, water, fuel, natural gas distribution and transportation systems to useless rubble with the detonation of a single nuclear weapon. The results? Ninety-four to ninety-nine percent of our population would die due to dehydration, violence, disease, starvation, and hypothermia in the first 12 months. Refining our ground rules and methods of estimation revealed that what the U.S. would almost certainly experience would be much worse than what appears in this series of books, and most of the population would be wiped out in 8 months — less, if the attack was mounted in mid-to-late summer.
That such results could be achieved with employment of a single nuclear weapon against this country makes its existence all the more an efficient means of removing this republic literally from the face of the Earth, and guarantees that some small nation or political group would build it. It is a certainty…
These studies were sent to our state’s members of Congress with no results. Not achieving even a casual interest, the wide range of studies were sent to almost all members of Congress — with little real results.
That such a popular series of books has generated no interest in Congress — and the vague promise by a sitting President that he would authorize a study about defending against such an attack — is both saddening and disappointing. When all is said and done by politicians, everything is said and nothing done.
The results of deploying an EMP weapon makes its creation and use a certainty. The results of this attack are far worse than you read in this series of books, and to a greater degree of permanence.
Amazing Series!
Incredible story telling and jaw-droppingly realistic expectations of the potential experience!!
Unsettling, Humbling, Riveting
Truly the most proud series I have ever read. A terrifying semblance of our current state of affairs and the silent threat which could stand to be our future.