"One Second After" William R. Forstchen

U.S. Army Colonel John Matherson is offered a general's star if he will accept assignment to a NATO post in Europe. But his wife Mary is ill with cancer, and he declines the commission, moving instead with her and their two daughters to her Christian-college hometown in the back woods of North Carolina. There he accepts a teaching position and adapts to a life very different from that of his Newark, NJ childhood. Then, one fine spring day, not only do the lights go out, but cellphones and car transmissions die and electronic devices of all kinds cease to function.

William R Forstchen's One Second After is a post-apocalyptic tale in the tradition of Lucifer's Hammer and Alas, Babylon. It tells the gripping story of survival in America after an EMP attack cripples the US. A threat known since the sixties, an Electromagnetic Pulse attack can be made using as little as just one small nuclear device set off high above the atmosphere. The high-voltage flux thus generated will fry any non-hardened electronics within the line of sight. The damage would be virtually complete and all but irreversible. In the first minute alone more than half a million people would die as their planes fell paralyzed from the sky. They, as the cliché goes, would be the lucky ones.

The story is fluidly written, and the plot grips you. The work is both realistic in its portrayal of how people react to disaster and romantic in portraying heroic people who identify their values and then struggle to maintain them. I finished this book in two eager late-bedtime readings. My throat tightened with emotion a few times. The book does have a few minor drawbacks, there is too much exposition as opposed to dramatization. Forstchen often relates the story after the fact rather than describing it in real time. And the repeated use of the expression "should of" instead of "should've" which was meant to convey local dialect seems more like a spelling error than a colorful regionalism. But if a story like this one chokes you up and you find it hard to put the book down, then it's a good read. And if it makes readers think about a serious threat to the civilized world, all the better.

While it does stand alone as a story, it's obvious that the author has a point to make. Hostile reviewers complain far too loudly that this is not a work of great literature. But Forstchen's goal was not to present a work of despair or self-recrimination acceptable to the aesthetic tastes of the political left. Frankly, I expect Forstchen would forgo the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for Literature if he could make the issue of preventing an EMP attack just one tenth as fashionable as was dealing with Y2K in its day. Forstchen has given us two good reasons to read this book, the warning message it implies and the story itself. Warner Brothers has optioned the movie rights. There is a Wikipedia article, and the book has an official website, onesecondafter.com, with links to congressional documents, as well as scientific information and information about the author and the real-life setting for his novel. You can also see the author speak on on YouTube and listen to an hour-long interview at BookTV, which I strongly recommend. And I recommend this book without reservation.

Immortal? No. Eternal? Maybe. (Part I)

The question of immortality doesn't arise to animals, they can't conceive of time in the abstract or of their own deaths. But humans can look at both the distant future and the deep past. Indeed, every time you look at the sky, you see history. The stars of Orion, for instance, lie some 500 light years away, and ago.

The science of comparative linguistics deals with the past as well. By comparing related languages we can deduce the nature of the mother tongue which gave rise to them, even though this dialect may be long dead, and was never written down. For example, the English words wit and wise, the Latin video, and the Greek idea all come from the same Proto-Indo-European root wid- meaning to see, and hence to know. The Proto-Indo-European language is not attested in any written form. It was spoken by pre-literate horse nomads in the area north of the Black Sea some six thousand years ago, long before Sumer or Stone Henge or the Pyramids. We know it existed because we know its descendents. See my post on Calvert Watkins' Proto-Indo-European dictionary. No current descendent of Proto-Indo-European uses the form "weid-" today. Over the millennia the /d/ in "weid-" changed to a /t/ in Proto-Germanic and hence English. In Latin the /w/ became a /v/ as we see in modern French and Spanish. In Greek the /w/ dropped out, leaving only "idea."

Most of our vocabulary results from either our native stock inherited through Proto-Germanic or comes through other Branches like Greek and Latin, as well as Celtic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian and the like. Other Branches include Baltic, (e.g., Lithuanian,) Albanian and Armenian. And last century the extinct Hittite and Tocharian were discovered in Anatolia and Central Asia.

Ferdinand Saussure, famous mostly today to postmodernists who have developed relativist theories based on the notes for his university course published and modified by his students after his death early last century, was a brilliant theoretician who studied an anomaly he saw in the reconstructed roots of the Indo-European proto-language. Most IE verbs had the root form noted by linguists as CVC- or more specifically CeC- meaning consonant-vowel-consonant. And in such root the vast majority had the specific vowel /e/. Examples include *bher- "to carry" (Latin fer-o English bear Greek pher-ein) and *pe(r/z)d- "to fart" (Latin "pest-" Slavic "perditi"). But there were also a large number of roots with either no first or last consonant, and the majority of these roots had some other vowel than /e/ as their root vowel. Examples include *ag- "to lead/plow" (English "acre" and from Latin "agriculture") or *sta- "to stand, to stay" as in Latin "sta-tus" or Greek "stasis". Saussure wondered if there might not have been some now unknown letter that existed in Indo-European but which, becoming silent, had affected the sound of those vowels as had silent /e/ in English which lengthens the vowel of breath to breath or of wisdom to wise. Maybe *sta- was originally *steH where the lost consonant (probably a sound made in the throat) changed the vowel before it left.

Saussure came up with the theory as a university student. Others found this theory fascinating, and suggest some /h/-like sound. But how to prove it? Saussure died in 1913. In 1915 and subsequently the Czech linguist Bedrich Hrozny published his translation of the newly discovered Hittite language of ancient Anatolia. It turned out that Hittite was an Indo-European tongue, and that this pre-Greco-Roman dialect exhibited /h/-like sounds just where Saussure had predicted them.

Saussure, using the scientific method, had predicted the sounds that existed in a language he had never heard, and that had been unspoken for millennia. Most people know linguistics as an exotic academic subject. Professor Doolittle in My Fair Lady springs to mind. No one can make money from historical linguistics. utterly impractical, it is a perhaps seen as pursuit of racists, cranks and the English upper class. Perhaps. But like the paleontologists impractical study of fossils, the astronomers impractical study of stars, and the historians impractical study of long forgotten wars, historical linguistics does have a connection with the human soul, one on the level of fine art, it connects us with the universe on a scale that far exceeds our here-and-now moment-bound existence. Far from showing us how small we are, such studies connect us with the timeless, and show how great is the mind of man. Such knowledge may not make us immortal, but it does connect us with the eternal.

Walker's Marsupials of the World

Did you know that Queen Isabella was interested in the marsupials, or that it was once believed that marsupials copulated nasally and sneezed the newborn into their pouches?

"Walkers' Marsupials of the World" by Ronald M. Nowak is a handsome, scholarly work well suited for the amateur or generalist. Its overall qualities outweigh its few quirks, and I can strongly recommend the edition to all but children and post-graduate level specialists.

This scholarly and informative book, which is suited to a high-school or above reading level, consists of an entertaining opening monograph by Christopher Dickman on topics germane to marsupials as a group, and a comprehensive main body by Ronald Nowak describing in detail all living and recent genera.

The section heads of the 42 page Introduction include: Taxonomy & Evolution, Morphology, Reproduction, Distribution & Diversity, Diet, Life History, Economic & Ecologic Importance, and Conservation, as well as References.

The Introduction is written mainly from an ecological and taxonomic viewpoint. While the physiological specializations of the group as a whole, and certain developments, such as the unique dentition of the Diprototont subgroup (i.e., Koalas, & `Roos as opposed to Opossums, Devils & Bandicoots) are mentioned in the text, there are no line drawings of skeletons or any anatomical diagrams. Pouch anatomy and specializations of the digits are described in the text, but there are only a few photographs of young suckling, none of birthing, and only a few insets in the main section showing external foot morphology. I, for one, have always been fascinated by the "two-thumbed/three fingered hand" of the Koala, for example. But there is little attention to anatomical detail.

There are over 140 black and white photographs in the book, almost all of individual live specimens. While keeping the price reasonable, the lack of color makes the work a bit drab and definitely unsuitable for children.

The main text examines each of the known marsupial genera, with at least one photo per genus, including the tragically lost Tasmanian "tiger" and all known (recent) species are named. Fossil forms are excluded.

There is no cladistic analysis, but the text and a table in the introduction serve as a classification in outline form, and taxonomic issues, such as the phylogenetic position of the "Monito del Monte" (a South American enigma that may be more closely related to Australasian groups than to the American opossums) are addressed.

The book does treat the Marsupials as consisting of seven groups of ordinal rank, an improvement over the traditional lumping of all groups into just one order. Overall mammalian taxonomy is in such a flux now, that the work is reluctant to make any authoritative statements, choosing a reasonable middle ground. As the work is fully noted, and references at least as recent as 2003 are in the bibliographies, those interested in such matters will be well guided in their own research.

Given that there are no maps, no drawings of internal or reproductive anatomy, no illustrations of such fantastic extinct forms as the marsupial "lion" Thylacoleo, or any other visual aids except the black and white "field-guide" photos, it is absolutely bizarre that the editors included a bare-boned appendix giving the geological timeline back to the Permian and four pages of metric/U.S. conversions with a 47 inch/1200 mm ruler (broken up into 10 segments to fit the page width!) instead.

Nevertheless, the paperback edition is well worth its price at pennies per page, and there is no better serious reference for the avid enthusiast. Note, the images in this post are not from the book. The book is available at Amazon.

When Puppies Play...

I am posting this merely as an excuse to share the adorable Getty Image. Jennifer Viegas of Discovery Channel, quoted at MSNBC, reports: "It may not be such a dog-eat-dog world after all, at least among puppies. A new study has found that young male dogs playing with female pups will often let the females win, even if the males have a physical advantage.

"Male dogs sometimes place themselves in potentially disadvantageous positions that could make them more vulnerable to attack, and researchers suspect the opportunity to play may be more important to them than winning...."

My thanks to Ed Thompson for bringing this article to my attention.