Battle for the Wastelands #2: Serpent Sword - Matthew W. Quinn

Here's the blurb I gave this novel: "There's no sophomore slump in SERPENT SWORD, the second book in Matthew Quinn's Battle for the Wastelands series, which combines post-apocalyptic science fiction, family saga, and Western elements. That's an ambitious combination, but Quinn pulls it off in fine fashion. SERPENT SWORD has plenty of action, compelling characters, and an intriguing, well-developed villain/anti-hero in Grendel, the dictator of the northern realms who's trying to take over the rest of the continent. This is an excellent series."

To expand on this a little . . . Dang, this is a good yarn. One of the most interesting parts of this series is the tangled family tree of the characters. The warlord villain Grendel has a number of children, including one with the sister of his greatest enemy, and this really amps up the political intrigue as he tries not only to survive the ongoing war against his rule but also to ensure a stable future when he's gone. If that sounds like he's the protagonist of this series, well, in some ways he is, despite being the bad guy.

Quinn does a fine job with the ground-level soldiers, though, following a platoon in the forces trying to drive Grendel from power. There's plenty of action, not just scheming, including some spectacular aerial combat involving dirigibles. The world-building is top-notch, too, as Quinn peels away more layers from the complex back-story of what the world has become in the future.

I can give this series a definite recommendation. It's well-written, has complex characters, and is packed with action. The books have great covers by Matthew Cowdery, too. Available in paperback and e-book editions from Amazon.

Battle for the Wastelands - Matthew W. Quinn

A while back, I read SON OF GRENDEL, a novella that’s a prequel to this full-length novel. Now I’ve read BATTLE FOR THE WASTELANDS, and it’s a fine post-apocalyptic yarn, just as I expected based on my enjoyment of the novella.

It’s the future, of course, after some disaster that has left vestiges of what people call the Old World. The countries, states, and cities that we know are gone, but firearms technology remains (although at a much lower level for the most part) and dirigibles are still around. A warlord known as Grendel has conquered most of North America. I get the feeling that BATTLE FOR THE WASTELANDS takes place primarily in what we know as Texas, although that’s just a hunch on my part. As in any place that’s ruled by an iron-fisted dictator and his vassals, there are rebels who fight back, and a group of them are the main characters in this novel, including the protagonist, a young man from a small settlement that’s almost wiped out who is searching for his sister and the girl he loves, who have disappeared in the chaos of war.

Actually, although he’s not the protagonist, Grendel himself is the dominant character in this novel. Tough, ruthless, smart, and with hints that he still has a bit of a world-weary code of honor, he’s surrounded by allies who can’t be trusted even while he has to deal with his open enemies. Political intrigue is thick, not only because of ambitious subordinates but also due to an abundance of concubines and offspring, all of whom would like to follow in his footsteps as absolute ruler someday.

Author Matthew W. Quinn keeps things moving along at a fast clip with lots of gritty action scenes, including a great dirigible battle late in the book. I get the sense that he’s barely started to peel away the layers of the story he envisions for this world, and I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next. BATTLE FOR THE WASTELANDS is good, solid post-apocalyptic science fiction, and if you’re a fan of that genre I certainly recommend it.

Son of Grendel: A Battle for the Wastelands Novella - Matthew W. Quinn

It’s been a while since I read a post-apocalyptic yarn. A while back, I bought the e-book edition of a novel called BATTLE FOR THE WASTELANDS by Matthew W. Quinn, mostly because of the great cover since I wasn’t familiar with the author. I hadn’t gotten around to reading it yet, though, so when Quinn recently published SON OF GRENDEL, a novella-length prequel to the novel, I decided to start with it instead.

Quinn doesn’t spend a lot of time on world-building. Instead, in an opening reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, he drops the reader down in the middle of the action as a group of resistance fighters in some future America ambushes a column of soldiers from the army of a tyrant known as Grendel, who evidently has conquered most of North America.

Then Quinn cleverly switches the focus to the title character, a young army officer who’s the son of that tyrant, and how he handles the campaign of reprisal against those resistance fighters. There are also some unexpected elements to the story, such as a mention of pterodactyls, that lead me to believe this is either an alternate universe from ours, or else something really weird happened in that apocalypse.

I suspect I’ll find out in BATTLE FOR THE WASTELANDS, which I intend to read soon because Quinn is an excellent writer with a fine sense of pacing and some top-notch action scenes. I really want to discover more about the world he’s created in this series. I’ll add, too, that SON OF GRENDEL is very well edited and formatted, something you don’t always get in books these days, even from the big New York publishers. Overall, if you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic adventure tales, I think this one is well worth reading.

Winterworld - Chuck Dixon and Jorge Zaffino

I've always liked a good post-apocalyptic yarn, and Chuck Dixon and Jorge Zaffino's WINTERWORLD is a very good one indeed. Somehow I missed the original three-issue mini-series when it was published by Eclipse Comics back in 1988, but it's been reprinted in a hardback edition by IDW, which as a bonus also includes the two-part sequel "Wintersea", also by Dixon and Zaffino, which has never been published before.

We don't get any real back-story with this. Dixon and Zaffino just drop us down on a brutal future Earth where the entire planet is covered with snow and ice. Nuclear winter? Some ecological catastrophe? Who knows? Not the characters, for sure, but it doesn't matter because all they're concerned about is survival.

The protagonist is a traveling trader named Scully whose only friend is a pet badger called Rahrah, until he rescues a young teenage girl named Wynn from one of the various tribes of primitives that roam the frozen-over land once known as Texas. They're captured and enslaved by another tribe that makes its home in an artifact left over from the world before, a domed sports stadium.

That's the start of a series of dangerous adventures shared by the three companions as they try to find the possibly mythical land where Wynn came from, a land where there is warmth and science and some hope for the future. In a way Dixon's story reminds me a bit of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the way that Scully, like Tarzan or John Carter, has to deal with warring tribes and lost civilizations. He's not exactly as clean-cut and noble as those Burroughs heroes, mind you, but he has his moments.

The script is very fast-paced and hardboiled, and Zaffino's art looks to me like it was very influenced by Joe Kubert and Alex Toth, so you can't go wrong there. I'm sort of glad I missed these stories when they were first published, because I get to read and appreciate them now. WINTERWORLD is excellent and well worth reading for fans of graphic novels and post-apocalyptic SF, or anyone who just enjoys a good adventure yarn, really.