Recently I finished reading a book that may be of interest to those visiting this forum. It is called Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler.

The book is set in the post-SHTF world, action taking place in the Pacific Northwest/Northern California. It describes United States in a such a way that Germany leading up to the Second World War comes to mind. Violence, poverty, unemployment, inflation and a general sense of despair pervades the world of this book. Simple existence and the sense of humanity is not taken for granted, as characters in this book are forced to fight for their place under the sun.

Protagonist of this novel is a remarkable woman striving to establish her own identity, and community in a world that seems very scary to us, yet hauntingly plausible. She is a visionary, able to influence those around her through her writings and through preaching of her own religious/moral views.

During times of despair, tough, fanatical leaders often emerge and people tend to follow them blindly, while creating even more havoc in the process. (Hitler and Stalin come to mind) This book is no exception. A militant Christian preacher is elected to be the President of the United States, with disastrous results to follow: more war, persecution and poverty.

Many times I have read posts and emails with their main line of reasoning going something to the extent of: "When SHTF, I will head for the hills and tough it out with my buddies and weapons..."
After reading this book, I realized that it is not going to be an easy task by any means. Even if you manage to establish a community of like-minded individuals. Even if you are well armed and self-sufficient, you are still not going to be safe from heavily armed fanatics bent on enforcing the "Will of God".

This is a painful book to read. Main character and those around her go through some hellish events in the course of this book. These are truly horrific and Butler manages to describe them with just enough of a gritty details for the suspension of disbelief to be complete. IMHO, she goes a bit overboard with this and the book becomes unbearable and depressing at times. Perhaps that was her intention

I would recommend reading this book if you are interested in feeling or imagining "what it would be like" to live in a post-SHTF world. This is a work of fiction, science fiction to be exact, but it is more of a "soft" type of science fiction: there are some futuristic technologies described, but they are plausible and not too far removed from reality.

Overall I would give this book a "B"
Plot: "A"
This is an interesting and engaging story very relevant to modern times and humanity in general.
Storytelling: "B-"
Some lengthy descriptions of various minor characters add little to the story, except they only increase the sense of despair. Perhaps it was Butler's intention, but it seemed unnecessary to me.
Writing skill: "B+"
Her writing is not bad at all, a bit poetic one might even say.

This is the second book in the series, first being Parable of the Sower, but can be read out of sequence.
Parable of Talents won the Nebula award for science fiction.

Excerpt from first few pages...

"She [main character] had a habit, during her youth, of hiding caches of food, money and weaponry in out-of-the-way places or with trusted people, and being able to go straight back to these years later. These saved her life several times, and also they saved her words, her journals and notes and my father's writings..."

"I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as "the Apocalypse" or more commonly, more bitterly, "the Pox" lasted from 2015 through 2030-a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.

Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs-wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself."

I enjoyed the series very much. Butler's writing is excellent, magnified, perhaps, by the fact that many writers of this genre are often lacking in real skill.