Nightmare: The Unfolding of a World Crisis by Liz Cowley and Donough O’Brien

(GB Publishing, 2022)

Reviewed by John Dodd

I like disaster films. I like world ending crises. I like the sort of thing where the stakes are so high that the only thing that can justify them is a resolution of equal height. From the read on the background, this wasn’t going to be a disaster along the lines of Armageddon or Resident Evil, but I liked that something that threatened the world might not come along in a large, loud package.

Unfortunately, that was as far as this got…

The premise is interesting, there’s several meteors that land in the various oceans that cause massive clouds of vapour to rise up into the air and sterilise all the men on the planet. Not just rendering them infertile but also impotent by virtue of removing all their testosterone. No mention made of the testosterone carried by the other half of the population, just a morose sense that the world had changed and that without the men on hand, the world was doomed.

Queue the race to keep all the men who weren’t exposed to the vapours (astronauts, soldiers in submarines, those sorts of people) in a safe place where there was no possibility of them being exposed. Leading to the building of secured stud farms so that humanity can go on, so that there will be some form of continuance to the human race, even if it would be far reduced from what it was.

Then the idea that this was an attack of some sort, and that the aliens who started it are up in the atmosphere watching the whole thing, waiting for their change to come down and finish humanity off. After all, with fully half the world’s population suddenly having no urge to kill and win anymore, that should make the fight significantly easier, no?

But they don’t…

And they wait…

And they wait…

This sums up the entirety of the issue I had with this. Loved the premise, loved the ideas behind it, but then the book went on a ramble around what would happen to everyone after years of living with this catastrophe. So much so that by the time the aliens thought to invade, humanity had had chance for its stud farms to produce the next generation of young bold heroes, who commence fighting for the world that they’ve never really been exposed to.

At the end of the book, the action scenes waver from gloriously silly to almost serious, and it becomes the book it should have been a hundred pages earlier, as the aliens finally come down and start causing havoc. It begs the question, given that it’s taken as many years as it did, why they didn’t come down earlier? More importantly, why didn’t the story drop them in much earlier.

There’s serious consideration given to what would happen if the world suffered a catastrophe like this. What would happen to the markets, to the world, to the state of people’s minds? It’s well researched information, but the story doesn’t tie it in in the way that it needed to. There were other things that I had issues with, the names of the characters for example. In a book this well researched, Gustav Holst and Igor Sikorsky are names that are associated with things, and the president of the United States shouldn’t have the same name as a bartender you introduce later in the book, it just causes confusion.

It reads at a reasonable pace, and if you’re willing to let go that some of it doesn’t make sense (it’s a story about an alien invasion, cut it some slack), it has several bits of entertaining writing, but not enough that I’d want to read the second volume, and while there isn’t mention of a second volume, it’s clear that this book is the first part of a larger story.

Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.