Survival World

by Frank Belknap Long

Marauder! The desperate men are loose in the world. They come by night, slipping past the guards & around the barriers, driving ever Eastward, until at last they meet the barrier of the poisoned Atlantic. They turn northward, but no matter where they go, the land is turning arid, the fish are dying in the waters, animals are disappearing from the fields. Hunger feeds their desperation, for the world is starving to death, the final result of the work of the polluters. They have poisoned the waters; scourged the soil, destroyed the viable seeds of life. Now the planet Earth draws a shroud of pestilence, waiting for the final moments, waiting to die, waiting until one man no longer submits to the inevitable & fights back against the messengers of death!

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Thriller, Science Fiction Fantasy, Time Travel

157 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Aka Lyda Belknap Long.

Frank Belknap Long was a prolific American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including early contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos. During his life, Long received the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention), the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 1987, from the Horror Writers Association), and the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award (1977).

Reviews

[Jackie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It started out pretty good but didn't maintain the momentum.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admit it--I picked it up and read it because I liked the cover. It looked like it could be an Edgar Rice Burroughs-type of adventure story. I certainly did not know who Frank Belknap Long was. It turns out that Long (1901-1994), a life-long New Yorker, wrote for the pulp magazines from the 20s right into the 60s. This very short novel was published in 1971 and it might have worked better as a shorter story in pulps of the 40s or 50s. Although short (157 pages), it seemed to drag and rely too much on dialog. The story is not without interest as it involves time travel. As the cover shows, there are savages threatening a modern man. Our heroes go into the future to find humanity has fallen back into savagery. Using a powerful weapon, they slaughter the savages. But our heroes hope to use their time machine to pick up people from the past to establish a colony in the future--and make a brave new world. The story could be much better. Hmmmm...let's see, what I would change....

[Fraser Sherman]

Zero stars. Part of the problem is that what starts off as a story of a man trying to feed the world despite an environmental collapse turns into an almost completely unrelated time travel story. A bigger problem is that this is soooo insanely talky. When it appears the villain has psionic powers, for instance, everyone stands around debating whether that's actually possible, and if so, just how powerful he might theoretically be. Long has done some short stories I liked, but novel length apparently isn't his forte.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frank Belknap Long (4/27/01-1/3/94)wrote not only imitative-of-Lovecraft horror stories but science fiction as well. This post-collapse novel, a favorite sub-genre, intrigued me.

[Bo · Rating 2 out of 5]

The plot of this book could so easily have been a short story, it felt very padded.

[Brandon Bowling · Rating 2 out of 5]

The pace was slow and plodding, and the book just never really went anywhere.

[Jerry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Normally when a book is obviously bad I stop reading it sometime within the first ten percent. The exceptions tend to be books like this that are so bad it’s like watching the proverbial slow motion train wreck. In many ways, this book reminds me of Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm. It has the same long-winded musings by characters that sound more like the author wondering where the story ought to go next, and changing his mind several times. It has characters making the same crazy leaps in logic that end up not mattering anyway.

The book starts out as a sort of typical “the world is going to end soon unless enlightened scientist saves it from the voters”. It stands out from others in its genre by how poorly edited it is: typos, sometimes significant, abound.

The only real saving grace in that is that there are indications that the author realizes this particular scientist is a self-aggrandizing busybody who doesn’t actually care. After complaining about the shortsightedness of humanity, he jumps into his private jet (an “astrojet”) on a moment’s notice (pausing to have sex with this wife) in order to catch a lone person at the beach. The jet appears to use a fuel that can explode; and when the lone person turns out to be able to seriously attack the astrojet he considers, without any consideration for the environment he was mentally worrying about earlier, dumping the astrojet and its fuel in the ocean.

He has only minor qualms several pages later when the government, in order to save the ocean’s “ecology”, bombs a ship powered by a thermonuclear reactor to the bottom of the sea. Sadly, this latter is all too plausible, as we’ve seen our own EPA do things just as stupid, such as at Gold King Mine in Colorado.

Then the whole save-the-world storyline gets dumped in favor of a time travel story into the future, a future where deadly starvation has, as it has in India, according to one of the scientists, created a super-race both technologically and mentally superior to our own who nonetheless live in cannibalistic squalor.

That’s right: starvation is what created the psychic powers necessary for the Indian rope trick and other magic abilities of Indian ascetics. So when the entire world is starved, the entire world becomes a super-race.

At this point I began to wonder if the real point of the story is that world starvation is a good thing. This assumes, however, that the main characters’ suppositions about their prisoner from the future are correct. The logic to arrive at that conclusion is incredibly flimsy. The narration pays lip service to how flimsy it is by, weirdly, having the person being told this believe it and having the person doing the telling not believe that the person he’s telling it to believes it. This itself could be the basis for either a humorous or tragic scene, but it just sort of hangs there.

And ultimately none of it matters because a truck metaphorically falls on the prisoner before they can verify or disprove the psychic conjecture—and before the prisoner’s escape adds anything to the storyline.

As I entered the last few pages I began to worry that this was the beginning of a series. There was no way that the story could end; and it doesn’t. They just return to their home time with the knowledge that one of the characters will be deified hundreds or thousands of years in the future. Nothing happened. Nothing mattered. The starvation that the main character is fighting against will eventually be solved, but only after that starvation creates a super-race that hates him.

[Pete · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was weird, it was bad, it didn't make much sense. I had to try hard to finish it

[Steve · Rating 1 out of 5]

Typos, time travel, telekinesis.

Bad writing, bad plotting, self insert mc who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and fainting women.

[Bart Hill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Slow, plodding time travel story about the near extinction of humans, and their ultimate chance for survival.

[Kinosfronimos · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible. Stupid disjointed plot. Cardboard characters. And the worst most pointless dialogue ever. Do not waste your time.