Shall Not Fall!

Last week I finished reading The Last Centurion by John Ringo. You all may recall that he showed up in the comments to this post over a week ago. A great novel I thought, and as a life-long suburbanite, I learned more about farming than I ever knew before. Farming, you ask? More about that later.

Taking place from 2019 to 2021, The Last Centurion centers around a U.S. Army officer known simply as "Bandit Six," who at the novel's beginning is the commander of a battalion abandoned in Iran. By novel's end, he has become known as "the Last Centurion," promising that his Rome, unlike the Rome of antiquity, shall not fall. The novel, however, covers far more ground than Bandit Six's Middle East adventure (which plays out like a twenty-first century version of Xenophon's Anabasis). Along the way, Ringo treats his readers to well-reasoned, if blunt, arguments on such issues as Hurricane Katrina, global warming, liberal kumbaya foreign policy, and the stupidity of the government nationalization of industry, among other issues.

This is all occurring against the background of an America in serious decline. The United States is first struck with an airborne, human equivalent of the avian flu, which sweeps through the population with deadly consequences. With the exception of New York City, major urban areas are hardest hit, and on average the blue states - having less of a tendency toward "voluntary associations" than the red - suffer more greatly due to the dependence of their populations on governmental largess. At the same time, there is also a serious meteorological cooling trend underway causing a reduction in arable farmland.

To the latter crisis, President Warrick (constantly referred to by Bandit Six as "the Bitch") responds by nationalizing farms across the country and staffing them with urbanites who know nothing about how a productive farm works. At this point, Bandit Six is back home from the Middle East and is working in the Pentagon, trying to provide helpful advice (he is the son of a farmer with a degree in a related field) to those rookie farmers willing to listen. And then there is the matter of many of this country's cities having come under the rule of gangster-type warlords by the time Bandit Six returns - a problem that Warrick is more unwilling than unable to address. Again, it is left to Bandit Six and his centurions to handle the problem.

Give this book a read. I guarantee you will enjoy it, if for no other reason than basking in the "voice" of the narrator (Bandit Six), whose tone reminded me a lot of the blogger Ace of Spades.

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Also, my fellow blogger Moxie is in the market for a shotgun. Please go over and give her some advice. She'll appreciate it!