I used to think that Stephen King was one author seriously in need of some editorial work, but now I think William Brinkley takes the cake with The Last Ship. Published in 1989, this is absolutely the most long-winded and boring book I have ever read. Underneath it all is the potential for a really cool post-apocalyptic story in the same genre as Alas, Babylon, but it gets so bogged down in details that it is truly a chore to read.
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The story is about a U.S. Navy Destroyer floating around a remote part of the Pacific after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed pretty much the entire Earth and all of civilization. You enter the story after the war is over, so don't expect any big openers here. Other than this fully stocked and manned ship, there is a Russian submarine believed to be lurking out in the water somewhere, so they remain a hidden threat that eventually pops up after I was too bored to care any more.
What happens here is that the captain of the ship, who also narrates the story, realizes that his crew could be the last remaining human beings on the planet. He understands that it is up to him to orchestrate what is no less than the survival of his species. This means setting up farms for growing food and basically establishing new life on land since the ship's resources will eventually run out and there is nowhere else left to resupply. They begin this heavy task on a beautiful deserted island.
It takes so friggin' long before anything truly happens in this book that I question myself as to how I even kept reading. For the first one hundred pages, pretty much all they do is plant a farm. It goes through all the characters as well as the captain's many lengthy inner monologues, but nothing interesting happens the whole time.
As for the writing style - OMG WTF! When I open a book and see page-long paragraphs that extend into other pages, it makes my eye twitch. The author is a good writer, but this book is in heavy need of some filtering. How any editor let this much filler content slip through baffles me. What's worse is the author repeats the same themes about isolation and the importance of women and repopulation over and over. I swear, the captain of this ship is like an emo kid in uniform.
You deserve a trophy if you can push all the way to the end of this book. I like apocalyptic type stories where a small group of survivors are trying to rebuild the world. It's an interesting genre and The Last Ship had the potential to be a great story. The main problem is that this book is twice as long as it should be and it's a damn boring read.
This sounds like it would be a great book ... with some editing.
I used to be one of those long paragraph writers. I was cured by reading a non-fiction book like what you describe.
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