Pines and Plains Libraries

A man and his young son traverse a blasted American landscape, covered with the ashes of the late world. The man can still remember the time before but not the boy. There is nothing for them except survival, and the precious last vestiges of their own humanity. At once brutal and tender, despairing and hopeful, spare of language and profoundly moving, The Road is a fierce and haunting meditation on the tenuous divide between civilization and savagery,...

Immersing himself in a mid-twenty-first-century technological virtual utopia to escape an ugly real world of famine, poverty, and disease, Wade Watts joins an increasingly violent effort to solve a series of puzzles by the virtual world's creator.

Following a sudden, inexplicable loss of electricity worldwide, the human race is abruptly confronted with the practical and ethical dilemmas created by the loss of familiar technologies.

A generation has passed since the change that rendered technology inoperable around the world, and western Oregon has finally achieved a degree of peace. Except a new threat has risen in Paradise Valley, Wyoming. A man known as the Prophet presides over the church universal and triumphant, teaching his followers to continue God's work by destroying the remnants of technological civilization they encounter, and those who dare use them.

"The story picks up a year after One Second After ends, two years since the detonation of nuclear weapons above the United States brought America to its knees. After suffering starvation, war, and countless deaths, the survivors of Black Mountain, North Carolina, are beginning to piece back together the technologies they had once taken for granted: electricity, radio communications, and medications. They cling to the hope that a new national government...

"Days after winning OASIS founder James Halliday’s contest, Wade Watts makes a discovery that changes everything. Hidden within Halliday’s vaults, waiting for his heir to find, lies a technological advancement that will once again change the world and make the OASIS a thousand times more wondrous—and addictive—than even Wade dreamed possible. With it comes a new riddle, and a new quest—a last Easter egg from Halliday, hinting at a mysterious...

"In the face of a crisis that sweeps an entire high-tech planet back to the age before electricity, the Brannings face a choice. Will they hoard their possessions to survive -- or trust God to provide as they offer their resources to others? .... a what-if series in which global catastrophe reveals the darkness in human hearts and lights the way to restoration for a self-centered world."--p. [1].

The America we are accustomed to is no more. Practically overnight the stock market has plummeted, hyperinflation has crippled commerce, and the fragile chains of supply and high-technology infrastructure have fallen. The power grids are down. Brutal rioting and looting grip every major city. The volatile era known as "the Crunch" has begun, and this new period in our history will leave no one untouched. In this unfamiliar environment, only a handful...

When an unthinkable nuclear attack occurs in an alternate-reality 1962, Scott is forced into his father's bomb shelter with his family and neighbors, where they rapidly consume limited supplies and fear the worst about the fate of the world outside.

The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners--a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life--has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren,...