CyberStorm (World War C)

I recall Piers Anthony once used the term "message novel" to describe one of his books about the deterioration of the environment and mankind's regression into "survival of the fittest." One of his points was that seemingly positive developments in human society (I recall a cure for cancer being one of them) had unforeseen negative side effects (in that case, massive overpopulation because diseases served to "thin the herd," so to speak).I view "CyberStorm" as being in the vein of a "message novel" rather than being pure fiction written solely as entertainment. I suppose if the name "The Perfect Storm" hadn't already been taken for a novel and a major George Clooney film, that name might have been perfect for this story as well, as the protagonist makes clear that it was a series of incidents that all occurred with precisely the worst possible timing that led to the "cyberstorm" that gives the novel its name. I found the story particularly chilling because it's so plausible in so many ways. People do rely so much on their computers and their technology that they're lost without them. A humorous version of "cyberstorm" might be how kids these days seem unable to entertain themselves if the power goes out and they can't play video games. This book may give me pause as I think about a few home-improvement projects I'd been considering. For several years I've been interested in a wi-fi thermostat so that I could control the heat and AC remotely. (Example: You go to Florida for two weeks and you peg the AC at 80°F while you're gone because it's a waste to cool an empty house. With the wi-fi thermostat, you use your phone to send it a command when you're on your way home so the AC will start cooling the place in advance of your arrival.) Reading this novel made me think maybe an old-fashioned dumb thermostat isn't such a bad thing. It may be hot when you get home, but as long as the battery has juice, the thing works.I'm giving four stars because I often felt many of the characters in this story don't develop much. I didn't really find myself caring about them as much as I might in a longer novel or a series. However, I suppose in a "message novel" the characters are simply a vehicle to make a point. I'm reminded of Lee Correy's "Shuttle Down," a novel from the early 1980s written to make the point that NASA hadn't made emergency landing plans for space shuttle launches from the West Coast. The characters in that novel existed solely to advance the series of problems that could be expected to occur when a space shuttle landed on Easter Island. I view most of the characters in "CyberStorm" in a similar way. It wasn't really important for many of them to develop. It's also important in this vein to remember that this is a short novel. It doesn't include actual page numbers and I therefore don't have a sense for its true length, but the dots on my Kindle's home screen suggest it's about two-thirds to three-quarters the length of the previous book I'd read, and that book was around 325 pages or so. That means "CyberStorm" is probably in the 250- to 300-page range. You can only do so much with your characters in that amount of space. (In fairness, I should also note that a lot of my reading over the years has consisted of epic series that take many years to publish, such as Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time or George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire. I know it's not reasonable at all to expect the same sort of character development in a 250-page novel that you'd find in a 14-book 14,000-page series.)Some of the reviews here on Amazon criticize "CyberStorm" for a somewhat abrupt ending. The action ends suddenly and then all is explained after the fact. I'm not entirely sure what I think of the ending. On the one hand, I like to see characters solve their problems and discover things for themselves. On the other hand, that sort of thing wasn't reasonable in this book. Because I do not like to put spoilers in reviews I won't say why that is, so I'll just say that the characters' circumstances at the time of the narrative shift in question are such that there is no way they could solve matters on their own, and there was certainly no way they could discover everything that's explained in the subsequent pages. When I initially read the ending I found it rather jarring. There's no denying it's a very sudden shift that comes across as sort of in the vein of deus ex machina (that's probably unfair, but I can't think of a better description). After I'd thought about it for an hour or two I was more favorably inclined. There wasn't really any further the author could go with the storyline as it was progressing at that point and the sudden shift was a clean way to tie everything up.All in all, a good and gripping read. I assume most people know someone who's skeptical of all things electronic or who won't get, for example, an E-ZPass to pay tolls because he thinks it's a conspiracy or whatever, and I assume most of us roll our eyes a bit at those people. This novel makes me think maybe some of those people aren't as loony as they sometimes seem.

This is not so much a review as a comment on the book as well as other reviews.Much has already been said about the book that I do not need to repeat.However I thought I could add my two cents worth of thoughts about it.To start on a positive note; the author evidently knows much about technology, the internet, computer virus and so on. He tries to make a personal story of how people can be affected when our systems get knocked out and how it affects the real world, not just cyberspace. He uses the examples of Stuxnet and Flame that have done just that in the past, although on a much smaller scale. For this effort alone I gave the book 3 stars.The problem arises with how these problems exactly affect people, and how they react to their adversities. What I've written below is mostly for the people who liked the book because of the realism.And as a warning there are some major SPOILER ALERTS below.I'll have to break it up in points.Food:The author mentions elsewhere that he "starved" himself for two days just to research the effects on going without food. If he just asked people who fast from time to time, or did some more research he would discover that as the body get more used to this (within 3-4 days), the hunger pains become less severe and focus returns. (Maybe this was more a ploy to allow all the characters to consistently do the most stupid mistakes).Everybody seems to be starving very early in the story despite time and again finding more food. They were collecting food from shops in bags (making sure to take high energy foods), but every time they get a new catch, the next page is all about how hungry and malnourished they are. At one point the main character calculates that one shopping bag is about 2000 calories, what sort of food were they grabbing? (one milk chocolate easter egg 375g, is 1800 calories - close to the daily energy need for one person)Water:Much was said about the hardships of collecting water. As noted, melting snow delivers only a tenth the amount of water, but it still weighs the same. So 1 kg of snow in a bucket should be sufficient per person in a 24 hour period, doesn't sound that hard does it? (By the way TE Lawrence survived on one (1) cup of water per day riding through the Arabian desert for weeks according to his memoirs).Maybe an extra litre of water could be collected per day to give everybody a bit of a wash, just a thought.Health:If people are in pain it is a lot easier to distil marijuana into a pain-relieving tonic, than raid the nearest drug store.If you have a shoulder injury, what you want is a nurse to "triage" it. Because knowing it is let's say category three, would really help with the pain.Two weeks without showers or washing clothes will infest every person, sheet, item of clothing and blankets with fleas. Even though it's freezing and everyone is staying inside, isolated from everyone else. Where did they all come from?People coming together to grab food handouts will turn the place into a cesspool of Cholera in days. The author mentioned elsewhere he studied (and I guess got ideas from) the earthquake in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina. But Cholera took 10 months to arrive in Haiti, in tropic conditions, because people were drinking from the river, and even then it was so strange that they realised it came from Nepalese aid-workers, not locally. So again where did this Cholera come from?Symptoms of scurvy can start as early as 3 months after being malnourished, but as we've seen above, they still ate a fair bit of food, but had teeth starting to fall out after 2 months.Winter:Comparing with earthquakes or major floods, a brisk winter is just not such a big deal. Everyone are freezing, but not a single person thought of grabbing some winter clothes from the nearest shop. What, they don't stock warm clothes in NY around Christmas?Clearing roads of snow is really not that hard. If they wanted to help the stranded people of NY, all they needed would be one (1) truck with a snowplough and a convoy of trucks and buses behind.Keeping warm in a small room in a modern building full of people is just not that hard.Communications:So power and internet is gone (together with most peoples brains). CNN is gone, only local radio stations work. Why? As we see later (again SPOILER ALERT) things are not as bad on the outside. Why can't all these places that have power continue their communications?People outside NY did not realise the extent of suffering inside. Why? They can tune into the same local NY radio stations, can they not? And there are Police and Military present, so surely they have ways of communicating with the outside.The most awesome military in the world cannot organise a relief op because every single personnel is busy looking for imaginary drones. And when they do, they drop mosquito-nets over NY, in winter. COME ON!To make matters worse, they have no problems organising other teams to come from all over the world, set up camp in Washington to help out (so no snow there I guess, or maybe the snow clearing trucks there are not run by the web).Oh and one last thing. When you have had most of your supplies stolen, because you did not store it with you, and then again, and again, maybe you would start thinking "hey let's take it with us where ever we go".The book was a page turner, but just because I needed to find out how in the world the author would pull this together. I started to suspect towards the end that the main character would wake up, realising it was all a bad dream, I'm afraid that would have been a better ending.

Rivetting read where you really get to care about the characters. So realistic in today's world, especially after recent events.Only bugbear was that I started reading the author's Compendium, and having double-checked the introduction (where it stated that some books were just tasters), thought it featured the whole book (and my Kindle showed reading time of 9 hours). After a number of chapters in, suddenly it's the end of the initial chapters ... but as you're captivated by then, you go and buy the book. This left me feeling really cheated and so I won't read anymore in the Compendium ....

Finally got around to reading this book after purchasing it a year ago.I wasn't expecting much tbh since I am more of a fantasy and scy fy type of reader, but a story about cyber intriged me at the time so I purchased it.Since I started reading it, I just couldn't put it down.It is a book that hooks you in from the beginning and is packed with action all the way through, covering a world where we lose our technology and the challenges one faces when all systems go down, while also fighting mother nature, creating a perfect stormI highly recommend this book. You should definately give this a go if you are into this type of genre.

With past jobs working for the military, law enforcement and also in the IT industry, books like CyberStorm are just what I love and this book doesn't disappoint. The scenario is very real and I have been saying for many years that a large scale Cyber Attack would cripple major cities and infrastructure and that millions of these attacks are unleashed every few seconds. If successful, then welcome to CyberStorm. Matthew has written a very realistic scenario of what would happen if such an attack managed to get through Government defences and wreak havoc on a nations (or global) IT structure. But this book isn't about the technical side, it's about family and coming together in a disaster. The characters are believable as are the incidents that happen to people, as well as the struggle to not only take care of yourself, but your loved ones. What would you do?All in all, a very well written story and I know look forward to reading everything this author has to offer. This book kept me turning the pages so fast I got blisters, or that could have been frostbyte from the frozen wastelands of New York flowing through the freezing pages as I turned them to find out what happened next.If you're a lover of survival stories, New York and the snow and ice, then this book will not disappoint. Grab a copy today and read it under a nice warm duvet with a hot drink. You will need it.

What would you do if Facebook and Twitter went down, and stayed down? You'd do one of two things, pick up the phone and call your real friends or keep checking to see if they were up and running again. But what if the Internet collapsed? Combine that with the entire Eastern Seaboard being blacked out, a series of killer blizzards, an outbreak of bird flu and you have the plot for Matthew Mather's Cyberstorm.It makes for impressive reading and with a background in cyber security he's probably writing about possible scenarios and the scariest part of this book is I can imagine it happening for real.When rogue foreign agents insert a cyberbomb into the system that begins to shut down power grids no one thinks it's going to last long but when a killer snowstorm blankets New York, shutting it off from the outside world. China and American are facing off against each other in the Pacific and rumours of a bird flu epidemic stretch the emergency services to their utmost. Civilisation begins to fracture as the normally stubborn New Yorkers become more desperate and then the horror begins to manifest itself as looting gives way to murder and cannibalism.We see this through the eyes of Mark Mitchell who is only trying to keep his wife and young son alive until the cavalry arrives. In this he is helped by his next door neighbour and best friend, Chuck and his wife, the Borodins, Russian emigres and a small band of brothers and sisters. The story itself is excrutiatingly slow as they forage for food and discuss how this could have happened to us here in America, but the slow pace just draws you deeper and deeper into the story until you feel as if you are right there. When they make a break for it and head across the river for safety they jump from the frying pan into the fire. The ending will leave you with a sense of relief and perhaps you might think to stock up on basic survival food and gear, and do a little homework on how to hack cell phones.He's done his homework and there's something of the lecturer coming through in the conversations the characters have as they wait for the cavalry that never comes but I didn't feel that slowed the story down, rather it gave you time to draw breath until the next daring exploit. This is a cautionary tale about the thin veneer of civilisation and the rapid descent from civilised man to wild animal. We think we are so clever with our smart tvs, iPhones, tablets, refrigerators that can send emails and computers that can pilot a spaceship all the way to Mars. But in the majesty of our cleverness lies the seeds of our destruction because most of the vital infrastructure depends to a large extent on computers. Technology has enriched our lives but over reliance on technology can lead to our destruction.Cyberstorm is a story that should be read by anyone involved in cyber security or essential infrastructure because it could happen. A well deserved five stars for a good page turner.

I'm sitting here reviewing a book about a catastrophic cyber failure. I'm doing it on the tablet I read the book on.A great book that brings home just how reliant we are on technology. Probably even over reliant as we become so accustomed to it being an integral part of our lives.We've had a few episodes lately where the payment card system failed for a short time and that was chaotic.Cyberstorm builds on that focussing on a group of people's battle to survive. It makes me wonder how well I could survive.I love the old Russian couple and the ease with which they accept the situation and survive. Less reliance on technology.Well written and well worth reading.