The City, Not Long After

by Pat Murphy

Hardcover, 1989

Status

Available

Call number

F Mur

Call number

F Mur

Barcode

7123

Publication

Doubleday (1989), Edition: 1st, 244 pages

Description

The city is San Francisco. "Not long after" refers to a devastating worldwide plague that has wiped out most of the planet's population. The people who survive in San Francisco are mostly artists, hippies, and misfits who pull together a viable community and transform the city. But when a military general determines to reunite the remnants of the once great United States and sets his sights on San Francisco, the people resist, believing they have already discovered a better way of life. The new and artistically creative guerrilla warfare they stage will make for one of the oddest battles ever fought.

Original publication date

1989

User reviews

LibraryThing member Crowyhead
This is another adult sf novel, repackaged for YAs. It's a post-apocalyptic yarn about California after a plague has wiped out most of the population. Parts of Northern California have come under the sway of a general people call Four Star, who wants to rebuild America as an ultraconservative
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dictatorship. The denizens of San Francisco, on the other hand, have created an anarchist art colony and have no desire to have their way of life disrupted.

The whole thing's ever-so-slightly hippie-dippy, but it's an engaging story and I loved the characters. Plus I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic scenarios.
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LibraryThing member EmScape
Pat Murphy is so brilliant. Seriously, everything she's ever written is a joy to read.
This one takes place in and around San Francisco after a global plague has wiped out the majority of the population. The cast of characters who remain in the city consist of "Books" who keeps up the library; "The
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Machine" who makes crazy robot sculptures; Danny-boy, who wants to paint the whole Golden Gate blue; and others who are mostly focused on using the remnants of what's been left behind to create art or advance knowledge. Unfortunately, there are also survivors who want to amass power and 'save society'. An unbelievably repugnant man who calls himself General Fourstar has built himself a little army, mostly leads by fear, and has decided he's going to bring the City under his dominion. The citizens get really creative in an effort to fight back.
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LibraryThing member rocalisa
I really enjoyed this. It was kind of weird and quirky in a most delightful way. My only disappointment was that the ending didn't seem to match the rest of the book. More accurate, the very end did, but the few pages before as the "current time" action ended, just sort of ran out of steam without
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the delicacy of the rest of the book.

The characters were all delightful - and the descriptions of their art and their weapons, both variations on the same thing, were beautifully done.

Each person was well described, not only in who they were at the time of the story, but in how they came to be that way.

A lovely story, if not exactly straightforward, kind of like the title, which I love.
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LibraryThing member lilinah
I loved this book. To be honest there are some caricatured characters, some elements of the plot are stereotypic, and the writing is sometimes weak.

But there were several aspects that bring me such pleasure, such wonder, that i have to give it so high a rating. First, the city is the center point,
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a major character, and that city is San Francisco, which i have always found magical (and i moved to the SF Bay Area after living in Chicago and NYC). And the "heros" are almost entirely artists, certainly not typical of most sciffy/fantasy novels, and many of my friends have been artists (visual, musical, dance).

Ultimately for me the wondrous and imaginative parts of the book outweighed the "same old" parts.
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LibraryThing member ragwaine
This is my first novel from Pat Murphy. Not sure I'm really that excited about reading more from her. I thought it was okay at first, then I thought it was really bad, then the last 3rd got interesting. Overall it felt really dated. There were supernatural elements that seemed extremely out of
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place in a post holocaust world. At first I couldn't tell if they were events that were actually happening or if they were somehow metaphorical. When it started raining flowers I thought I had missed something and that maybe it was someone dropping flowers on to the main character from above but later I realized it was literally raining flowers. The best part was the creative way that the San Franciscans "fought" the war.

So if you're looking for post apocalyptic sci-fi, I would suggest -Blood Music- from Greg Bear or -The Postman- from David Brin.
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LibraryThing member mkhall
Interesting post-apocalyptic fantasy with a dream-like feel. The characters are good, if a bit blank in many ways; they aren't so much meant to be people as ideas, I suspect. Once it gets to the end it feels like Murphy realized she was running out of pages, so shifted gears to wrap-up mode, making
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it feel more than a little rushed. I would have liked to have read more after the climax, but that's asking for more linearity than the author was interested in providing.
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LibraryThing member dpappas
Alone, she felt the city around her: a fragile and elaborate construction; a maze of streets as complex as the strands of a spider’s web; houses in which people had lived and slept and made love, each individual leaving an indelible mark on the place.

Ever since I first read a book by Pat Murphy
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that was being offered on Netgalley I have grown to really love her books. I can honestly say that I probably would never had discovered her had it not been for Netgalley. While most of her books are fantasy or sci-fiction they all seem so unique and different that I honestly never know what I'll get when I start one of her books.

This book was no exception to that. This books follows a group of artists who live in San Francisco after a plague has wiped out most of the population. The group of artists must ban together when a stranger with no name comes to town warning them that a General most people call Fourstar wants to take control of San Francisco.

I loved reading about the artists and reading all of their backstories and seeing what they did before the plague came. The girl with no name (she eventually gets a name but I will refer to her as 'the girl with no name') absolutely fascinated me at first and I was dying to know all that had previously happened with her mother. The further along in the story I got the more her stubbornness and aggressiveness annoyed me.

I loved the way that the artists fought back (and how the city itself helped them). I became a bit wary with where the book was going towards the end but ultimately I ended up enjoying the end. If you are looking for a dystopian book with a cast unique but extremely interesting characters then I would definitely recommend you read this book.
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LibraryThing member sturlington
Several years after a plague has decimated the human population, a group of artists inhabit a mostly empty San Francisco, using the entire city as their blank canvas; then a woman without a name arrives to warn them of a planned invasion, and the artists must come up with a new way to wage war.

I
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thought this was a very interesting entry in the post-apocalyptic genre. Unlike other post-apocalyptic fiction, it rejects the notion that humans will regress to violence and savagery if civilization blinks out. In fact, this San Francisco is an anarchic utopia, marred only by elements from the outside. This is a different take on the well-worn themes of war and peace (although concluding that some violence and probably a lot of death is inevitable to avoid one and achieve the other). I appreciated the city as a major character in the book, actually intervening at certain points; these incidents of magical realism seemed appropriate for the tone and setting, and contributed some lovely images, such as blue butterflies painting the Golden Gate Bridge and golden flowers raining from the sky. A good read for post-apocalypse fans looking for something different.

Read for the SFFCat in 2015.
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LibraryThing member AltheaAnn
I really enjoyed reading this book - the tone and concepts were just beautiful. It's a post-apocalyptic scenario infused with magical realism. After a plague spread (accidentally?) by peace-activist Buddhists, only a few survivors live amongst ruins. San Francisco has become a haven of artists, but
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a military cult based in Sacramento is set on forcefully establishing a new American empire. Pacifism faces down a philosophy of violent force... but primarily, this is the story of the orphaned Danny-boy and the wild girl Jax... and of the city itself, suffused with dreams and nightmares.
My only criticism is that while it's beautiful and poetic, the book paints both sides of the conflict with a broad brush, and avoids engaging some of the obvious questions (is there absolutely no crime or major conflict amongst the happy artists of San Francisco?).
Still, even though it may have limitations, it's still a lovely book.
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LibraryThing member zjakkelien
I have a thing for sentient in unexpected places, so I loved this book with its sentient city. I liked the way it protects its inhabitants and how the artist living there make a life for themselves. It was very interesting to see how they defend themselves when the city is under attack. I also
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liked that the defensive (and offensive) roles are played by men and women alike. I think I would have preferred a different ending, but I was ok with it.
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LibraryThing member unclebob53703
The story is about a post-apocalypse San Francisco, and although there are human characters, the city is the main character. A young woman comes to San Francisco after her mother's death, bringing a warning about a general who wants to take over the city. The crisis takes place in the last 60 pages
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of the book, and the "war" is largely symbolic, and I found its resolution not entirely satisfying. But the book makes its own rules and mostly follows them. If it really was the end of the world you could do much worse than living in San Francisco.
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LibraryThing member Citizenjoyce
This book has been sitting on my bookshelves for years. I can't imagine why I didn't get to it before. It's about peace and war, non-violent and violent disobedience, art, artists, political oppression, and thinking outside the box wrapped in a great story about post-apocalyptic San Francisco.
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Evidently, Pat Murphy really loves her city. Now I'm going to give it to my daughter.
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Rating

½ (95 ratings; 3.9)

Pages

244
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