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    Daybreak Zero
    Daybreak Zero
    Daybreak Zero
    Audiobook16 hours

    Daybreak Zero

    Written by John Barnes

    Narrated by Susan Ericksen

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    What began as a technothriller
    continues as high adventurein the newly savage ruins of civilization.

    In late 2024, Daybreak, a movement of post-apocalyptic eco-saboteurs,  smashed modern civilization to its knees. In the losing, hopeless struggle against Daybreak, Heather O'Grainne, a one-time minor bureaucrat and former Federal agent, rose to become a vital leader in the struggle to restore civilization. That story was told in Directive 51.

    Now Heather's story continues in Daybreak Zero.  In the summer of 2025, she leads a tiny organization of scientists, spies, scouts, entrepreneurs, engineers, dreamers, and daredevils based in Pueblo, Colorado. Both of the almost-warring governments of the United States have charged them with an all but impossible mission: find a way to put the world back together.

    But Daybreak's triumph has flung the world back centuries in technology, politics, and culture.

    • Pro-Daybreak Tribals openly celebrate ending the world as we know it. 
    • Army regiments have to fight their way in and out of Pennsylvania.
    • The Earth's environment is saturated with plastic-devouring biotes and electronics-corroding nanoswarm. 
    • A leftover Daybreak device drops atom bombs from the moon on any outpost of the old civilization it can spot.
     

    Confined to her base in Pueblo to give birth to her first child, Heather recruits and monitors a coterie of tech wizards, tough guys, and modern-day frontier scouts: a handful of heroes to patrol a continent.  All the news is bad:

    • Tribals have overrun Indiana and Illinois
    • The last working aircraft carrier sits helplessly out in the Indian Ocean, not daring to come closer to land
    • The crash of one of the last working airplanes kills a vital industrialist
    • Tribals try to force appeasement on the Provi government while the Temper government faces a rebellion of religious fanatics
    • Seventeen states are lost to
      the Tribals as California drifts into secession and hereditary monarchy
    • Everywhere,  Provis and Tempers lurch toward civil war.

    Heather's agents may be brave, smart, and daring, but can they be enough?  For the sake of everything from her newborn son to her dying nation,  can she forge them into a the weapon that can at last win the world back from the overwhelming, malevolent force of Daybreak? 

    Her success or failure may change everything for the next thousand years, beginning from  Daybreak Zero.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 6, 2011
    ISBN9781441862266
    Daybreak Zero
    Author

    John Barnes

    John Barnes (b. 1957) is the author of more than thirty novels and numerous short stories. His most popular novels include the national bestseller Encounter with Tiber (co-written with Buzz Aldrin), Mother of Storms (finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula awards), Tales of the Madman Underground (winner of the Michael L. Printz Award), and One for the Morning Glory, among others. His most recent novel is The Last President (2013).

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    Reviews for Daybreak Zero

    3.5/5

    54 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is the second book in the Daybreak series. I've not read the first, and I'm not sure I will, not because the book is bad, but because if things are as grim as they are here, how much worse must it have been when things fell apart. Victories in Daybreak Zero are real, but partial and fleeting. The deaths of billions is not half so hard to take as the agonizing deaths of several characters. These unpleasant and extended scenes reminded me of Barne's Mother of Storms.For those with a stronger constitution, this near future post-apocalyptic novel has a number of interesting SFnal ideas, an on-going and as-yet unresolved mystery of who is behind the goal to exterminate humanity, and plenty of action and political machinations. They're not zombies, but the Daybreakers and tribals are just as vicious and unrelenting, and dealt with in the same fashion as the Walking Dead. That in my mind is the weakest element of the book.Recommended if you're a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre.
    • 4/5
      Not as good as Directive 51, the first book in the series, but still worth reading. Character development still is too thin, but the story moves along reasonably well and has a few new plot twists. The book leaves some key questions hanging. How did the EMP bombs get on the moon? How do the protagonists manage to move around at will and brainwash key players? Maybe these will be answered in the next volume of the series, which I hope does not continue the downward slide.
    • 4/5
      Not quite as good as the first one, but kept me reading, can't wait until the next one.
    • 4/5
      Sequel to Directive 51, a post-apocalypse novel in which the world is beginning to recover from the destruction of technological civilisation (or most of it) by an internet meme/cult. Daybreak. It turns out that Daybreak didn't end when it brought down 'the big system', it's still there and still capable of propagating itself. The remnants of the US struggle to bring themselves together against each other, against the tribes which are the remnant tools/agents of Daybreak seeking to destroy re-emerging technological civilisation (and bring about the complete genocide of humanity), and against neo-feudalists within. An engaging story that ends, not unexpectedly, unresolved. There will be at least one more sequel.