Deathlands, for starters, is not a single book, but a series of books published by Gold Eagle. Similarly, the author James Axler is a pseudonym-the novels are written by a group of authors. This book and its sister series Outlanders (which I’ll write a review on soon) is one of the best examples of post apocalyptic action sci-fi. The Deathlands series began around 1986, and to date, there are over 70 titles published till now (New ones are still being released). I’ve read all of them in sequence upto #66. The books themselves are rare to come by in India, and all I’ve read are pirated off of IRC channels. I read book #2, Red Holocaust, in 1995, when I was in school, and since then I’ve tried and tried to get the actual books, but nobody in India seems to have them. Anyway, now I have nearly read them all. The basic premise is, the world as we know it was totally destroyed by nuclear war at 12.00 pm on January 20th, 2001-in a war between the Americans and the Soviets. (Remember the Cold War was still on when the series began, and back then, the events portrayed were still a terrifying possibility). The first novel, Pilgrimage to Hell, describes in great detail the events that led to the holocaust. 80% of the world population was wiped out, and global climate and geography were also irreversibly altered. Nuclear triggered earthquakes have changed the land, strong acid rain showers come without warning.Now a hundred years have passed. The law of the jungle prevails and the remains of the US have personal fiefdoms carved out by local warlords. Weapons are highly prized, for protection from crooks and dangerous mutants (both animal and human), and weapons dating from before the war are highly prized. Before the war, the US govt. was conducting various secret experiments in teleportation, and they constructed several hidden military bunkers or redoubts across the US and other places, each with a mat-trans (matter transport) unit that can teleport people and objects through a 4th dimension to another similar location instantly. Most of these hidden bunkers have survived the war, but nobody knows of their existence. They continue to run silently, computer controlled, powered by nuclear generators that continue to remain operational even after a century. These bunkers have caches of food and weapons, living quarters etc, for military personnel to use after or during the war. A band of survivors, led by Ryan Cawdor, accidentally stumble upon one such bunker, which has a teleportation unit, and they learn how to use it to travel to a new destination. The series is about their adventures in each new place that they teleport to, as they move around in search of a safe place to settle down. Now that I’ve laid down the background, onto the series itself. This is an unbelievably gritty and violent series, with graphic sex and violence and profanity thrown in. You get to see descriptions of brains being spattered by bullets and people getting blown up during skirmishes. The books, especially the first few ones, serve to highlight the absolute totality of a nuclear war. There is a sense of poignancy whenever they encounter 20th century artifacts, lying abandoned and broken after a hundred years, be it old buildings, corporate logos (One of them reads a reference to Kansas on a box of cornflakes in one of the redoubts, and says ’where the f is Kansas?’, to be told it used to be a place that now has radioactive swamps. After a while, the books fall into a predictable pattern-each book begins and ends with a mat-trans jump, and they encounter some sort of evil warlord or twisted killers, and they get rid of them and move on. Yet, a sense of continuity is maintained through the series, with constant character development, and questions raised in some of the novels are resolved later on. I would highly recommend this series to anyone who likes this genre of action novels; as I said before, they can only be loosely termed as science fiction as they are not sci-fi novels in the traditional sense. You can either order them from the publisher at https://jamesaxler.com (ha!), or find them on IRC channels for pirated books. (No, I’m not going to tell you where!).