There is a scientific property known as Faraday's Equation that has something to do with the planet's magnetic field and this book. However, the author never sees fit to make that connection clear, and frankly, this reviewer remembers little from his scholastic science courses, so the true mysteries behind what happened to the planet Earth in N. Lee Wood's Faraday's Orphans remain unsolved.

The book takes place in the American wastelands of 2242, where something has affected the basic way things work (i.e. electricity, etc.) and made much of the world barely technological no-man's land. The survivors of this age either live in domed cities (ooh, how original a concept), in harshly defended cavernous enclaves or in roaming nomad bands. The book focuses on a helicopter pilot named Berk Nielsen, a blue collar joe trying to live as an individual in a society that makes such tendencies dangerous to the public good. His wife? A knockout firebrand who can't understand, much less support him. His boss? A fat bureaucrat resting on his laurels. His life? Tinkering on an ancient helicopter in a subculture that prefers fixed wing flight., forever looking to "explore and reclaim" Western ideals of frontierism that has been lost to this polite society.

The book screams "blah" at almost every turn of the page, with the oppressive hopelessness bearing down like a descending ceiling. It's clear from early on that Berk never has a chance for anything, and since he isn't exactly a character you can sympathize with (raping his wife when she won't submit to him, recklessly searching for an elusive goal that can't happen while jeopardizing everything he'd worked to achieve, etc.), one reads the text in a "hm, well, what can be gleaned of interest from the environment?"

There, at least, is some reward. Wood did a good job depicting this admittedly not original post apocalyptic world, and best details were the loose gang structures developing in the lawless, un-domed metropoli, the quasi religious nomads who were like a mix between Quakers and Sunni, and the detail at which her words paint the picture of a world that is wild, unexplored, and more hostile than can be tamed.

However, in the end the book disappoints largely, as the hero and his scruffy, homicidal sidekick literally ride off into the sunset ... knowing full well that they'll never live to see it. It's easier to turn on your TV and see the decay of today than open this book to imagine the rot of tomorrow.