The Fall of the Republic

By Crawford Kilian

The past was safe and comforting, knowable. The present was a series of insults, disappointments, and frights. The future could only be disaster.

Set in the mid-1990’s, the world is on the verge of collapse.

Several nations have already descended into chaos and the US is now only months away from anarchy. The old nationalism no longer works. But the discovery of “Trainables” – a select portion of the teenager population who can be trained to read, comprehend, and remember vast amounts of data like a computer – staves off disaster for a little longer. These Trainables are placed in vital government jobs – security, analysis, etc. With these “human computers” in place, the government can maintain control.

Jerry Pierce was one such Trainable…

A colonel barely out of his teens, Pierce learned early not to let scruples, friendship, or inconvenient dead bodies stand between him and doing a job right. And a good thing too-because it wasn’t just civilization he was fighting to preserve, it was all Mankind and the planet Earth itself.

Bio for Crawford Kilian:

Crawford Kilian was born in New York in 1941. Raised in Los Angeles and Mexico City, he is a naturalized Canadian citizen living in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, Alice, and daughters, Anna and Margaret. Formerly a technical writer-editor at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, he has taught English at Capilano College in North Vancouver since 1968. His writing background includes two children’s books (Wonders Inc. and The Last Vikings); critical articles on Charles Dickens and the Canadian writer James De Mille; several radio plays broadcast by the CBC; and Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia.