The novel “Some Will Not Die” by Algis Budrys was published for the first time in 1961, an expanded version of “False Night” of 1954.
Matt Garvin is part of the 10% of the population that survived a pandemic that also resulted in the complete destruction of the civilization. In a situation where anyone can be a mortal enemy, the only way to move forward is to find someone you can trust. Slowly, starting with his neighbors, Matt starts forming a new society that expands through Manhattan.
Joe Custis was commissioned to find Ted Berendsten, a leader officially killed many years before but according to various rumors actually alive and well hidden. The authorities that gave him that task want Berendsten because the army he commanded had led to the formation of the first real North American state after the pandemic so they consider him useful for the government of a new Republic.
The post-apocalyptic subgenre was already a great classic in the 1950s, when Algis Budrys published this novel’s first version. In this case the collapse of Western civilization is caused by a pandemic and the survivors often have to fight to get their hands on the remaining resources. In a Manhattan that has become an urban jungle in which any survivor can be prey or predator, some people start rebuilding human relationships.
“Some Will Not Die” goes through many decades and the story isn’t told in chronological order. The narration alternates between chapters set a generation after the pandemic that tell Joe Custis’s story and chapters that start from Matt Garvin’s story to tell how the situation evolved through the decades that separate it from Joe Custis’s.
Algis Budrys worked in a market where novels were short by today’s standards and “Some Will Not Die” is quite long by the author’s standards, being over 200 pages long. To keep a story that spans decades in a novel of that length, he made a very precise choice about what to tell and what to leave out and it’s up to the reader to decide whether that’s acceptable or give up reading this novel.
Typically, in his novels Algis Budrys focused on one or very few protagonists to be developed in depth but in a novel like “Some Will Not Die” a number of protagonists succeed each other throughout the story. Despite this, the author manages to flesh out all the important characters or at least the men because from this point of view the novel is dated in the sense that women are essentially sidelined.
What is lacking in “Some Will Not Die” in some cases is difficult to not consider a defect. The new society is built at the beginning apartment after apartment and then expanded to other buildings in Manhattan but even then Algis Budrys remains really vague about the political and social structure adopted in the various attempts to set up a new Republic. Even very practical problems are overlooked: for example in Joe Custis’s story we see that vehicles are still used but it’s not clear if they managed to resume their construction and fuel production in any way.
Despite these shortcomings, “Some Will Not Die” is interesting because it offers good portraits of pandemic survivors who bring different ideas, sometimes clashing sometimes collaborating, to face the new situation. Later, a new generation still brings new attitudes because they’re people who’ve never known the previous civilization.
In the end, “Some Will Not Die” is a novel that has precise limits given that it focuses on the life of some protagonists of the reconstruction after the pandemic. For this reason, in my opinion, within those limits it’s all in all good but it’s worth reading it only if you consider Algis Budrys’s choices acceptable.
