The Big Ones

The Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them)
© 2018 Lucy Jones
256 pages

Earth is not a peaceful place; even it were stripped of all life, it would still teem with energy, from vast tectonic plates below, to the rolling seas and fantastic lightening storms above.  Much of that energy is put to use by human ingenuity, but sometimes it lashes out in displays that destroy hundreds or thousands of lives and undermine what we've built. The Big One reviews some of the greatest recorded disasters to strike human civilization, mixing science and history, and closes with some general advice  to the public on how to think about disaster preparation and emergency management.

Jones' background is in seismology, so it's probably no surprise that most of the disasters chronicled here are earthquakes. But disasters that  make history -- the 'big ones' that people remember  -- are rarely by themselves. The great San Francisco earthquake, for instance, did great direct damage, but its greatest impact was the fires it helped create and feed.  Likewise, for the Fukushima affair; the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan were formidable in themselves, but they compromised and accelerated the demise of a nuclear reactor and led to an altogether different kind.  The most recent 'big ones' covered in this book are the Christmas 2004 tsunami that affected sixteen countries and killed nearly three hundred thousand people, and the Fukushima event.  There are some here which have nearly no name recognition (like the massive earthquake that struck immediately after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution in China, and some I've seen mentioned in other books, like the earthquake and fire that destroyed over eighty percent of Lisbon in 1755. 

In addition to discussing the science behind disasters -- why they happened, what specific forces are causing various calamities, why some earthquakes are more disastrous than others  -- Jones also addresses the long-term effects of these disasters when possible. The timing of the Lisbon earthquake -- on All Saint's Day, during the morning when all the churches were full of faithful parishioners celebrating the memory of saints present and pass --  could not have been better timed for mass death, and it shook the faith of many, just as the Holocaust would centuries later.   Japan and China's traditional way of explaining disasters, as distortions of yin and yang, would be challenged by "big ones' during the dawn of modernity as well.  The disasters around the Mississippi -- a great flood and then Katrina -- also  bring up a discussion of race, and the US government's first forays into federal emergency management. Jones defends FEMA during Katrina, however, arguing that the great failures there happened on the ground, as both the city and state officials were not communicating with one another or with FEMA enough to be at all effective.   In one of the few non-earthquake examples,  Jones points to greater international information-sharing as a result of the 2004 tsunami.   (Which...was triggered by an earthquake. We're really never far removed from that!)

All said, this is an interesting history of how  a few earthquakes have altered nations' responses to disaster response, driving the desire to learn about them and find realistic politics to cope with the aftermath -- topped with advice to citizens at the end that's a little generic ("Educate yourself"). It's not as wide-ranging as I'd hoped, since most of the disasters were earthquakes, but keeping this subject in mind is good for any citizen today. Future disasters will effect proportionally more people, as the global population swells and concentrates, and as the globe becomes fully industrialized we will have more distortive effects on the environment.  Emergency awareness and management should be near to the forefront not just for citizens, but for every level of government.

The Water Will Come

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
© 2017 Jeff Goodell
332 pages

Complex problems of enormous scale rarely have a patent solution. There are, however, rational responses. In The Water Will Come, Jeff Goodell reviews the way a few cities across the globe are moving to address the growing problem of rising sea levels, from flat denial  to grandiose plans to raise entire city centers. Goodell visits Miami, New York,  Venice, and communities in the Arctic circle, Nigeria, and the Marshall Islands.  Although Goodwell is hopeful that action can be taken, he's left with the grim conclusion that many communities may simply be abandoned and their people removed to higher ground.

Goodell reviews both the various ways rising water will threaten communities near seaboards, as well as their responses. Rising waters will lead to widespread property forfeiture, of course, but floods and storm surges will become worse.   Invasive waters are not simply the ocean with a bigger footprint:   waters sweeping through urban areas become toxic soups of offal and waste fluids,  providing a perfect vector for health crises  While it's easy for most people alive today not to worry about 2100, and easier still to shrug and say that those clever people of 2099 will no doubt have extraordinary technology to solve these problems,  rising floods today are an immediate risk.  Hurricane Sandy added particular impetus to New York City's own risk assessment goals: they intend to build floodwalls around some of the most vulnerable areas.    Venice, Italy, has been fighting its own reclamation by the sea for centuries, but tidal flooding has grown worse and the city now finds itself struggling to complete a controversial tidal barrier.   While Miami is wealthy enough that it can conceivably plow money into infrastructure to help it adapt to the future, places like the Marshall Islands can only look abroad for help.  If the Marshalls are reclaimed by the ocean, their population will have to find new homes abroad -- and as the migrant crisis provoked by the ISIS gang-state indicates, that won't be pretty.

Goodell's survey involved interviews with policymakers and scientists alike, and helps readers understand why more actions aren't being taken.  Many Miami developers don't care about sea level changes because they're short-term investors: once they sell the development, they move on.  The future peril of the development is for its owners and subletters to worry about.  There's also the fact that climate response  has to be mediated through society and governments that are not only unwieldy, but beset with other considerations as well. President Obama may have believed strongly in the threat posed by change, but when he's badgered by the author as to why he allowed the Alaskan oil pipeline to continue, the president patiently explained that no president is truly free to do what he wants; he enters office with wheels already in motion, and  he has to not only work through Congress but take into account politics and economics. If Goodell succeeds in promoting the need to plan for rising sea levels, it will owe to the threat itself and not his delivery; he appears to see only this problem, and dismisses any opposition. He refers to multiple people as "[cityname]'s Trump", or "the [country-adjective] Trump",  but that's confusing to say the least. Are they trumplike because they're developers? Populists? Overenthusiastic twitter-ers? 

This is an important matter for concerned citizens to consider, especially in seaboard communities like Miami which are already fighting "sunny day flooding" because increases in sealevels have submerged their seaside drain outlets. 

1906

1906
© 2004 James Dalessandro
368 pages

Turn of the century San Francisco was a notoriously corrupt city, filled with vice from the brothels of the Barbary Coast to the opium dens and sex slaves of Chinatown. 1906 is a political thriller  that brings together two brother-cops and an intrepid lady reporter together as they attempt to throw a spotlight onto the den of scum and villainy that is city hall, exposing a political-criminal cabal controlling the city.   And then...history happens, in the form of an earthquake and a fire that destroy city hall and a lot of the city, pitting the corrupt mayor against a slightly deranged general whose solutions all involve shooting or exploding things.   The novel and title both indicate that this is a novel set amid the chaos of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906, but in reality....the quake hits when the book is nearly over,  and it merely serves as a large-scale plot twist.  Because I was reading this solely for the earthquake and fire angle, I wasn't too much interested in the seaside skulduggery -- especially since one of the cops was this irritating college grad who seemed to have majored in precognition, since he keeps telling people all the mistakes they're making, apparently armed with information from the future.  Perhaps he's a time traveler -- he wouldn't be the only one, since another character pines for cars not taking over the street yet, despite their still being rich man's toys in 1906.  devices that couldn't roll a mile without a flat tire.

If the potential reader is interested in the actual disasters, there are a couple of very storied histories -- Dan Kurzman's Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 was the volume that ignited my interest. It bubbles over with anecdotes that really bring the calamity to life.  Less anecdotal, but written by a San Francisco citizen, is Edward F. Dolan's Disaster 1906.

Opera fans may be interested in Enrico Caruso's steady appearances throughout 1906. He no good a-speaka the English, because he's-a Italiano.

Isaac's Storm

Isaac's Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
© 1999 Erik Larson
336 pages

First news from Galveston just received by train that could get no closer to the bay shore than 6 mi  where the prairie was strewn with debris and dead bodies. About 200 corpses counted from the train. Large steamship stranded 2 mi inland. Nothing could be seen of Galveston. Loss of life and property undoubtedly most appalling. Weather clear and bright here with gentle southeast wind.

On September 8th, 1900,  Galveston, Texas lost its bid to become the greatest city in Texas, the New York of the West. It became famous for another reason, however: the near-total destruction of the city and the deaths of at least six thousand of its people made the Galveston hurricane the deadliest to ever strike. It remains the United States' greatest natural disaster, despite challengers like Katrina and the San Francisco Fire of 1906. Isaac's Storm renders a history of the disaster, largely through the eyes of a Weather Bureau scientist who failed to predict it -- to his own tragedy. A mix of history and science, Isaac's Storm is narrative history that reminds readers of a more optimistic time -- and of the dangers of that optimism.

I first learned of the Galveston hurricane through a novel, strangely enough, a criminal thriller/western set in the city's seedy underbelly shortly before another hurricane struck the city.  The thought of a metropolis-in-the-making having its life snuffed out has stayed with me ever since, but the storm's anniversary -- coinciding with three hurricanes brewing in the Atlantic -- brought the event to mind recently. Isaac's Storm mixes all kinds of science and history together; Larson doesn't just stick with Isaac Cline, but in the opening chapters darts hither and yon across the hemispheres to tell stories that contributing to our understanding of tropical storms and hurricanes. Although Isaac Cline was a dedicated and intelligent scientist, he believed (based on studying reports from places like Bengal) that Galveston Bay was inimical to hurricane strikes, that the topography of the Texas coast discourage and dampened them.  Unfortunately for the residents of Galveston, a warning about the hurricane from Cuba was dismissed by American authorities, who regarded the Cubans as excitive and superstitious.  Larson regards the Weather Bureau of 1900 as overly confident in its own abilities to predict the weather with exactitude, despite its able use of a telegraphic warning system that was leaping the oceans.

There were portents during the day that something was in the offing. Although the barometer rose at times and the skies didn't have the "signature color" that preceded hurricanes (brickdust red, apparently), the rising swells that kept crashing into the beach were unusual. By the time night fell, those swells were ever-larger and wiping out the infrastructure build near the beach -- docks, gazebos, even a trolley trestle. Throughout the late afternoon and early evening,  rising water flooded the city, but the full fury didn't smash into Galveston until after dark.  Perhaps that contributed to the appalling death toll, making it harder for people to navigate through the sudden ruins of their city and avoid danger. A lot of deaths were caused by people being struck by debris, though building collapses were another factor -- as were drownings. Isaac and his children managed to escape, but his pregnant wife never emerged from the ruins of their house, nor did the dozens of other people who had taken shelter there.

Although the book is ultimately about a harrowing disaster, as narrative history Isaac's Storm is easy on the mind, and I appreciated the look into the beginnings of weather services in the United States...even if they weren't even aware of the Gulf Stream yet.

The shaded blocks were destroyed as storm surges swept in from north and south.  Even the few unshaded blocks in the center were heavily damaged, according to Larson.

Eye of the Storm

Eye of the Storm: Inside City Hall During Katrina
© 2007 Sally Forman
260 pages

Although Hurricane Katrina was not the biggest disaster to ever hit an American city, it was New Orleans' greatest crisis -- posing a near-existential threat to the city, and forcing unprecedented measures from its leadership.  Sally Forman was the Communications Director for Mayor Ray Nagin at the time of the storm, with duties that involving trying to steer him away from shooting his mouth off. During the storm, she became an unofficial aide de camp, working to keep members of city hall in touch with one another, and with the county, state, and federal officials who were moving to help New Orleans at varying glacial paces. Eye of the Storm is her memoir, one that portrays NOLA's City Hall doing the best it could under intense pressure with diminishing resources. Forman does not shy away from self-criticism, though her target is always herself and never the office of City Hall.  Civic leaders were proud to have evacuated 80% of the city given that such a general evacuation had never been ordered before, and in their prompt decision to declare martial law after reports began arriving about lootings, police shootings, and violence in the Superdome. Some failures of hurricane response owed to lack of foresight: no portable generator for the City Hall office,  buses not removed to ground high enough, and bus drivers not included in the evacuation exemption. Some owed to the murky jurisdictional disputes between city, state, and federal officials: Nagin expressed his frustrated at not knowing, really, who had ultimate authority since he'd declared martial law, but now FEMA and the National Guard were operating on their own.  Forman ends the memoir with a list of lessons learned.

This is not a full Katrina history by any means, but one of interest to those curious about how municipal governments can react during a crisis.  Unfortunately, Mayor Nagin seems to have acted better during the crisis weeks than during recovery, since he was indicted and made bankrupt by corruption charges.

Related:
Hurricane Katrina Through the Eyes of Storm Chasers, Jim Reed and Mike Theiss
Rescue Warriors, David Helvarg
Disaster 1906, Edward F. Dolan

Rescue Warriors

Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America's Forgotten Heroes
© 2009 David Helvarg
384 pages

When Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, the Coast Guard was the first on the scene, with helicopters in the air saving lives long before FEMA stirred. Though one of the United States’ military branches, the Coast Guard is an unusual institution;  best-known for its high profile search and rescue missions. Far and away the smallest military branch – and the most physically and academically rigorous in terms of its recruiting requirements --  the Coast Guard’s mission takes it far beyond safe and shallow coastal waters.   Rescue Warriors provides both a history of and a tribute to this oft-overlooked service, mixing history of its various missions and interviews with men and women working overtime to preserve lives and keep the coasts safe.

Although the Coast Guard was officially organized in 1915, it prefers to trace its history back to the revenue cutters of George Washington’s administration, which enforced and collected customs and tariff fees.  Another parent organization was that of the lighthouse and lightship service. The present Coast Guard has maintained that duel-purpose organization, simultaneously enforcing maritime law and rescuing those in danger.  Its mission portfolio is vast: in Rescue Warriors,  Helvarg interviews search-and-rescue teams,  drug-enforcement patrols,  counter-terrorism missions, environmental cleanup crews, science stations, and even more.  Helvarg spent time with servicemen and officers from around the United States’ territorial waters: the Gulf Coast,  New England,  California, Alaska, Hawaii, and even (with Canadian ‘permission’) in the Artic northwest passage.  Despite its ‘coast’ guard name,  Coasties may be found throughout the world: their boarding teams are especially relied upon in the Persian Gulf,  boarding local boats (with consent) to ask about  pirate concerns – and fishing for information on parties hostile toward the governments of Iraq and the United States.  (If the Coast Guard being a military branch simultaneously providing law enforcement seems constitutionally questionable, that isn’t surprising given that Wilson presided over their formal creation:  he never met a constitutional curb he wouldn’t drive over.)

The demands placed on the Coast Guard only seem to be increasing: a global economy means more ships to monitor, and with the Artic now open for commercial traffic and industry,  there will be still more ground to cover. The Coast Guard is much smaller than even the closest other service, the US Marines, but the gulf between its responsibilities and resources has demanded a great deal of efficiency. The average age of a Coast Guard ship is thirty-five years, and its officers’ training vessel, the Eagle,  was built in 1936.   That’s resource conservation, though when a helicopter requires 40 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight time.... The reason for the Guard’s physical and mental demands becomes obvious in reading this:  they are operational every day, not simply training for the next big conflict, and they often go against nature at its hairiest – flying helicopters into punishing winds to seek out those in peril on the sea.  They’re also up against human nature: in the opening chapter on rescue operations in Hurricane Katrina,  the Guard’s Seahawk helicopters took ground fire from locals; another man threatened to shoot a helo crew if they didn’t rescue him, and when they dropped people off at a CG station, it was promptly looted –  though the ammunition locker refused to give up its contents.  At least against cartel gunmen, the Coast Guard  is authorized for “Airborne Use of Force”.

Rescue Warriors  makes for encouraging reading, filled with  tales of rescue, of men and women stretching themselves so that others might live.  Helvarg sees the Coast Guard’s historical legacy and current role as exemplary, highlighting the early employment of women in the lighthouse service, and urges that the Coast Guard be given more resources so that it might serve the United States’ expanding needs.   Ultimately, this is a fun read, a mix of history, present-day history stories, and a fair bit of editorializing by the author whenever there is an environmental connection.


Related:
The Heart and the Fist, Eric Greitens. The memoirs of a humanitarian-turned-Navy SEAL, another mix of service and force.

Hurricane Katrina through the Eyes of Storm Chasers

Hurricane Katrina through the Eyes of Storm Chasers
© 2005
96 pages, virtually all photographs

I recently discovered a collection of Hurricane Katrina photography that I thought worth mentioning.  The book collects photos taken by Jim Reed and Mike Theiss, principally in the Gulfport area but also including a handful of shots in Orlando and New Orleans.  Eleven years later, the plight of New Orleans monopolizes any mention of Katrina, but these photographs were amazing.  The storm hit only a year after Hurricane Ivan walloped Alabama, so I watched it approach the coast with dread. Reed and Theiss are lunatics, judging by how close they were to the storm surge and the winds here -- though at least once they set up a highly stable and encased camera near the path, then recovered it later. If the only Katrina footage you have seen is of New Orleans, this book is worth looking through.  Gulfport wasn't merely flooded: the winds, 26-foot storm surge, and ships thrown inland wiped out massive swaths of development. Hotels had their first floors gutted, with only the load-bearing walls intact,  The shots of wind blown trees have a beauty about them, despite the sheer danger they make those of us living anywhere near the Gulf remember.

Volcanoes in Human History

As with Earthquakes in Human History, this is exactly as it describes itself. A mix of science and history, the authors begin with an explanation of volcanic activity before moving on to cover a few key eruptions. Volcanoes illustrate that the world is constantly remaking itself, forming and destroying islands as the years go by. Like "Earthquakes", "Volcanoes" is most commendable as a collection of the immediate impact of various eruptions, supplemented by scientific explanations. The most 'far-reaching' effect of a volcanic explosion documented here are the disruption of weather patterns across the northern hemisphere; twice in the 19th century, 'summer' practically never came, with famines ensuing.

Earrthquakes in Human History

Earthquakes in Human History
© 2005 Jelle de Boer, Donald Sanders
304 pages

de Boer and Sanders' "Earthquakes" is exactly what it says on the tin: a quick survey of how earthquakes have affected human history.   An initial section explains the basic causes of earthquakes, and subsequent chapters reflect on activity in the middle east, England,  Greece,  Japan, South America, the American midwest, and the Pacific Coast.  The authors lead with a retelling of the quakes' immediate effects, like the days of fire consuming San Francisco in 1906; this is followed by material on how seismic activity has shaped the local geology, and finally thoughts on the long-reaching effects. The long-reaching effects are the weakest point of the book, with the authors giving credits to earthquakes for everything from the collapse of states like Sparta and Portugal, to the rise of the scientific revolution. That last is overdoing it, methinks.    Take it as a narrative account of some of the Earth's deadliest earthquakes, strengthened by explanations of how quakes occur where they do,  and it succeeds.

Related:
Disaster 1906, Edward F. Dolan

8.4

8.4.
© 1995 Peter Hernon
393 pages

San Andreas? You want a real earthquake, son, you come to Tennessee.  In America's heartland lies a currently-quiescent fault, the New Madrid Seismic Zone. In the early 19th century a series of three massive earthquakes  rolled the Mississippi River region, the most powerful quakes recorded in American history.  In 8.4., it happens again.....but instead of scaring the coon-skin caps off of hunters and making the cows go crazy in the frontier, it devastates cities. It doesn't just give them a bad day, knocking the electricity offline and collapsing interstate bridges: it levels the area, with a preliminary death toll of over a hundred thousand.

The novel is a genuine science fiction tale, as most of the viewpoint characters are seismologists who are frantically trying to figure out what's happening; as they argue between themselves and attempt to convince the authorities that the worst is yet to come, the reader is treated to not only explanations of tectonic geology,  but graphics that give some idea of what is happening below -- illustrating the different kinds of faults, for instance.  Key to the drama is the fact that New Madrid activity doesn't consist of one big quake with minor aftershocks, but that its powerful tectonic activity erupts in clusters.   The characters spend most of the book in mortal danger: if they're not fleeing the consequences of the quakes, like floods in Kentucky after a dam collapses, or urban riots as people raid stores for supplies, they're actively courting it by  crossing rivers transacted by the faults, rappelling into open breaks in the Earth's surface, or probing deep into abandoned mines to collect data.    There's even a little outbreak of civil war at the end, when the President decides the best thing to do is stick an A-bomb in the Earth's innards and blow it up, and the Kentucky governor realizes the White House is out of its ever-lovin' mind.

8.4 leads with science, and follows with disaster-movie thrills. The endgame is bonkers, frankly, but maybe it's hard to sell 20th century readers on the idea that not everything can be solutioned or bombed away.

Related:
Supervolcano: Eruption, Harry Turtledove.

Patriots

Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse
© 1995 James Wesley Rawles
400 pages

So...much...testosterone.

Well, D.C. finally spent itself into oblivion. After decades of deficits and a series of bailouts that do nothing but inflate the problem, the financial sector is hemorrhaging and taking with it the entire American economy.  Few institutions will survive the crash, and now a generation is on its own. Todd Gray isn’t alarmed, though. He smelled the storm coming a long time before it hit; for nine years, ever since  September 11,  he and a group of likeminded friends have prepared for the worst. They’re survivalists, or ‘preppers’:  not only do they maintain extra supplies at home to see them through extended power outages or local disasters, but their group has purchased an expanse of land in rural Idaho to use as a retreat in case something catastrophic happens. From their retreat, this small band of friends will labor to rebuild the Republic.  Patriots follows their trials after the collapse, as they face off against human desperation, disease,  the threat of starvation, and worst of all: the government.

Patriots is a how-and-why argument for prepping in the form of a novel. There are characters and things happen to them, but mostly they’re there to explain what they’re doing to the reader, what they’re doing it with, why one tool or behavior is  better in this or that situation ,and so on. There is action throughout the novel, including car chases, first-fights, pitched brawls between raiders and strongholds, and even a town invasion, and its second half features a looming showdown between cells of free citizens who have survived, and a resurrected Federal government that employs UN soldiers to do its eeevil bidding.  Unlike One Second After or Lucifer’s Hammer, there’s not a great deal of emotional drama, let alone grisly scenes like cannibal hordes.  The book’s characters are preppers, calm in the face of whatever happens. They’ve spent nine years  practicing together, keeping one another’s skills sharp, running through scenarios and improvising solutions. They even purposely recruited members with diverse strengths, so whether they need an arm stitched back together or something welded, they’ve got it covered.

One is almost relieved when a helicopter descends from on high to deposit an overfed bureaucrat announcing that the Federal government is alive and well and on the way to ‘pacifying’ the country. The emergency does require some extraordinary measures on the government’s part, of course – a little suppression of free speech here, a little confiscation of guns there, total wage-and-price controls – nothing to worry over. It reads like a Top Ten List of Evil, and comes off as preposterous given that the United States’ entire civil and economic infrastructure has collapsed. By that point five years have passed, and society has recovered a bit, building around cells of order like the central characters retreat, but this is an armed society with no fond memories of the government, whose gross irresponsibility led to the collapse.  Regardless of the merits of this scenario, including the outlandish invasion of the United States by U.N troops, it at least gives the characters a challenge to overcome.

Whatever else, one must give credit to Rawls for  infusing a massive amount of information into novel form.   His characters’ actions are factual; every book and product they discuss is commercially available. I recognized a fair few of the book titles (The Encyclopedia of Country Living, for instance, and When There Is No Dentist).  Impressive, too, is the range of events he gives information on:  forging IDs, rain cachement, rotation of storage supplies, gun cleaning, home fortification,  and blood transfusions.  The characters are forgettable and the plot weak, but this is a mild kind of wish-fulfillment that combines action and lectures on food storage. It’s a strange kind of fun if you’re into self-reliance, disaster-preparedness, or attacking tanks.

Related:
One Second After, William Forstchen. An EMP attack shuts down most electronics in the United States.  Misery ensues.
Lucifer's Hammer, Larry Niven. Asteroid impact levels most of civilization.
World Made by Hand, James Howard Kunstler.  Peak oil novel.

One Second After

One Second After
 © 2011 William R. Forstchen
528 pages

When the power blinked, Colonel John Matherson wasn't alarmed. These things happen. But they don't happen at the same exact time as failing phones, stalling cars, and falling planes.  As night fell and nothing changed, he began to suspect the worst: that America had been attacked. One Second After turns a Norman Rockwell life into a horror story, taking readers through a town trying desperately to hold on to survival after its entire world collapses.

Like any horror story, this is grisly and exciting; as Matherson quickly realizes, his city has been the victim of an electromagnetic pulse,  probably generated by a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere.  Virtually every electrical device is now kaput. Cars, computers, even telephones and clocks are dead.  One character notes in alarm that they've been thrown into the Civil War era, but their fate is far worse than that; as the historian Matherson notes, the world of 1865 had its own infrastructure. That was a world of widespread farming and home industry, of self-reliance. With electricity went every tool and system the modern world depends on; the trucks, trains, and ships that moved food from across the continents;  the computers that managed the money. The integrated world economy, David Ricardo's dream coming true, meant the utter dependence of every community on thousands of others.  With thousands of people needing medicine and food every day, and without the means to produce it or import it again as needed, One Second After is a tale of slow death.

The technological order having collapsed, and the old traditional skills having been forgotten,  the people of town are in a bad way. An early scene in a nursing home overwhelms Matherson and readers with a hint of the tragedy that is to come;  its staff unable to come to work, and medications running low,  four medical personnel are alone in a building filled with dozens of elderly who need constant care. Matherson is there to evacuate his father in law, but when he arrives he finds death, disease, and despair; the staff are overwhelmed, unable to cope.  It's a gut-wrenching scene, but devastation won't be limited to the nursing home. Those dependent on medications in the civilian population are first to decline; food poisoning, disease, and strife ravage the population in turns.  Without comforts, ferality rears its head; as some give in to their inner beasts, Matherson and others do their utmost to preserve some dignity. They study the situation, make plans for the future, organize defense against what mobs and nature are throwing at them, and  strain not to break themselves.

While rock bottom is never reached, and there is some marginal reason for hope at the end, this is a truly harrowing story. There are minor issues with the style --  the characters often remind themselves  that "we're still Americans",  invoking memories of higher ideals, but in too unvarying a way --  but this is a small fly in the soup. As devastating as the barrage of crises is,  the main character continues to hold on, making it inspirational. There's no question that this novel was written as a warning; the story is bookended with notes from a  congressman and a military intelligence officer who remark on the dire need to prepare for the aftermath of this kind of an attack. That warning applies not just for Congress, however, but for people, too;   Matherson's city profits from the skills of a few survivalists and hardcore Civil War reenactors, but  the townsfolk on the whole are not prepared. Accustomed to buying everything as needed from the store, no one has any extra provisions or supplies set aside.  Little wonder 'prepping' booklists often include this one.

While I don't know how likely an EMP attack is, One Second After is a chillingly effective warning of how fragile everyday life has become.

Related:
Lucifer's Hammer.  An apocalyptic novel following an asteroid impact, this also has a cannabalistic horde. It's also more firmly a science fiction novel.
World Made by Hand, James Kunstler.  This is far gentler, since it's set long enough after the peak oil scenario that collapses the modern world that characters have adjusted to living in the 19th century.
Supervolcano: Explosion, Harry Turtledove.  Similar scenaro

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart
© 2013 Harry Turtledove
400 pages

What was the difference? Just a little timing. There wasn't a person in the world who didn't have a story like that. If you'd been a little late or a little early, if you hadn't had that fender bender, if that woman in the store with you had bought the secondhand book that changed your life when you read it, if this, if that, if the other thing, your whole life would be totally changed. | It made you wonder. It really did. Ordinary lives were so easy to jerk around that way. What about the lives of nations? If your destiny could twist like a contortionist slipping on a banana peel, what about your country's?  (p.379)

Almost ten years ago, a supervolcano buried under Yellowstone National Park erupted, vaporizing a few deer and covering most of the American west with ash. That ash and dirt filled the air, too,  killing millions and blocking out sunlight.  As a year without a summer becomes a decade without one, the odds that the planet is slipping into another ice age look increasingly large.  Like the books that preceded it, Things Fall Apart follows the lives of the scattered Ferguson family as they continue to adjust to the new facts of life -- or in one character's case, continue to whine about it.  It is essentially a soap opera with a mildly interesting background -- for ten years into the crisis, changes are everywhere.

While most of the characters live in the greater Los Angeles area, two one lives on the fringe of habitable land in Nebraska and another lives in the wintry wasteland of Maine. Their county is now virtually autonomous, forgotten about by the US Government in its attempt to find food and shelter for the millions who are still displaced, a decade after mounds of ash moved quite rudely into their neighborhoods overnight. The few who remain there eke out a living growing turnips in greenhouses, hunting moose, and chopping wood, though ten years of such harvests have fallen to meager pickings. After a decade of intermittent power and scarce resources, the 21st century has been pushed back: now typewriters sit upon desks, notes are taken by hand on paper, and virtually everyone bicycles. In the cities, many still crowd onto public transportation, but aging and overworked buses are breaking down with no parts available to replace them. As people emigrate between the states -- or in Europe, flood from the north away from a dying Gulf Stream to invade Greece and Spain -- tension between the long-time residents and newcomers surge.

All this is background, however, the scenery to a plot consisting of a police officer retiring, his oldest son having an affair with a married woman and then being dumped by her; his oldest daughter having all of her money stolen by her Serbian revolutionary-boyfriend, and his two younger sons (well, son and almost-son-in-law-who-he-thinks-of-as-a-son)   being cold and having wives in Nebraska and Maine.  Oh, and his wife begins dating a middle-aged man who can't get enough of European football and Broadway musicals.

Things Fall Down is really As the World Turns....into an Ice Age. or, The Young and the Restless and the Very Cold.  Or, Coronation Street Ice-Plow Capers.  At any rate, if you're looking for science fiction, this isn't it:  science-as-plot was over after the eruption, and now it's scenery. If you want post-apocalyptic thrills, then sorry, out of luck. Now, if you want characters eating oatmeal and taking showers and brooding over their love lives while it snows outside, then hey --  this is the book for you.

Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
291 pages
© 1997 Jon Krakauer

When Outside magazine dispatched Jon Krakauer to join an expedition to climb Mount Everest in 1996 to investigate its commercialization, the opportunity allowed him to fulfill a lifelong dream of climbing to its top -- but in May 1996, that dream turned quickly into a nightmare, as Krakauer was intimate witness to one of Everest's greatest climbing disasters.  Into thin Air is his record of the experience, written less to fulfill Outside's hopes for an examination of profiteering and more as a way of coming to terms with the loss of so many people he'd spent nearly four weeks with.  It is at first exciting, then harrowing; an inspiring, longer climb up to the heights of human endeavor  that crashes quickly, sliding down a boulder-filled crevasse into the abyss.

Mount Everest stands as the highest above-ground mountain in the world, being part of the Himalayan mountain range that forms the border of Tibet and Nepal. The difficulty in ascending it lies not merely with the frequent winds, biting cold, or the fact that parts of the approach are icy, narrow, or so steep that they require technical skills with ropes to surmount. Nor is the difficulty limited to Everest's status as a natural gauntlet resembling an old-school video game, in which climbers must dodge falling rocks and ice missles from above while simutaneously hoping the ground underneath them doesn't give way. The greatest obstacle to human ascent is the fact that much of the peak towers so high that oxygen levels are but a third of what they are at sea level. Even ordinary respiatory requirements would find that amount insufficient, and a person dropped onto the peak by magic or a transporter would find himself unconscious in minutes. But climbing nearly 30,000 feet -- the cruising altitude of a transcontinental jet, like the Airbus Krakauer took to Nepal --   requires considerably more. Even when relying on canisters of bottled oxygen,   those who near the peak are operating on mental and physical vapors; their bodies find the effort of digestion so hard at that height that they prefer to consume muscle tissue for fuel. Physically exhausted and mentally handicapped at the peak, the difficulty in scaling Everest is returning to the ground safely. This proves tragically true with Krakauer's expedition.

In spite of the difficulty, Mount Everest is enormously popular both among serious mountaineers as well as rich would-be outdoorsmen who are anxious to prove their manliness by subduing the world's greatest physical challenges. When Krakauer joined a commercial expedition -- Adventure Consulants, run by an enthusiastic mountaineer named Rob Hall -- he was among nearly fifty people intending to climb up at once. That number included not only another commercial group, Mountain Madness, but various teams from Taiwan and South Africa, and a few enterprising individuals like a young Swede who bicycled from Europe to Nepal before hoofing it up the mountain.  The price for trying is enormous; even before equipment and plane fare are factored in, Nepal requires licenses to climb that start at $10,000 a head -- or $25,000 for individuals working alone.  Commercial guides like Hall and his nascent rival Scott Fischer (of Mountain Madness) charge even more, up to $65,000 in Hall's case.  That cost overs not only the guides' expertise, but their prepatory work; not only had Hall made the summit seven times prior, but he employed a crew of local Sherpas to establish ropes and create caches of supplies for his clients. For all their experience and preparation, however, humans high upon the peak of Everest are very subject to the wrath of Nature.

Though Jon Krakauer -- an experienced mountaineer -- was the first of his group to make the summit, and returned safely to one of their staging camps before nightfall, few of his team were as lucky. A fantastic storm hit the mountain as dozens of individuals were in the middle of climbing or descending, and it would be their undoing. Fierce winds not only destroyed physical guides, like the ropes, and flattened tents, but they prevented climbers from making progress at all; on narrow ledges and icy paths, any movement in the wrong direction could lead to death -- and it did.  They had to stay where they were, and every moment brough them closer to disaster, because once they exhausted their oxygen bottles, they would quickly become weak and delerious, if not not fatally hill;   high altitude and low pressure are lethal to a human body unadapted for either. As their brains were deteriorating, their bodies were increasingly numbed by the cold. Even those who had found a secure place to rest were not exempt from dangers of low oxygen or prolonged exposure.  Once the storm hit on May 10,   a disaster was born and people began to die at rates unseen outside of a slasher film.  Some were taken by the cold, others thrown into darkness by the wind.  Those involved in the commercial expeditions were the most badly ravaged,  in part because of their location and in part because they lost their leadership -- and once the guides were gone, a team of mountain-climbing novices were no match for the fury of of an awakened mount.  In a final chapter, Krakaurer -- whose authorial voice loses its edge as the disaster waxes, becoming increasingly desperate -- tries to explain what happened. Why was the 1996 expedition so lethal?   He puts forth a few guesses; the sheer number of people on the slopes, practically inviting catastophe, and the fact that their guide had never encountered a storm before. His prior ascents had all been blessed with clear skies, so reliably perfect for climbing that Hall regarded May 10 as an auspicious day for himself: all of his  summits were achieved on that day.

Into thin Air is a gripping look into what it takes -- and what it can cost -- to climb Mount Everest,  though it leaves one wondering why on Earth anyone would do it after Sir Edmund Hillary.  There is no reward for the hours of agony; the vista is barren and lifeless. Even Krakauer, who had dreamed of Everest, recorded that at the peak, he was too exhausted to care about his success.

All Fall Down

 Supervolcano: All Fall Down

© 2012 Harry Turtledove

416 pages

 

 

YellowstoneNational Park is gone, replaced by a vast caldera that still ripples the air with its heat. The momentous eruption covered North America’s great-growing heartland in ash, ruining harvests for years to come, and vented enough dust into the atmosphere to begin a new ice age. In Supervolcano: Eruption, Harry Turtledove began a trilogy exploring the aftermath of such an enormous eruption, using the dysfunctional Ferguson family and their associates to tell the tale. The original novel was shaky at best, relying more on its premise than anything else, but All Fall Down is an improvement.

 

All Fall Down builds on the world the eruption began to create – a colder world, with abbreviated growing seasons and snow that never seems to stop. Characterization has improved from Eruption, or rather the characters have: the Fergusons tended toward the obnoxious before the earth-shattering kaboom, but having to adapt to increasingly adverse circumstances has improved their dispositions. They , and the world in which they live, are adapting; this is especially obvious in the case of the Ferguson boy trapped in Maine, who before the fun began was touring in a garage band. With the entire northern hemisphere experiencing eight months of winter and four months of bad skiing, the Federal government has largely abandoned Maine. There, characters live close to the land. No more do they ship in salads from California and shrimp from Thailand: now they hunt moose and squirrel, and subsist on whatever crops can survive the new local conditions. In California, Colin Ferguson – a no-nonsense cop whose steely resolve and willingness to make adjustments makes him a solid central character – bicycles to work, even if he is the #2 cop in the city. He’s also willing to turn a machine gun on the Los Angles Police Department if they try to pinch his department’s tanker of gasoline. Desperate times breed strong men and iron-handed measures. Colin’s daughter Vanessa continues her caustic reign of terror, but the Ferguson crew is supplemented by a mysterious guerilla-turned-freedom fighter from Serbia and an endearingly odd political leader who embraces anachronity in his dress and speech.

 The novel spans anywhere from three to five years, judging by the fact that a woman gives birth to a child who is asking annoying questions by novel’s end, and in that timeframe Turtledove’s new world becomes much more like Jim Kunstler’s peak-oil world featured in his World Made by Hand Novels and less like our own. This slow transformation takes place in the background, against which characters pursue their own private stories – a serial killer for the lieutenant, escape from the purgatory of Kansas for Vanessa. As with the first novel, the premise and how that shapes the characters’ lives is more interesting than their private lives, with the exceptions of those characters who live outside of California.

 

Unfortunately, the same basic weakness of Eruption is present here, as well. Turtledove's novels have a big background happening with his characters trying to live out their lives against it, but the gradual transformation of the climate doesn't move the plot, and neither do the characters' little stories. The man in Maine whom CNN calls a virtual dictator has the potential to create a more energetic story, but so far he's only functioned as a wry commentator. And of course, there's the usual editing problem -- Turtledove stumbled upon a metaphor he likes between the two books, "screwing to the wall", and he used it with great gusto here. He does seem to be curbing his habit of repeatedly describing the same characters: here, only Colin's dry humor is used in this way. For the most part, Turtledove demonstrates his characters' personalities rather than describes them, which is refreshing after reading for the hundredth time that Sam Carsen burns easily or Ludmila Gorbunova is a good child of the Soviet Revolution and has no use for priests.*

 

Although All Fall Down was entertaining enough that I don't regret reading, I can't say I'd purchase it. It is a step forward in the right direction, and the general premise still holds fascination for me.

 

* To be fair, though, I remember Turtledove's characters when other novelists' creations have long been forgotten, so perhaps there's a method in his madness. The trivia I can tell you about people who don't exist...!



Lost Moon

Lost Moon: the Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13
© 1994 Jim Lovell, Jeffrey Kluger
368 pages

No one wants to hear ominous noises coming from their car in the middle of a road trip, especially if they're in the middle of nowhere. But it could be worse -- you could break down two hundred thousand miles from Earth, surrounded by the void of space and trapped in a small spacecraft whose every life support system  is failing rapidly.  Such was the case for the Apollo 13 crew: when a loud, ominous bang followed some routine tests, their mission to land in the hills of the Moon became a four-day struggle against the void of space and a dying machine just to stay alive.

Death and disaster had happened before to the astronaut corps: several had died in aircraft crashes, and the Apollo program began in tragedy when flames  consumed the interior of the command module of Apollo I during training, claiming the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee -- but those accidents took place too quickly for anyone at Mission Control to intervene. Now, for the first time,  the lives of NASA astronauts were imperiled in the course of a mission, and far from home. If NASA couldn't find a way to keep those men alive and bring them home safely,  they would face the prospect of having to talk these men through their final hours.  On the ground in Mission Control, and in the void of space, men called upon all their resources -- their training, their intelligence, their creativity -- to overcome problem after problem, overcoming the odds and achieving a triumphant return four days later. It is the story of those four days that Jim Lovell (commander of Apollo 13) and Jeffrey Kluger tell here.

Although Lovell participated in these events which he's helping to retell, the book isn't written from his perspective, nor is it limited to the four days of the mission itself. The authors begin retelling the story of Apollo 13 fairly quickly -- and it's one that keeps the reader tense, even knowing the outcome -- but they also weave in reminiscences on NASA's and the astronauts' history. These diversions don't just give the reader a break from the tense situation unfolding around the moon and the technical chatter between the craft and mission control: they add context, demonstrating how the catastrophe of Apollo 1 shaped NASA's approach to disasters, or how various events in Lovell's life prepared him for the duties of the space program and the extraordinary challenge of Apollo 13.  Lost Moon almost doubles as a history of NASA from the perspective of an astronaut, and between Lovell and Kluger even explanations of mechanistic failures have an energetic drama about them.

Definitely a book of interest to those interested in humanity's space endeavors.

Lucifer's Hammer

Lucifer's Hammer
© 1977 Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
629 pages

The chances that Lucifer's Hammer would hit Earth head-on were one in a million.

Then one in a thousand.

Then one in a hundred.

And then...

The eeriest part of the story of the dinosaurs is its sudden, abrupt, and once-mysterious ending. After nearly 200 million years of domination, the dinosaurs vanished in a startlingly moment.  Although the source of this mass extinction was debated hotly for years, today a general consensus of scientists believes asteroid impact to have been the culprit. The force of the impact shockwave would have been disastrous by itself, vaporizing everything in a wide radius...but the widespread ecological disruption and climate change which followed doomed the survivors, especially those who were adapted for certain ecological niches. Imagine, then, the fate of hyperspecialized humans following a similar impact. What becomes of us, a species most of whose members are far removed from the production of food, who are utterly dependent on an evermore fragile castle of cards called civilization, when that structure collapses?   Such is the setup of the terrifying disaster thriller Lucifer's Hammer, easily the best of its genre I have ever read...or can imagine.

The year is 1977, and the Cold War is about to end...for the participants are doomed. The discovery of a new comet delights the astronomical community and general public, especially seeing as it will pass near enough to the Earth to provide a fantastic light show but not too close as to pose a threat. But no one's data is perfect, and the comet -- dubbed The Hammer of Lucifer -- does fall. Multiple impact points vaporize land and ocean alike, and the force of the hit triggers massive earthquakes and global volcanic activity. Tsunamis and torrential rains follow, and the astronauts orbiting Earth can only watch in horror as chaos engulfs the globe, civilization goes dark, and the Earth itself becomes clouded over -- no longer a 'pale blue dot', the planet is swathed in stormclouds which will deliver a harvest-killing rain of destruction.

On the ground, beneath those clouds,  there are survivors. Those who live through Hammerfall race toward the high ground like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Once they were civilized, and their shoulders bore a thousand petty burdens -- what to wear, which car to purchase next?  -- but now they were reduced to scrounging for food and shelter. Rich and poor, powerful and weak, black and white -- no one is spared from the basic struggle of survival.  As the weeks pass and the immediate damages are over, the scattered survivors form groups and learn that their greatest enemy may be one another, for the disaster's fallout has allowed some of the most base and savage instincts of humanity to express themselves in full. Although readers get hints of what is happening around the world, most of the action is confined to the San Joaquin Valley of California. As in Stephen King's The Stand, the survivors coalesce into two groups, and their interests collide in the fate of a nuclear power plant which somehow survived the catastrophe and may represent humanity's best hope for recovery.

Virtually every natural disaster known to us is unleashed by the Hammer, but I was less interested in the race for immediate survival during the fall itself than by the aftermath. How do people survive the coming winter, let alone the coming ice age? Lucifer's Hammer abounds in characters, and  watching them struggle to regain civilization -- and collapse into depravity -- is utterly gripping. People are forced to assume leadership, to find a place for themselves in this newly devastated world. Death is all around them, and their futures are utterly uncertain. It's an ideal foundation for a novel in which human beings struggle against the elements and the worst of themselves, seeking to overcome it all.

This is one SF thriller I highly recommend; this makes the Mayan doomsday hype look pale by comparison.

Related:

• Death from the Skies!, Phil Plait
• The Stand, Stephen King
• World Made by Hand and The Witch of Hebron, James Howard Kunstler. 
• Supervolcano: Eruption, Harry Turtledove

Death from the Skies!

Death from the Skies! These are the Ways the World Will End...
© 2008 Phil Plait
326 pages

By anyone's standards, 2011 was a banner year for disasters, with Earth's ful inventory of catastrophes on display. Flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions, hurricanes, and tornadoes filled newspaper headlines all year. In the wake of all this, some might be tempted to look to the heavens for relief -- to the placid, twinkling stars above. Too bad that twinkling is probably a gamma-ray burst on its way to vaporize you.

The perils of the heavens are the subject of Phil Plait's second work, Death from the Skies, and in it he lists nine particular ways the universe might be trying to kill us, from relatively mild extinction-level asteroid impacts to the collisions of galaxies.  Although exposure to most of these sounds like nothing to laugh about, Plait's tone remains light throughout the book, until he discusses the total heat death of the universe. Part of the reason for Plait's levity is that these are not serious concerns;  considering the size of the cosmos and the timescale at which things happen, the chances of human beings in their present form being damaged by the collision of the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, or gobbled up by the Sun's swollen expansion, are virtually nonexistent.  And even if these things were a serious concern, there's nothing we can do to prevent them -- so why worry?  Asteroid impact and solar storms are likely to affect us, but their damage can be mitigated -- and even avoided.

While this is my first time reading Plait, I've long been a fan of him thanks to his blog (Bad Astronomy) and his frequent appearances on shows like Star Talk and the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.  Plait is as entertaining an author as he is an in-person guest, almost chatting with the reader and  making frequent jokes. He's as sneaky as he is funny: while people may be drawn in by the book's colorful cover (and title) and engaged by his literary charisma,  Death from the Skies!  isn't superficial in the least. Along the way, Plait instructs readers in astronomy and cosmology. The stars are the source of many of these world-ending scenarios,  and one can't help but be impressed by the scale of their lives and their overwhelming importance to life as we know it.  The stars don't simply illuminate the skies and heat the planets in orbit about them; throughout their lives and especially in their death throes, they create the stuff of life. The very atoms that make up Earth have been forged in the heart of supernovas.

Death from the Skies! is one of the best science books I've read in a long time; anyone with an interest in the night-time sky should enjoy it. Expect to see his debut book (Bad Astronomy) read here at some point, because Plait is a blast.

Related:

• Death by Black Hole (and other Cosmic Quandries), Neil deGrasse Tyson

Supervolcano: Eruption

Supervolcano: Eruption
© 2011 Harry Turtledove
420 pages

"I love the smell of hydrogen sulfide in the morning," Daniel intoned. "Smells like...tenure."

p. 146

Sometimes, even Harry Turtledove must tire of penning novels based on World War II. I don't know what spurred his interest in writing this novel -- the fact that 2012 will be a good year for disaster entertainment, perhaps, or the simple need to take a break from the War that Came Early series -- but this science fiction apocalyptic adventure is a drastic change from his usual military-action tomes. He opens on Lieutenant Colin Ferguson, a recently divorced and badly hungover cop taking a vacation to Yellowstone National Park to clear his mind, who barks at a parka-clad figure hunched over a geyser to scold her for trespassing. She proves to be a geologist taking readings of seismic activity,  one who believes the Yellowstone basin presents a future danger to the global environment.  Underneath the geysers and pine trees lurks trouble: a supervolcano in the making. Were it to erupt, the energy released would destroy everything around it for hundreds of miles -- and the amount of ash thrown into Earth's skies could very well lead to an ice age.  Naturally, someone forgets knock on wood.

From the start, the newly-single Curtis is interested in this geologist; his attraction and genuine interest in the implications of such a catastrophe compel him to learn more about it, preferably over dinner dates with her.  Their budding relationship allows Turtledove to gently explain the premise and science of the novel in an unobtrusive way, though the novel's action is slow to take off. The fun doesn't start until a quarter of the way in: for the first hundred or so pages, Turtledove introduces his panel of viewpoint characters, all of whom are Colin's relations -- his divorced wife, his sons (one a touring  20-something musician, the other a perpetual college student),  his impressively abrasive daughter Vanessa, and her ex-boyfriend,  who is working on a thesis related to Hellenistic poetry and who has remained friends with Colin despite being dumped by the lieutenant's daughter.


In the end, it's the premise and not necessarily its execution which carries the novel. The usual Turtledove baggage -- repetition -- is fully present, and the pace sometimes bogs down in minutia. This is especially striking after Yellowstone goes "boom", in a scene where a band-on-tour  breakfasts in Maine, and the viewpoint character devotes an entire page to describing what each member of the band had for breakfast. There's a giant dead zone in the middle of the continent, and he hasn't heard from his sister in Denver -- but these are trivial matters compared to the appropriateness of ordering Mexican food in a fishing village, apparently. Still, Turtledove won me over for the most part. He introduces a fun character in the last fifth of the novel whose personality makes him one of the most likable characters in the novel (not that he's against a lot of competition: Curtis' sons are bums, and even he refers to his daughter as 'a mean dog'). Once the disaster began to unfold, my interest peaked, especially as months wore on and people began having to make adjustments.  The amount of time that passes in the novel is unclear to me -- it begins immediately after Memorial Day, and at least one college semester passes -- but it's lengthy enough that we see more than immediate consequences. The wasteland of the plains strains the connections between the east and west coasts, causing resource crunches; the ash fallout creates a respiratory panic; the United States' diminished strength creates fun times for the middle east when Iran decides to seize the day and bloody Israel's nose. The novel leaves before entering long-term territory, though. Does mass starvation follow the ruin of all the plains crops? What becomes of the nations who rely on the US for their imported food?    The end leaves many of the characters hanging,  but all resolute to pick up the pieces as best they can.

Although burdened with painful repetition and slow to start, ultimately the interesting premise and character growth push Supervolcano into 'fair enough' territory. It's left me with the desire to study up on volcanoes and the possibility of a Yellowstone disaster -- isn't provoking an interest in learning the point of science fiction?

Post-edit note: according to a Turtledove wikisite, this is the first of a new trilogy. I hope Turtledove gets a better handle on what he's aiming for here: while he can get away with a character-dominated story in a war novel in which the viewpoint characters are soldiers participating in the central drama, in Eruption they're just getting in the way and reducing the supposed star of the show, the volcano, to an obscured background reference.

Disaster 1906

Disaster 1906: the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire
© 1967 Edward F. Dolan Jr.
172 pages

If, as some say, God spanked the town

For being over-frisky

Why did He burn the churches down

And save Hotaling's whisky?

-p. 175

Years ago I read a fantastic book called Disaster! The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906. A few years later I determined I wanted to buy my own copy of that book, but alas! Woe! My home library no longer had the book and I forgot the title of it. I hit Amazon, and this seemed like it might be what I was looking for.  It actually isn't, as I found out while reading the book and noticed that key elements from the masterpiece I remembered were missing -- like Enrico Caruso hearing of the volcano eruption in his hometown and thanking God he was in safe San Francisco, only to wake up to an earthquake and an inferno.

Disaster stories interest me, hence why my home library contains several books on the Titanic and why I've read various books on the San Francisco and Chicago fires, as well as the Galveston Hurricane. Part of this is what Augustine might call gross curiosity -- the appeal of looking at a car wreck -- but I'm also fascinated by the way people react when their world is completely eradicated and the society-as-usual  no longer exists. In Disaster 1906,  the sleeping town of San Francisco is visited by a mighty earthquake, and then ravaged for several days by fires which consume much of the city.  Communications are negligible, the water pipes are dry, and yet -- people survive. People freely gather together to help pick up the ruins, men from all walks of life join the fire brigades,  women empty their pantries cooking food for the newly-homeless, and a corrupt mayor  suddenly begins to fulfill his moral responsibilities as a public official and becomes a hero. And people are clever! They improvise! They fill the bathtubs with water before the cisterns leak completely dry, saving the water for use in fire fighting: they construct stoves of bricks and random metal grates.  Throughout the long night, as the fires burn and destroy homes, businesses, and all the hopes of tomorrow, people gather together and tell jokes: they sing and entertain one another, and when they day breaks they start picking up the pieces.

Disaster 1906 was probably written for younger readers given its length, but it's a fine introduction to the disaster and one written by someone who grew up in San Francisco, and who is so fond of the City by the Bay that his last chapter is devoted to  commenting on the rebirth of the city after the disaster, in which the wild child of the west coast grew into a Queen who astonished all the world at the Exposition in 1916, but who maintained her childish sassiness.

Related:

• Disaster! The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, Dan Kurzman
• The Great Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco, 1906. John Castillo Kennedy. I may have also read this one while trying to find Disaster!  I think my confusion in trying to find the book is warranted given how similar these three titles are. 
• Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco in the 20s and 30s, Jerry Flamm. One of my favorite books.

This is my fifth review in 15 hours, and while two of those were leftovers from last week and the week before last, it's still odd. Why do I go days without being able to progress in collecting my thoughts on a given book, and then have days in which it's easy?