A few years ago, I read Walter Jon Williams’s The Rift, a just barely speculative disaster novel about a cataclysmic 8.9 earthquake on the New Madrid fault that runs under the southcentral United States. It’s a chilling book, and the scary bits aren’t so much the power-of-the-planet stuff -- though that certainly is frightening -- but the economic devastation and political turmoil across the country and the globe that occurs in the wake of the quake.
I’ve been thinking about The Rift a lot over the last 24 hours as I look at pictures like this:
How many millions of people are suddenly homeless and unemployed? How much will the prices of gas and heating oil soar with all those refineries offline? How much of a hit can the already precarious American economy take?
I think I need to reread The Rift.
I think it’s going to be a very very scary winter.
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