Newspaper headlines don’t get much more dire than this:
World Helpless Against Assaults of Nature
I mean: Wow. The Associated Press’s Calvin Woodward just kinda dives right into the deep end of the panic-and-depair pool:
WASHINGTON -- In a more hopeful time, buoyed by the promise of science, it was thought hurricanes could be tricked into dispersing, earthquakes could be disarmed by nuclear explosions and floodwaters held at bay by great mounds of dirt.
Such conceits are another victim of a year of destruction.
The planet's controlling forces romp over dreams like those. Usually the best that can be done is to see the danger coming long enough to run.
Rich and poor nations have taken the hit over a period so twisted in nature's assaults that one month, rich is helping poor and the next, poor is helping rich as best it can, and then the poor gets slammed once again.
And the bird-flu pandemic hasn’t even hit yet.
Good thing he didn’t just finish reading John Barnes’s 1994 SF novel Mother of Storms, like I just did, which is a fairly horrifying futuristic disaster tale about superhurricanes that threaten to destroy civilization as we know it when a tactical nuclear strike over the Arctic releases all the methane (a greenhouse gas) bound up in the water ice there, which heats up the atmosphere and the oceans till the Atlantic and the Pacific turn into nurseries that look to spawn and nurture perpetual storms. It was especially horrifying to be reading MoS this week, when New York City is being deluged by remnants of some tropical storm or other with a name further down the alphabet than I think we’ve ever seen before. (Tammy, maybe?) And yet the book was somewhat comforting, too, because all I could think this morning, as I got drenched running for the bus and then the train got delayed because subway tunnels were flooding, was that at least we weren’t dealing with a storm surge powerful enough to wash completely over Ireland and Florida and scour Hawaii down to bare rock, as Barnes’s characters have to deal with.
If Woodward had read Mother of Storms, he’d know that in fact there may be a way to defang hurricanes, even ones with *gulp* supersonic wind speeds. Of course, it requires that we pass through the Singularity...
Speaking of the subway, and of bird flu, there was a guy on the train the other night hacking up his lungs, he was coughing so hard -- people were moving away from him, it was that scary. It made me think it’s about time I picked up my dogeared copy of The Stand for a fifth or sixth read...
Maybe after I finish Jasper Fforde’s Something Rotten, the latest installment in the adventures of Thursday Next, literary detective. Fforde’s books are brilliant, and supremely geeky, kinda like Douglas Adams meets Neil Gaiman at a literary salon hosted by Jane Austen... or Elmore Leonard. Thursday lives in a geek’s dream world, where writers are like rock stars and mobsters pirate Kit Marlowe first editions and absolutely everyone is crazy for literature that way the people in the mundane world are for TV or pro sports. But it gets even better: characters can leave books, and readers can enter them, which is why Jurisfiction cops like Thursday are needed, to keep everyone where they should be.
A little hint of Thursday’s world snuck into ours recently (maybe she stepped off the pages of one of Fforde’s books), with the first Quill Awards:
The Quills, aiming to become a flashier event than other literary awards, added "Oscar" touches like a red carpet for authors, comedy stars to entertain guests and some well known hosts from the television world.
The best geek-on-geekiness comment:
The effort to boost the profile of books drew ironic comment from Jon Stewart, whose "America" won the humor category. "Finally," he said, "we have an event to bring together the glamour of literature and the gravitas of an awards program."
And the most unlikely sign that Thursday really has stepped into our world and is influencing it:
The event will be broadcast on NBC television on October 22.
A literary award show? On network television? What’s next: physics hottie Brian Greene on the cover of GQ?
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