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Post by dem bones on Dec 12, 2007 13:21:56 GMT
Conrad Voss Bark - The Big Wave (Nel, Feb. 1979) One of the few, one of the very few, to survive by a miracle from among ten million Londoners dead in the greatest disaster of all time, was a reporter, Corrie Wilson of the London Daily Express.....
"Shatteringly realistic ...." Something tells me that Conrad Voss Bark has quite possibly worked as a journalist for a certain newspaper judging by Corrie Wilson's heroics in this fast-paced disaster novel. Geologist Dr. Doberman has published his concern about the basement rocks that support London's clay (relax: the technical stuff isn't particularly important to the story, and he's wrong anyhow). His theories discredited by fellow professionals in the press, he retires to Wiltshire with his young mistress. Two Express reporters think he may be onto something and Corrie Wilson, a war correspondent with a neat line in 'nam flashbacks, goes to seek him out. The two men brawl on meeting but Connie Doberman intervenes and gets them to cooperate with one another. A mild earth tremor at Gravesend convinces Wilson that Doberman is far from the mad boffin he's been portrayed as - there really is something going very wrong deep underground. The Express are about to publish when ..... London is hit by its very only tsunami. The best eye-witness account came from the crew and passengers of an SAS Boeing flying over Millwall Docks ..... They noticed dust rising from the city, great clouds of dust they thought was smoke, and then they saw buildings collapsing. A moment later the river was sucked down into the estuary like a sluice, exposing the river -bed: then when the river flooded back again the wave came with it .... The wave wiped out the East End, wiped it clean as the tide wipes castles on the sands; it tore over the City, uprooting the Tower and the Mansion House, the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, splitting the Stock Exchange building into fragments .. Wilson's fortuitous survival is down to his years dodging Vietnamese snipers in the jungle. When he notices the huge gothic clock above the Express building give a slight lurch, he has a panic attack and, as trained, scarpers for higher ground. He's recovering on a bench in St. James' Park, berating himself for his overreaction, when the duckpond empties over Wilson and the old dear feeding the birds ... But for some intrigue surrounding the army and a power-hungry top civil servant, that really is it for the plot. The rest of the novel gives vivid accounts of the destruction, the fight for survival, the mounds of corpses washed into tidy heaps, the search for the Queen (if they don't find her, Princess Anne ascends to the throne being the only know surviving Royal). If only some mutant man-hating lobsters had been disturbed in the tumult, this would have been a NEL indispensable, but its still great fun and - at 174 pages - just the right length.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 14, 2017 9:21:35 GMT
Richard Doyle - Deluge (Pan, 1976) Blurb: A GREAT CITY DEVASTATED ...
It was to be the day that the American President drove in state through the streets of London. By the middle of the morning those streets are under water already several feet deep and still rising. Freak winds and driving rain have pushed a thirty foot surge up the Thames and London is facing the worst disaster in its history. The death toll from drowning, injury and disease tops 100,000. A power station explodes like a bomb.The central London Underground system is flooded and passengers are trapped in trains. A barge is hurled into the first floor of St.Thomas's Hospital and parts of dockland are flooded to a depth of twenty feet... "Cataclysmic" - Sunday TelegraphJim O'Brien's outstanding Rabies round-up in Pulp Horror 6 got me to wondering if there were equivalent "IT COULD HAPPEN!" novels inspired by other mid-late twentieth century homeland scares - collapsing tower blocks, inner city race riots, mad cow disease, bird flu, plague, that type of thing. Bar the obvious - The Rats and it's legion spawn - was drawing a blank until I spotted The Big Wave on the shelf, and, quietly festering among the great unread, Richard Doyle's Deluge. Throw in the GLC warning - saved to my hard drive from God only knows where - and instant London Flooding Is A Real Danger thread. J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World (Berkley, 1962) is maybe more of a borderline case in that, from my understanding (not yet read it), the events are set in the far future and the capital City he depicts bears little or no relation to then contemporary London? GNS muscled in on the act with Crabs On The Rampage (Nel, 1981) wherein the killer crustaceans emerge from the river to take out the Isle of Dogs. Construction of the Thames barrier (opened 1984) put an end to the regular school playground flood drills but proved no obstacle to Richard Doyle who again unleashed mass destruction in Flood (Random House, 2007). Further suggestions welcome. Horror/ disaster novels & shorts inspired by the flood scare particularly so, but this is Vault, so if thread drags in related panics or mutates into yet another checklist of vampire cucumber from outer space novels that's fine by me.
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Post by dem bones on Nov 7, 2017 19:43:04 GMT
Try again. John Coyne - Hobgoblin (Fontana, 1982) Blurb: HOBGOBLIN is just a game BALLYCASTLE is just a house THE GARDINERS are just an ordinary family. Until one stormy, violent Hallow’een night, the deadly truth about the house emerges - and a Hobgoblin rises to destroy all those he loves.This was the kind of thing I had in mind. Another case of mass hysteria/ media outrage/ scaremongering, etc, in this instance, the evils of Dungeons & Dragons, role play games & Co. turning our pop kids into mindless killers. Haven't read it yet but Hobgoblin is afforded generous coverage in Paperbacks From Hell. It sounds absolutely barking.
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Post by bluetomb on Nov 7, 2017 21:10:41 GMT
The Drowned World is indeed more far future than topical disaster peril. Some action, but more leisurely sci fi musing on what the changed environment does to human nature. Liked it a lot myself, had an old Penguin paperback that fell apart and wound up in the recycling.
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