Disaster novels

[dem bones]

With the kind permission of Justin Marriott, here, as threatened, a thread to compliment, and possibly add to the '70s Disaster Novels feature in Paperback Fanatic #44. Towering Inferno's; doomed luxury liners and exploding Concorde; avalanches, earthquakes and landslides; train wrecks and motorway catastrophes; amusement park massacres; floods and forest fires; collapsing new buildings; oil rigs in peril - all grist to mill.

Justin's criteria for inclusion on listing: "If I were to try and label the books I have covered, it would be 'man's folly resulting in mega-disaster threatening the lives of large groups."

For purpose of this listing, have ditched the 1979 ceiling, as omitting the When Animals Attack!, nuclear strike and Vampire/ Zombie Apocalypse titles has already deprived us of several potential candidates.

Here's some to get us started (and, unless people chip in with suggestions, most likely finished). The Coming Dark Age is prophesy of disaster as opposed to fiction, but as the world didn't end in the 1980's (or did it?), have included it for superb cover art and general air of misery. Death Cloud is reputedly terrible. Have never been able to bring myself to read it.

Conrad Voss Bark - The Big Wave (Nel, Feb. 1979)

Blurb:

Most unlikely' they had said; a million to one chance' — but it was happening.

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.'

Matt was a professional. No one else could have done it but he did. When he said 'a reporter' something came alive in me. I don‘t remember what I said: words dissolve after you use them. I gave him facts — the stone cliffs above the tideline of the Mall, the twisted steel skeleton that had been New Zealand House, the heaped bodies along Whitehall, the search for the Queen ...

Roberto Vacca - The Coming Dark Age (Panther, 1974)

Richard Clifton-Dey

Blurb:
Translated from the Italian by Dr. J. S. Whale

Blurb:
More shocking than FUTURE SHOCK ...
More terrifying than THE DOOMSDAY BOOK -
THE COMING DARK AGE reveals how our world is heading inevitably for shattering collapse

In the most disturbing book on mankind‘s future ever written, Roberto Vacca shows how all the major systems on which our civilization depends are hopelessly overloaded . . . and will crack up completely between 1985 and 1995. The result will be massive social collapse, widespread violence. disease and starvation. death on a scale never before known - and a hundred years of darkness unparalleled in human history. . .

* Japan and America will go first, followed by Germany, Holland, Belgium, France. Austria. Italy and Britain - in that order . . .
* There will be no more short-term housing problem once the survivors have cleared the corpses out of the buildings ...
* Fortified redoubts with gun emplacements will be the new Ideal Homes
* Vigilantes and the new feudal lords will be the only lawmakers

This is your future, and it's starting now ...

Steve Crisp Quake
Les Edwards The Camp

Richard Laymon - Quake (Headline, 1995)

Blurb:

Twenty minutes before the quake hits, Stanley is ogling a pretty female jogger through his living-room window. He ogles Sheila every morning and that's not all he'd like to do to her.

The quake might just give him his chance.

When the quake hits, Sheila’s husband and daughter are stranded on the other side of the ruined city. The power lines are down, the emergency services can't cope and the evil and the lawless have already begun to comb the ruins. New Clint and Barbara must make their way home to Sheila, trapped naked in the bathtub in their ruined house. But will they get there before Stanley, the fat pervert for whom the earthquake is a heaven-sent opportunity?

Guy N. Smith - The Camp (Sphere, 1989)

Blurb:

The holiday makers had come from all walks of life to relax and enjoy themselves, little realizing what lay in store.

They had all been chosen to take part in experiments for a new drug. It was intended to control rioters by producing peaceful fantasies. But for some of those dreams would become violent nightmares...

And after the brutal murder of a young girl the media began calling it the 'Camp of Death'. But no-one was prepared for the horror and violence that would be unleashed when the antidote failed to work at ... THE CAMP

Tim White Death Cloud.

Michael Mannion - The Death Cloud (NEL, Sept. 1977)

Blurb:
Dorchester was just an average town; where nothing out of the ordinary ever happened — until .... DEATH CLOUD.

Suddenly huge stagnant black clouds of deadly poisonous gases descended on the town of Dorchester, mixing with the autumn fog, bringing tragedy and death to the local inhabitants.
There had been warnings, but these had only been ignored, ridiculed and scorned. The people had stayed and then it was too late — time had run out for those who had to face the DEATH CLOUD.

Graham Masterton - Famine (Sphere, 1981, 1988)

Blurb:
FAMINE
When the grain crop failed in Kansas it seemed like an isolated incident and no one took much notice. Except Ed Hardesty. Then the blight spread to California’s fruit harvest, and from there, like wildfire, throughout the nation.
FAMINE
A tidal wave of terror
FAMINE
Suddenly America woke up to the fact that her food supplies were almost wiped out. Her grain reserves lethally polluted. And Botulism was multiplying at a horrifying rate…

[cromagnonman]

I like the sound of THE BIG WAVE.
Clearly if you want to survive wholesale catastrophe in London then it really pays to work for the Daily Express. Worked for the staff in The Day The Earth Caught Fire also.

[Shrink Proof]

Sept 16, 2020 10:47:08 GMT cromagnonman said:

I like the sound of THE BIG WAVE.
Clearly if you want to survive wholesale catastrophe in London then it really pays to work for the Daily Express. Worked for the staff in The Day The Earth Caught Fire also.

I don't like the sound of it one bit. A world where the only survivors are Daily Express journalists is real horror.

[cromagnonman]

Sept 16, 2020 13:58:33 GMT Shrink Proof said:

Sept 16, 2020 10:47:08 GMT cromagnonman said:

I like the sound of THE BIG WAVE.
Clearly if you want to survive wholesale catastrophe in London then it really pays to work for the Daily Express. Worked for the staff in The Day The Earth Caught Fire also.

I don't like the sound of it one bit. A world where the only survivors are Daily Express journalists is real horror.

But if they all look as good as Janet Munro then I, for one, would not complain.

[dem bones]

Initial post veered so far from Justin's guideline that we might just as well continue in same vein, throw natural disasters and epidemics into the mix (the morale boosting, pack up your troubles in an old kit bag Paperback Fanatic 44 includes a feature devoted to plague and virus fiction), regardless of whether they came about through man's stupidly or not. Don't see any harm in including nuclear accident novels, either. Or non-fiction where relevant. Or anything, really. Does Plasmid qualify?

Richard Doyle - Deluge (Pan, 1976)

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 Telegraph

Piers Paul Read - Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors (Avon, 1975)

Blurb:
On October 12, 1972, a plane carrying a team of young rugby players crashed into the remote, snow-peaked Andes. Out of the forty-five original passengers and crew, only sixteen made it off the mountain alive. For ten excruciating weeks they suffered deprivations beyond imagining, confronting nature head-on at its most furious and inhospitable. And to survive, they were forced to do what would have once been unthinkable...

This is their story—one of the most astonishing true adventures of the twentieth century.


Russell Foreman – The Ringway Virus (Nel, Aug. 1977)

Blurb:

A British family, on holiday in Australia, suddenly found itself prey to a mysterious illness. At first, it was diagnosed simply as flu, but within a matter of weeks, all of them were to die.

It was at this point that the existence of a new and utterly lethal virus was confirmed – a virus the human body could have no possible resistance to. The result? One hundred percent mortality. The end of the human race.

Unless … if a tiny few could somehow isolate themselves sufficiently to survive, there might still be hope for mankind. It was a big ‘if’ – a gamble which builds into one of the most nightmarish tales you’ll ever read.


Some contenders.

Jeff Rovin - The Hindenburg Disaster (Manor. 1975), as enthused over by pulphack, here.
Lawrence Huff - Dome (NEL, 1980) "The Terrifying Chiller of the Ultimate Nuclear Accident .... Read It While It's Still Fiction!"
Burton Wohl - Death Ride (aka Rollercoaster

[cromagnonman]

Don't have the issue as yet so apologies if I'm duplicating suggestions already covered there but both Jack London's THE SCARLET PLAGUE (1912) and S Fowler Wright's DELUGE (1928) are pioneering examples of catastrophe fiction.

[doomovertheworld]

Sept 17, 2020 14:11:01 GMT cromagnonman said:

Don't have the issue as yet so apologies if I'm duplicating suggestions already covered there but both Jack London's THE SCARLET PLAGUE (1912) and S Fowler Wright's DELUGE (1928) are pioneering examples of catastrophe fiction.

If we are going relatively old school with our catastrophe fiction choices could I throw in to the mix Mary Shelley's The Last Man

[cromagnonman]

An excellent suggestion Mr Doom.

I should have added Fowler Wright's sequel to DELUGE which was entitled DAWN and was published in 1929. Very influential on John Christopher especially these books so I believe.

And then there is Peter Dickinson's Changes trilogy (1969/70) towards which I am very nostalgic on account of the tv serial.

[dem bones]

Many thanks for the suggestions, gents. I think the best policy might be we just post disaster stuff of any persuasion, and let the Marriott Escort Agency sort what, if anything, is suitable for PF purposes.

Another very early example is Morgan Robertson's The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility (1898), which vaguely prophesied the sinking of The Titanic when it had yet to be even thought of. Have been warned it is one dull read, but have yet to find out for myself. Justin recommends Walter Lord's A Night to Remember (R & W Holt, 1955). Is my addled brain deceiving me or was there a Ladybird (or possibly I-Spy) book of the Titanic Disaster?

Anyway. Here's;

Hans Heinrich Ziemann – The Explosion (NEL, June 1979)

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Blurb:

The scientists said it could never happen:
how wrong they were …

On a hot July day in the heart of the Rhine valley; the GREATEST UNCONTROLLABLE ATOMIC REACTION happens.

“By an author who has plainly made a thorough study of the hazards of a nuclear explosion.
Definitely not a book for the squeamish”- MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS

Translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel

[pbsplatter]

Arthur Herzog - IQ 83 (Simon & Schuster 1978; cover is from the 1980 Berkeley reprint)







From the back cover: 

YOU ARE DR. JAMES HEALEY AND LAST WEEK YOU WERE A GENIUS



That was before the DNA experiments. Before the accident you said could never happen...



Since then you have felt your mind decaying a little more each day. You have watched your wife slip into imbecility. You have seen the crowds growing murderous with animal terror, the President of the United States babbling and drooling on TV...



Only one thing separates you from them. You, at least, know what is happening as you search for the cure for the horror you have unleashed upon the world--as each day the dimming of your mind lowers your chance of finding it!






I picked this up late last year and still need to read it; it sounds like Stephen King's "The End of the Whole Mess". 

[dem bones]

Re Disaster novels: Mustn't overlook this slick, prophetic novella: The wreck of the Titan.

Morgan Robertson - The Wreck of the Titan (Pocket, 1998: originally M. F. Mansfield, 1898 as Futility)

Harley Crossley

Publisher's Foreword
Simon Hewitt - Introduction

The Wreck of the Titan

Blurb:
‘She was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men. In her construction and maintenance were involved every science, profession and trade known to civilization ... unsinkable, indestructible she carried as few boats as would satisfy the laws'
So wrote Morgan Robertson in 1898 in this novel of extraordinary intensity. Fourteen years before the greatest civil maritime disaster of all time, this story eerily prefigured the actual calamity. A century later The Wreck of the Titan has lost none of its power to shock. It is a compelling read in its own right, but the question remains - was it a strange series of coincidences, or was something altogether more mysterious at work?