Good novels to read...

[snowsure]

Another cheerful posting from me.

If I can start this one off. How about "The sixth winter" by John Gribbin and Douglas Orgill.

If any book inspired "The day after tomorrow" I reckon it was this one. Quite rare to find (i.e. none on e-bay!) but my local library obliged. Excellent description of the "ice-dancers" in this one which, imo, resemble the huge tropospheric-fed weather systems in the afore-mentioned film.

Anyone else read it? Published in 1979 (the ice man cometh decade!)

Any recommendations? (about books to read :lol: not what I should do!)

[blitzen]

Well i've been dropping hints all over the place as I quite fancy 'Frozen in Time' by Ian McCaskill. (The worst winters in living memory)

Blitzen.

[osmposm]

"The World in Winter" by John Christopher, first published in 1962, is quite entertaining.

The fun and games begins, incidentally - for all those watching next week's developments with bated breath - with 3 inches of wet snow in mid-October after an exceptionally good summer.

Things get progressively much worse, with an icebound Britain eventually abandoned to gangs of armed scavengers. Anyone who can get away escapes to Africa.....where the locals rather turn the colonial tables on the refugee whites, who are forced to live in slums and work as barmen, servants and prostitutes to survive! Eventually an exploratory expedition is sent north from Nigeria - in a fleet of hovercraft, the only transport that can make it across the frozen seas.

Oh, and it's all caused by solar radiation cycles, by the way: rather ahead of its time, in fact, and not a bad read (assuming you're a snow-obsessed weather junkie ).

PS Don't bother with e-bay for books, snowsure - go to www.abebooks.co.uk, it's much better: there are 17 copies of my suggestion, and 21 copies of The Sixth Winter listed there for sale.....

[Essan]

PS Don't bother with e-bay for books, snowsure - go to www.abebooks.co.uk, it's much better: there are 17 copies of my suggestion, and 21 copies of The Sixth Winter listed there for sale.....

Thanks for the link! I've already found a couple of out of print books I wanted, and at a good price

[Essan]

In terms of books to read about climate disasters, I did enjoy Michael Crichton's State of Fear - which is mainly about a group of people trying to track down some eco-terrorists who are trying to precipitate major weather related disasters. For those who like snow, some of it is set in Antarctica.

[snowsure]

Thanks so far for the book titles. Great link to Abe books too. Should save me a few quid.

SS

[noggin]

Not exactly climate-change-induced, but Dennis Wheatley's book "Sixty Days To Live" is a cracker. Written in 1939 by this very clever man (who was called on to advise the war cabinet) it tells of the climatic, social and political consequences of a collision between Earth and a large comet. Absolutely brilliant, even 68 years on.

I wasn't around when he wrote it! It is one of those books that will never lose it's well-earned place in my bookcase.

[Essan]

That reminds me, Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven is a great story about a cometary impact and its aftermath (although the climate change isn't really that major a feature, there is an awful lot of warm rain/flooding). It's also a good observation on how people might react under such apocalyptic circumstances. Not all of it savoury. Bruce Willis, however, doesn't get a look-in

[Just Before Dawn]

The World in Winter has already had a mention - it's one of Christopher's better novels (I find his stuff a bit reactionary for my taste, but it's got some interesting concepts in it and I like the way it unfolds). Another good one (not climate change per se, but natural disaster on a global scale) is A Wrinkle In the Skin (1965) about a series of massive, earth shattering earthquakes.

Also in the same genre is John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes (1954), which is about an alien invasion, though the buggers land in the ocean and after a brief battle decide to flood us all out by raising global temperature. Different reason, same end result.

Other apocalyptic novels dealing with climate change include:

The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard (1962) (still the best climate catastrophe novel ever written IMHO)

Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand (1997), which starts out as a sea-level rise thriller and becomes a more gloomy meditation on human capacity to take a bad situation and make it worse.

Deus X by Norman Spinrad is a pretty conventional global warming disaster novel

Hope this helps....