What's worse than a tsunami? Try a nuclear tsunami! Actually, despite the fantastically flash cover art, THE WAVE isn't a tsunami at all, but a gigantic dam break wave surging down the Columbia River. And what's in its path but the aging Hanford Nuclear Waste site, which in this story is home to a brand spanking new breeder reactor - purely a fictional construct, thank goodness. The failure point is the Mica Dam in British Columbia, "one of the largest earthfill dams in the world" ... and different characters in this story fill us in on all the dangers this kind of dam construction entails, and all the corrupt/incompetent politicking that went on to get the Columbia River Treaty passed way back in 1961, which outlined Canada and the USA's hydroelectric responsibilities on said river. Author Christopher Hyde present a sadly all-too plausible disaster scenario in the best '70s thriller style, in line with the early work of Michael Chrichton. As the cover blurb says, THE WAVE isn't just fiction, it's tomorrow headlines!
Hyde does his best work around the circumstances of the creeping disaster, both physical and political. We get a crash course on the Vajont Dam disaster of 1963, which claimed over 2,000 souls in Italy, and the aforementioned outline on the political scene leading to the Mica Dam's construction. Meanwhile, simple passages on a single pebble rolling down hill or ripples lapping at the dam become sublime, loaded with the quiet threat of what we know to come. Hyde does less well with the requisite '70s thriller conspiracy elements, with clumsy references to the conspirators' membership in Skull and Bones, and the need to find "an Oswald" as a patsy to take care of our nosy protagonists. He still manages a paranoid atmosphere, but some of the skulduggery feels like filler on the way to the main event. And woo boy, once that water starts rolling ...
On our side of the pond, Playboy Paperbacks put out this attractive edition in 1981.
Spoilers (of a sort): the radioactive wave doesn't make it to the ocean, sparing us a precursor to the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. But there's plenty of delicious destruction along the way, with floods and firestorms and a nuclear hostage situation. Half the fun of any random disaster thriller is learning about a brand new subject and all the horrible ways it can go wrong. A good thriller author takes us under their wing for a time, selling us on these awful visions. Hyde acquits himself well in that respect, even with some narrative speed bumps. A fake transcript of congressional hearings after the disaster is a penultimate dollop of verisimilitude, followed by a stinger of the conspiracy taking out its own trash, another realistic touch.
3/4
Coronet Books, 1982 (original pub. 1979)
Christopher Hyde has also published some novels as Paul Christopher and as A.J. Holt.
ReplyDeleteChristopher Hyde has written plenty of novels under his own name and as Paul Christopher.
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