TSUNAMI by Crawford Kilian

Canadian author Crawford Kilian brings us this all-American near future sci-fi/disaster thriller. The ozone layer's been shredded and the Earth's magnetic field has faded away, requiring people to wear protective gear just to go outside. The government's at a loss, the economy's in a depression, and the academy's holed up in its ivory tower, "shaking out" any radical voices in preemptive, neutering self defense. Sleazy Hollywood moguls work with the Pentagon to shovel out ultra-violent jingoist fantasy as a distraction from the long emergency. Sound familiar?

"Still, they'll have to do something. They can't just let everything fall apart."

Sound familiar?

And then, just one more damn thing. An 8.0 earthquake in Antarctica sends the mother of all tsunamis screaming up the Pacific, slamming into San Francisco and blasting society apart like a cheap storefront in front of the storm surge. Now the shit has really hit the fan, and it's not going to shake out how everyone might like:

These would-be survivalists had been foolish and unlucky. They'd prepared for the end of the old order, but not for the beginning of the new. They'd thought that violence would protect them during the brief period before other people obligingly died off, like some disaster novel; then they'd inherit the earth.

Like most disaster stories, this isn't just about the big wave, big rock, or bad bug on the loose, but about the paper thin barrier between our supposedly rock solid establishment society and pure, roiling anarchy. After a false start with the crime wave caper of Martin Wallace Tyler's Tidal Wave, it's good to get rolling with some real tsunami action in a real disaster epic, especially one that runs counter to the reactionary impulses that frequently play out in this genre. The post-Vietnam black and chicano soldiers who became savage cannibal raiders in Lucifer's Hammer, fit only to be cut down by heroic homesteaders, here find themselves ... everywhere, like everyone. Who knows who you'll become when faced with the ultimate choice of life or death, but it's a messy affair regardless.

John Berkey's original art for the cover. Sourced from the Paperback
Palette article on watery disaster stories: It's all water over the bridge.

Kilian isn't interested in settling scores against the wrong type of people, and even his "bad" characters like the nasty Hollywood producer are drawn with a sensitive hand. His writing is best in the more intimate moments, such as producer Anthony Allison's fraught relationship with his starlet Shauna, or scientist Kirstie Kennard's pained reflections on the academy's impotence in the face of unfurling history. Kilian's focus, after the big waves, is on how things get put back together by people shattered by their experiences, truthfully, and not in the fascistic play-acting pantomime of Niven and Pournelle. It's a tight story at just over 200 pages and though it sometimes yaws uncomfortably in the inter-genre spaces, Kilian steers it home true in the end.

3/4

Bantam Books, 1984