MYSTERIES OF OUR WORLD by Peter Briggs

Not a mystery mongering text, but a solid pop-sci volume covering the cutting edge in earth science c.1969. Author Peter Briggs lays out the debates and scientific developments leading to our new knowledge of the world around us, from the ocean depths to the mountain tops, atmospheric heights, and beyond! There's a healthy dose of natural disasters, with volcanos and earthquakes making for engaging reading. Oceanic investigation is another exciting subject, with plenty of ships dredging and scanning and netting all around the seven seas - the Glomar Challenger is here, a few years before the Explorer would launch its now infamous secret mission. 

Reading on through Briggs' explorations, dense but smoothly flowing, it makes me think. We only just saw the announcement of the phasing out of "pocket" paperbacks, and here's a relic of that soon-to-be-bygone age: a portable, dependable, entertaining science primer, readable by anyone, anytime, anywhere, packed with references and sources - put out by a relatively sleazy/lowbrow publisher, even. Nowadays google is just as likely to give you a completely hallucinated "AI summary" for your search terms as a straightforward URL ... maybe I'm just being cranky, I don't know! Google also doesn't offer as many cigarette ads as vintage paperbacks:

Briggs appears to have been a prolific nonfiction writer - here's a spread of titles including Water, The Vital Essence, which Briggs references in this current text, and a title on the Glomar Challenger.

"And if California falls into the ocean/
Like the mystics and statistics say it will"

 

True to their rough and tumble image, Belmont Tower included a two page spread of mafia books as part of their nonfiction advertising. "You liked reading about volcanos, Billy? Well how about Lucky Luciano?"

This educational title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Belmont Tower Books, 1969

SHOCKWAVE by Nick Everett

"From the depths of the ocean comes the most devastating of all the Earth's forces ..."

Watch out ... for the SHOCKWAVE!

The "rugged Englishman" Kirk, sexy lady scientist Simone, and a boatload of Norwegians are sitting on top of a big problem in the North Sea: an unstable trench that's about to launch a landslide into the ocean depths, triggering the most massive tsunami ever seen in this hemisphere. Worst of all, the blast wave will be on track to slam into the eastern coast of the UK!

This is author Nick Everett's only credited work, though the polished writing points to a pseudonym of some working writer. Everett leads with a little bit of disaster science onboard the good ship Isthmian, along with Kirk's battered libido - Simone "can make a duffle coat and a pair of sea-boots look sexy" we're told, and once Kirk gets off this tub he's entertaining thoughts of a courtship with her. That'll have to wait, of course, once the seafloor shakes and the big wave starts rolling.

Everett writes a short, tight little disaster epic, drawing down on family man Walter's evacuation via traffic jam and on daredevil pilot Ryan's rubbernecking by way of his precious twin engine Dakota, the very same plane brought to life on the front cover. Walter's a drab grey man living a drab grey life, and now he might lose it all without having ever really enjoyed himself! Ryan meanwhile gives us a bird's eye view of the action and pushes himself further and further into reckless hedonistic thrill seeking.

Like the water sucked out to sea before a tsunami, the empty hours between the announcement of the disaster and the inevitable crashing wave are a loathsome absence, proof via negation of a horrible, inescapable reality. When the shockwave finally comes roaring ashore and overground it's almost a relief, a sweet release for our trapped cast. Pilot Ryan could easily have flown to safety, but his own demons compel him to witness the destruction, and poor Walter, well, he's stuck in a miles long caravan along with a thousand other souls.

Closeup on the cover art!

Everett mentions a 220 foot tall tsunami resulting from the Good Friday quake that struck Alaska in 1964, which also factored into the background of Arthur Herzog's Earthsound. Over at the Paperback Palette, Jeffersen has amassed an exhaustive entry for water based disasters - that's "flood, deluge, squall, gale, tempest, cyclone, hurricane, typhoon, tsunami," any and all "EXTREME WATER EVENTS," and Shockwave is among the many, many entries. Jeffersen also has questions about Everett's identity, because great minds think alike.

His lengthy survey also covers Deluge by Richard Doyle and The Raging Flood by R.T. Larkin. Check it out!

Shockwave earns a reliable 3/4 for a no frills, cheap thrills disaster!

New English Library, 1981

EARTHSOUND by Arthur Herzog

The DISASTERTHON smashes on! Tonite, we feel the earth move under our feet as disaster maven Arthur Herzog scribes us the EARTHSOUND!

Your name is Harry Vail. You have a tragic backstory involving the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 which struck Alaska with a vengeance - maybe this would have been a gripping story on its own, but you've moved to Rhode Island with your new wife and live a quiet life as a geological surveyor, mixing with the beautiful people and secure in the knowledge that the East Coast's staid tectonics won't reignite your trauma ...

Or won't they?

Herzog makes a bold play here, eschewing LA, Japan, or even NYC in favor of a small town tableau, mixing folk horror with the classic disaster formula. The results are uneven but interesting, as Harry Vail must navigate the treacherous ground of an insular New England community as he tries to unravel the burgeoning threat from below. Midcentury bourgeois angst blends uneasily with the frisson of nature's fury, as nasty party games lead to domestic paranoia and some Stephen King-style conflict with the local dead end youths ... what's the difference, really, between the physical upheaval of an earthquake and the shifting ground of a failing marriage, a failing life?

Sadly, Herzog's juicy mixture doesn't quite land on solid ground. There's too many loose ends and dead ends, and the final quake is (rather realistically) limited in scope: there's only so much destruction an isolated peninsula can endure. Threads of poltergeists and Edgar Cayce (Cay-cee, not Case, Herzog helpfully informs us) clutter up the scene without adding much suspense.

Above, the Pan edition, for Commonwealth readers.

Herzog's Earthsound earns 2/4 for an uneven ride with tremors of feeling. Anything is better than nothing! This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Signet Books, 1976 (original pub. 1975)

THE WAVE by Christopher Hyde

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)