I just finished reading Category Five by Philip S. Donlay, where a big monster hurricane is bearing down on the Eastern United States. It's a fairly decent airport novel, plenty to keep you entertained while waiting for your flight to depart. It also got me thinking about some other monster storm and weather novels I've read.

Let me take more about Category Five first, which from what I can tell was written well before last year's killer hurricanes. Big bad Hurricane Helena looks to be a new breed of storm emerging out of climatic change. You've got a weather researcher who's monitoring it, her former lover Donovan Nash who's got a hidden past and the bright idea of perhaps stopping the storm in its tracks by nuking it. Yes, it's right out of the "just add water" school of instant thriller/action novel. You won't be dazzled by amazing plot turns. But it's an easy and fairly entertaining page turner.

Mother of Storms is in an entirely other class. I read this years ago. It's written by one of my favorite authors John Barnes, who wrote the fantastic A Million Open Doors, one of my favorite SF novels. He's one of the few that has approached the reverence I hold for Heinlein, though some of Barnes's novels definitely are weak. Avoid Patton's Spaceship, Washington's Dirigible and Caesar's Bicycle. Wikipedia has a page about him. He doesn't have a web site but does have an Amazon hosted blog here.

Anyway, Mother of Storms sees a runaway greenhouse effect hit the earth after a nuclear explosion releases huge amounts of methane in to the air. Giant hurricanes result and places like Hawaii, well, you don't want to be there. All of this is set in the future. As I said, it's been years, so I don't remember all the various plot points. There are a couple of more detailed reviews you can read here and here. It was definitely one of those books I didn't want to put down and the rare one I'll probably go back and reread some day.

A Planet for the President is a political satire novel where the current US president is convinced that life would be a whole lot better if maybe everyone but Americans were wiped out. He doesn't arrive at this idea immediately but gets pushed there as global warming and ecological disasters becomes more pronounced.

I read the book about three months before Hurricane Katrina hit. It was written in 2004. One part of the novel has a hurricane hitting New Orleans and killing thousands of people. It's not that the author was particular prescient. Planners have feared that New Orleans couldn't withstand a major hurricane for years. That kind of made a mockery of President Bush's early statements that no one knew the levees wouldn't hold. A fairly unknown British satirist managed to know this but the federal authorities weren't up to speed?

Anyway, if you're pro-Bush, give the novel a miss. He's the poorly disguised Fletcher J. Fletcher. Then again, liberals get plenty of send up in the novel as well. There's a very nice long review of the book over here at Wikipedia. In Britain? Here, you can order it from the Conservatives online book store, which seemed kind of odd to me. Then again, these are the New Conservatives.

Finally, after the New Year, I finished Michael Crichton's State of Fear. There's no storm activity in this novel. I toss it in simply because global warming is a factor in all the books above. Crichton basically debunks the notion as part of the thriller he tells, or at least debunks the notion that we can predict with certainty much of anything. You'll encounter lots of charts of temperature activity showing things aren't necessarily getting warmer.

I admit it. I've been a global warming believer to some degree. I'll put it like this. While the jury may be out, it doesn't seem absurd to think we should try to pollute the planet as little as possible, whether than means pumping out carbon dioxide, oxygen, methane, junk, you name it. I'm not naive. We're going to have an impact; we are going to pollute, and the planet is going to be changed in response to human activity. But we ought to be able to minimize that.

But Crichton's book will get you thinking, and just when you want to dismiss it all as a work of fiction, he throws a ton of footnotes at you from the back. Then again, others might debunk those, as this review does.

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