Subject: Review of HEAVY WEATHER by Bruce Sterling (REPOST)

From: [email-masked] (Alayne McGregor)
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 1995 21:11:32 GMT

HEAVY WEATHER
                           by Bruce Sterling
                      reviewed by Alayne McGregor

     After you've read this book, you'll never look at a thunderstorm in
the same way.

     It's about storm chasers, in a 21st century Texas where global
warming has screwed up the weather so badly that what we call massive
tornados and hurricanes now are only piddly little F-2s, F-3s, or F-4s,
compared to the really heavy weather. These chasers are after the big
prey -- an F-6 tornado, the type that can take apart a city and maybe
never stop. [Think logarithmic here: an F-6 tornado is 6 orders of
magnitude bigger than an F-1, not just six times bigger.]

     Starting with a breakout from a Mexican underground medical clinic,
this book pushes you on as fast as the megaforce winds in the shit-
kicking, Texas-huge storm scenes, where you're seriously wondering how
the hell the characters are going to outrun those winds. It's the story
of Dr. Jerry Mulcahey, a genius mathematician who thinks he can model
megastorms, and who has assembled a Storm Troupe in the parched,
abandoned wilderness of Texas (where no one lives anymore after the
aquifer dried up), to follow storms, verify his models, and wait for the
F-6.

     It's also the story of Juanita (Jane) Unger, who thinks she may
have finally found a reason to live in following Mulcahey and spending
her fortune on subsidizing the Troupe, and her brother Alex, who doesn't
believe in much of anything except trying to keep his lungs clear enough
to stay alive, and whose self-obssession threatens (and then perhaps
saves) the Troupe.

     I don't know if Sterling has got the technical details right in
this book: it's not my area of expertise. But I know he's got the feel
of a society flying apart in a storm of its own making, where the
natural calamities are only the final push.

     I am intensely bored by disaster novels. I think everything was
said in _When Worlds Collide_ some forty years ago, and the only novelty
is in how the human race will be blown apart this time. But the F-6 is
only peripherally what this book is about: it's about people's
fascination with cataclysms and how they survive. You may not agree with
the ending, but it's a mighty fine ride.

%A      Sterling, Bruce 
%T      Heavy Weather
%I      Bantam
%C      New York
%D      1994
%G      ISBN 0-553-09393-2
%P      310pp
%O      hardback, US$21.95, CA$29.95

-- 
Alayne McGregor                         [email-masked]
[email-masked]
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