There is a tendency in people of a certain age to welcome the destruction of everyone and everything because they are coming to terms, badly, with the fact that someday they themselves will die. The idea that Death has happened to others and the world keeps on ticking upsets them because they're just that selfish and vain, so they want the world to die too. Let this simple narcissism be understood. That's the real drive behind apocalypse fanatics.
I am not a fanatic. I am a novelist. I like disasters because they force people to adapt to reality and set aside their petty politics just to get through it. They are rich territory for stories and characters, and as an amateur novelist I need that sort of thing to write. Of course, then I learned that petty politics are a great excuse for ethnic cleansing in a real world disaster, and we've already seen examples of this in recent American disasters by so-called Liberal Justice. Look at New Orleans, and how much wasn't rebuilt after the billions went to the Liberal aid agencies. Graft and corruption by the Left. How much of poor black New Jersey was rebuilt after Sandy flattened it? How about the mansions built over the remains of former apartment blocks? Really?! This is what the Left did with the money? They're nothing by hypocrites and con men, criminals. Yet those same people will vote for the ones who literally knocked down their homes and put them into the street. That's mental illness, right there.
I had the misfortune of choosing to borrow a library sci-fi "novel" called The Great Bay, which was nicely printed and packaged, including some interesting graphics of a largely swollen San Francisco Bay that had moved into the central valley kinda like THIS:
Except of course, the author, despite having a father who was a Geographer at UC Berkeley, wasn't aware of the elevation differences. The lake I show above isn't flat. It has many openings and drainages so its more of a moving swamp, only its moving so slowly that it will look like a single piece of water taken in this way. The North end is about 60 feet higher than the bottom, which is actual tidal area and mixes salt water and fresh, which unfortunately shuts off the water supply for the California Aqueduct system, ending the water for half the east bay, all of South Bay, and most of the Peninsula except San Francisco. That's around 11 million people who suddenly don't have drinking water. When you factor in the farms along the western side of the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles, where the water eventually ends up, if the levees fail and the bay salt water gets to Tracy? That is a serious Disaster. 20 million people would have to leave California, and half the farmland would be lost. Most of the nation's vitamin C is grown in orchards watered by the aqueduct, all would be lost and scurvy would make a comeback. You don't need magic 95% mortality plagues to cause turmoil and hurt birth rates. Little things like a levee failure and a flood can do it.
Additionally, the San Joaquin Valley climbs continuously as you move South, yet is flatter than the Sacramento Valley. There used to be lakes in the valley before, and will probably come back. Kern Lake is an easy sell because the land under it is full of impermeable natural concrete which has ruined the drainage of the soil so its only good for rice or wetland and bird sanctuary.
In the apocalyptic notes, because there was no story and thus it wasn't a novel, the setting roughly describes hippies winning the civil war and plague dieoff somehow through collectivism and indifference to the suffering of others, mostly. Then they somehow don't farm and yet don't starve while other people do lots of work and then don't die when people with guns and motivation show up because unarmed people totally win against people with rifles. Sigh.
That isn't the worst part. This person isn't even passingly familiar with how to tell a story. Its just story notes. No narrative. OCD handwaved as history plus a vanity press funded by the AGW political slush fund because the fantasy sea level rise is part of the story, such as it is. The result is nice looking on the outside but the content was crap. The worst thing about publishing something you should be ashamed of is you might be remembered for it for decades. You'll never live it down.
My above picture is based on actual flood data. I modified the picture from red to blue so you can see what it would look like if the various levee breaks happened in many places over a short enough time to form a wetland. If we got an Atmospheric River, with our dams silted up like they are now? And that condition dropped 100 inches of rain, and then monsoon summer rains came up from Mexico and then over the back side of the Sierras and started dropping 10x normal summer water? Then yes, this lake could become more persistent. Throw in beavers, which live up there, and govt inaction and yes, that wetland could be a permanent feature of California. And despite all my studying of ice age critters and climate, I happen to know that much of the coast of California, and the Sierras, were ranging 100-125 inches of rain per year. Not sure where the storms were coming from, but that rainfall is fact. Only after the ice melted and the glaciers retreated did we fall back to this current oasis status. Bring back the rains and this state could get very swampy, and filled with mosquitoes. Spreading very fatal infections and diseases, completely overlooked in that Great Bay fantasy setting without a story narrative. Really, that thing was embarrassing. It wasn't done. It wasn't ready to publish. It needed a LOT of work, and an editor or writing partner to flesh it out with characters, narrative structure, actual descriptions. It needed to be more than crappy story notes.
I suppose the upside of this book is I won't feel like I'm stepping on a genuine authors toes when I get around to writing about the Levee failure coming to my state someday. Or about the reality of the next ice age, which we might be lucky enough to see happen, thanks to human ingenuity and life extension drugs. I know an awful lot about those. Xeroderma Pigmentosa. Look that up sometime. There's several others like stem cells and the pros and cons of a particular super-villain monster hormone/drug that makes people heal really fast but turns them into Reavers, like in Firefly. A real thing, not a fantasy thing. Activates some really aggressive DNA lurking in us. Need to look up the name again.
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