The Rift

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Synopsis
It was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who finally made the Swampeast habitable. Just south of Cape Girardeau the levee line began, to continue 2,200 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. The levees kept the floodwaters out. During the decades of prosperity, the farmers had forgotten the conditions under which they had prospered were artificial. Southeastern Missouri was as artificial as the Washington Monument, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, or the space shuttle, and like these, existed as a monument to the ingenuity of humankind. The land there had been manufactured. But that which is artificial occupies a precarious position in the world of nature. Its existence depends upon the maintenance of the conditions under which it was designed. The Mississippi River's levee system was built with the understanding that two things would remain constant: The flood waters would not rise much higher than they had in the past, and the land on which the levees were built would not move of its own accord. The first of these constants was violated regularly. The result was a greater commitment to reinforced levees. The second constant, the requirement that the earth not move, had not been tested. Though such a test, as history showed, was inevitable.
Copyright:
1999

Book Details

Book Quality:
Excellent
Book Size:
933 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780061057946
Publisher:
N/A
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Walter J. Williams
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Literature and Fiction, Mystery and Thrillers, Science Fiction and Fantasy
Submitted By:
Guido Corona
Proofread By:
Guido Corona
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

Reviews

5 out of 5

By on

Walter Jon Williams is known mainly as a science-fiction writer, but there are no fancy gadgets or little green spacemen in The Rift. When the synopsis says it's a "near-future what-if scenario," they mean near-future as in, it could happen tomorrow, or at least the day after it was published (being from 1999, some of the technology is even a little outdated). In any case, there is a definite Stephen King quality to The Rift, in that it focuses on how people deal with an unthinkable catastrophe. Some characters live in denial, some work together to survive, and some immediately begin using the situation to wield power and control over those around them. Our cast of characters include a moody teenager just moved to Missouri from California with his wacky New Age mother; the nation's first elected Klansman sheriff; an out-of-work weapons engineer; and a nutcase End Times preacher. (Guess which two set up their own private kingdoms in the wake of the earthquake ...) Some characters are a bit stereotypical (the investment banker whose only thought is getting to the office so he can make money off the disaster, the sheriff's wife obsessed with the local matriarch and her decaying antebellum estate), and the portrayal of southerners as Bible-banging crackers is sure to rankle some. But other characters are wonderfully complex, chief among them, surprisingly, the Kluxer sheriff, who, at least at first, is one of the more likable characters. (Well, you'd have to read it ...) The writing is a little clumsy at times, Williams repeating certain phrases as if he forgot he'd just used them a page ago, and the character of General Frazetta is introduced with two awkward paragraphs without a gender-specific pronoun, in a transparent attempt to shock us with the fact that it's a female. There's a bit of philosophizing (the President's final monologue) that some may not agree with. But overall, I couldn't put this book down, and it's long enough to keep you engrossed for quite a while. I had to go all the way and give it five stars. Definitely food for thought, with all the natural disasters that have happened around the world in the past few years.