The Worst-Case Best Seller

We have seen the future, and it wants to kill us. That's how it looks, anyhow, thanks to the increasingly popular view of the past as a chronicle of disasters unforetold but colorfully retold in a string of ubiquitous books. It's an indication of society's new catastrophe consciousness that we instinctively refer to the publishing trend as a "flood" of disaster books or, last year, as a "tsunami," which seemed a metaphor both more dramatic and timelier, until New Orleans.

If we're to believe Mike Davis' new real-life horror story, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, made timelier by last week's front-page news about the decoding of the 1918 flu virus that killed as many as 100 million (or more than 5 percent of humanity), and its close relation to today's avian flu virus, perhaps the most up-to-date metaphor would be an "epidemic" of disaster books.

Why are these dismal accounts so popular? Partly, it's because they reached a Gladwellian tipping point, so publishers plunged into the eye of the profit storm. "Publishers kind of chase what works," says Rick Simonson of Elliott Bay Book Co. In the late '90s, storms were working nicely, inundating the best-seller lists. The Perfect Storm roared out of the Eastern Seaboard and became an uncontrollable cliché, and Into Thin Air catapulted a Seattle freelancer into stratospheric tax brackets. "There were sea ones, mountain ones, flood ones, storm ones," Simonson recalls. Seattle's Erik Larson scored in 1999 with Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, about the 1900 destruction of Galveston, Texas, by a storm and tidal surge. Last December's tsunami was a boon to Dennis Powers' account of the 1964 Crescent City, Calif., tsunami, The Raging Sea: The Heroic Story of America's Worst Tidal Wave, which was abruptly resubtitled The Powerful Account of the Worst Tsunami in U.S. History, published far ahead of schedule, and distributed in torrents to bookstores.

John M. Barry didn't do quite as well at first with his 1999 Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, but this year, the shocking news of Bush's contemptuous cruelty to poor black victims of Katrina propelled his book into Amazon's top 10 and got him on NPR and Meet the Press, thanks to his horrifying portrait of hundreds of thousands of black Americans confined to refugee camps for months by Bush's 1927 doppelgängers. Then the avian flu news hit, and Barry got another gust of success for his The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (the definitive 1918 pandemic book), soon to have a sequel in a city near you!

"Christopher Hollowell's Holding Back the Sea: The Struggle for America's Natural Legacy on the Gulf Coast never came out in paperback, I'm guessing," says Simonson. "It kind of got lost in hardback." Now the paperback is on its way, with its prescient argument on behalf of wetlands. Also coming early next year: the first big Katrina book, The Great Deluge, by rising young historian Douglas Brinkley. New Orleans native Michael Lewis is said to be penning his own, presumably nonfiction New Orleans tome, though there's no telling whether it's calamity-centric or more culturally and nostalgically oriented.

Mount St. Helens, May 18, 1980: a disaster close to home. (Getty Images / Craig Mitchelldyer)

Not even novels are immune to today's disaster-mindedness. "Reading the paperback of Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain the week after Hurricane Katrina was eerie," says former Amazon editor Ron Hogan. "I knew that the novel hinged upon the efforts of D.C. scientists and lobbyists to force the government's hand on global warming issues, but I had no idea that its climax was going to be the arrival of a massive storm system which overflowed the Potomac and turned the streets of Washington into rivers. Some of Robinson's descriptions of the storm's impact seemed a little tame in light of what we'd just seen on TV, but other scenes—like the evacuation of the animals at the National Zoo—felt vividly authentic. I can't wait to see how he plays out the aftermath in the upcoming sequel, Fifty Degrees Below.

"Science fiction has always had an apocalyptic streak running through it," Hogan continues, "but there's usually a sense that if we just listen to the scientists, everything will turn out OK. Robinson's latest story seems to have that optimism, but there's also a hint of fatalism, too—as if to say that things have just about hit the breaking point, and we're going to have to start performing triage just to keep things going." It's a mind-set influenced by such apocalyptically inclined nonfiction best sellers as Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive and books more targeted to the intellectual elite, like Ross Gelbspan's Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis—And What We Can Do to Avert the Disaster, which scores a trendy-cataclysm twofer by warning that the greenhouse effect is about to cause not only tragedies involving too much (and too little) water, but epidemics of malaria, dengue fever, and nasty allergies.