The Rift [Hardcover]

Walter Jon Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 1999

In 1812 the quiet Missouri plains were split by an earthquake so powerful, it rang church bells in Boston. Two centuries later, almost no one in the Midwest knows the history of the New Madrid fault line. And no one knows that another quake is coming, a quake so massive it will kill tens of thousands, destroy cities, change the course of the Mississippi River itself. The first quake is the worst. reducing the central United States to the Stone Age. Then the fault line shakes again. And again. Fast-paced and terrifyingly real, The Rift is a blockbuster novel of destruction, heroism, and survival that's sure to grab fans of such recent screen shockers as Deep Impact and Armageddon.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Rock & roll takes on new meaning in The Rift, Walter Jon Williams's huge book about a magnitude 8.9 earthquake centered under the southeastern United States. This is a major departure from the intricate science fiction tales Williams usually writes (City on Fire, Aristoi), but he applies the same thoroughness, complexity, and great character development to this disaster yarn. Some readers might balk at the book's size (it's a doorstopper), but consider the subject: the biggest earthquake in recorded history, a monstrous disaster that lays waste to entire cities from Chicago to New Orleans, flings one of the world's largest rivers out of its banks, and within 10 minutes obliterates countless lives. But the earthquake is only the beginning of this horror story--fire, flood, and chaos follow, and ordinary people are pushed to the limits of ability and sanity as they are transformed into survivors:

Marcy thought the tremor was just another aftershock, but then she saw the flash brighten the shining steel of the Gateway Arch, and turned south to watch in awestruck horror as the bright fireball rose over south St. Louis. Bright arching trails of flame shot out of the fireball, like Fourth of July rockets, as debris rose and fell.... It is the Bomb, Marcy thought. It is the End.... The bubble of fire rose into the heavens, and its reflection turned the Mississippi to the color of blood.

Williams follows the fates of nine people in the earthquake's aftermath. Among the most compelling, considering the racial and political tension characteristic of the American southeast, are the stories of sheriff Omar Paxton, a card-carrying KKK member from a small parish in Louisiana; the Reverend Noble Frankland, a fundamentalist preacher with well-stocked bunkers and fanatic followers; and General Jessica Frazetta of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the woman in charge of somehow repairing the damage. Each character's story would make a terrifying disaster novel on its own, and Williams handles them all deftly, weaving their threads through the apocalyptic postquake landscape. The Rift is a magnitude 9 novel--you'll walk gingerly on the quiet earth when you're done reading. --Therese Littleton

From Library Journal

A devastating earthquake strikes the American heartland along the New Madrid faultline, destroying homes, severing communications, and changing the course of the Mississippi River. As the inhabitants of cities from Missouri to Louisiana seek to recover from the catastrophe, the earth continues to shudder, and with it comes a breakdown in the lives of the survivors. With the same vigorous eloquence he brings to cutting-edge sf, the author of Voice of the Whirlwind depicts a continent divided not only by the forces of nature but by the all-too-human rifts that separate individuals from each other. Part social commentary, part disaster novel, this near-future drama should appeal to fans of cataclysmic fiction. Highly recommended for general and sf collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Eos; 1st edition (July 7, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061052949
• ISBN-13: 978-0061052941
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (84 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #866,286 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Big One, February 8, 2002

By 

sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rift (Mass Market Paperback)

The New Madrid Fault lies in the south central part of the United States right on the Mississippi River. It is very real and very ominous last heard from in 1811-1812 in an 8.9 earthquake. So "The Rift" is not an apocalyptic fantasy, but a meticulously researched epic of what could happen tomorrow. You well may ask why isn't the earthquake of 1812 a part of every American child's history book as famous as the Chicago Fire or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906? The answer is how lightly populated the area was at that time; the number of people who could report on the catastrophe were few, so at present day we have little documentation.

Mr. Williams has done an awesome job of investigation from everything concerning an earthquake to nuclear reactor plants. Every chapter is interwoven with contemporary accounts of the 1812 earthquake. We read what transpired over miles and miles of countryside, and then the author shows us what the same devastation would be like if that "countryside" had the City of Memphis sitting on it as it does today. I learned a little about the Richter scale: an 8.5 is not just a "little" stronger than an 8.3, but a thousand times stronger. An 8.9 (the top of the scale) is just short of affecting the entire planet. For comparison purposes the San Francisco quake registered 8.25 on the Richter scale.

To bring us a story and give us a human's eye view of such mass destruction, Mr. Williams gives us a cross-section of characters, most of whom were sharply defined and realistic. From Jason, a young teenager who is Kalifornia Kool but displaced by his parent's divorce to Cabell's Mound, Missouri to Nick, an unemployed weapons engineer recently separated from his wife. (For some reason, I pictured Nick as Bryant Gumbel in the middle of the earthquake.) The hustling dealmaker Charlie struck me as the most poignant. He only existed in the cyberworld of suppose; when the earthquake hit, all he could think to do was dial 911 on his cell phone.

"The Rift" is a monumental work in all senses of the word, but unlike many worthy tomes, highly readable and entertaining. Grade A

53 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wild Adventure on the Mississippi, March 26, 2003

By 

Jenny Hanniver "medieval_student" (Philadelphia, PA, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rift (Mass Market Paperback)

I love this book. At the age of three, 'way back in 1939, my parents brought me to Reelfoot Lake in the heart of the New Madrid fault country. I've never forgetten the eerieness of that experience and look for books about the historical earthquake or sci-fi projections of future ones. Most, like Hernon's 8.4, aren't any better written than a Robin Cook, but THE RIFT is different. It's literature!

I am sure it's no accident that the plot is far more than a disaster novel. It's a picaresque travel-tale and its structure parallels the greatest of all American novels, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, with a rebellious white boy and an intelligent black man confronting dangers and weirded-out characters on the Mississippi and along its banks, and finding great depths of resourcefulness in themselves, as well as friendship and trust. And you get a delicious sci-fi disaster story on top of all that! Who could resist?

I've lived in the South about half my life and found the characters entirely believable. Like Mark Twain, Williams shows us the murderous underside of fundamentalist religion, yet at the same time doesn't demonize the preacher and his surprisingly creative wife. Murderous fanatics they turn out to be, but a lot more likeable than the Ku Kluxers and the drugged-out Militia creep from Detroit. (I've lived in the Detroit area, too, and that little piece of smarm could be patterned after a few racist haters and baiters who got in the news.) Yet even he is not without a soul. Williams understands the politics of the American lumpenproletariat, the reasons for resentment and their unfortunate tendency to blame everyone but their genuine enemies. So you get a political analysis, too.

Samuel Clemens, I am sure, must have read this novel in Heaven about as many times as I've read it down here.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What happened Walter Jon?, June 10, 2005

By 

Steven D. Lydick "stevelydick" (Grand Island, NE United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rift (Mass Market Paperback)

I have to say before anything else that I am a huge Walter Jon Williams SF fan. This may cloud my review somewhat, because I came into the book with high expectations. Unfortunately these were really not met.

The highs of the book were (for me):

1. very good character development, not as good as some of his other works, but very good.

2. well researched

3. reader develops genuine feelings about the characters (see 1)

The lows:

1. He spends hundreds and hundreds of pages meticulously building this little world, then just seems to lose interest and throws it all together in the end. The book doesn't build to a crescendo, the characters just all end up together, good beats evil, and everybody goes home. It's almost as if it was looking like it would drag out to another 500 pages as he was writing it, so he just wrapped it up. He took one character he had developed over several chapters and just unceremoniously mashed him with a barge in a short paragraph and moved along smartly.

2. Related to 1, there are tons of loose ends left untied at the end of the book. What was the nature of the Sheriff's chest pains? What happened with the General's vision? her political future?

I just was left with the feeling that he sat back and said, Geez, this thing is getting too long, how can I wrap it up? Well, I'll move this guy to here, these people over there, kill this one, stuff them all in here, kill some more, whiz bang done.