***WINNER, Best Science Fiction, 2010 Green Book Festival
Based in scientific reality, Dale Pendell presents a powerful fictional
vision of a fast-approaching future in which sea levels rise and a
decimated population must find new ways to live. The Great Bay begins
in 2021 with a worldwide pandemic followed by the gradual rising of the
seas. Pendell's vision is all encompassing--he describes the rising
seas' impact on countries and continents around the world. But his
imaginative storytelling focuses on California. A "great bay" forms in
California's Central Valley and expands during a 16,000-year period. As
the years pass, and technology seems to regress, even memory of a
"precollapse" world blends into myth. Grizzly bears and other large
predators return to the California hills, and civilization reverts to a
richly imagined medieval society marked by guilds and pilgrimages,
followed even later by hunting and gathering societies. Pendell's focus
is on the lives of people struggling with love, wars, and physical
survival thousands of years in California's future. He deftly mixes
poetic imagery, news-reporting-style writing, interviews with survivors,
and maps documenting the geographic changes. In the end, powerful human
values that have been with us for 40,000 years begin to reemerge and
remind us that they are desperately needed--in the present.
