The Great Bay: Chronicles of the CollapseDale Pendell
North Atlantic Books, July 2010
ISBN: 978-1556438950
***WINNER, Best Science Fiction, 2010 Green Book Festival
“A light boat, sailing across a broad bay, with the tops of ancient skyscrapers deep below. Our western North American world, hundreds and then thousands of years into the future. Dozens of remarkable stories, in the unfolding ecologies of post collapse, post climate change. Civilizations and technologies die or are lost, but human ingenuity—families, tribes, and villages, the musicians, shamans, philosophers, and people of power—live on.”
— Gary Snyder, poet, Mountains and Rivers Without End
“An imaginative and thought-provoking look at life in California 16,000 years in the future after a global pandemic and environmental catastrophe in 2021.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Utterly fascinating and alternately horrifying and deeply moving.”
— Gayle Wattawa, ed., Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire
The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse by Dale Pendell is a gripping journey into the future of mankind, when global warming, coupled with pandemics, wipes out civilization and leaves only a small fraction of the world’s population alive. Presented as a series of excerpts from historical documents like journals, broadsheets, textbooks and newspaper clippings, readers witness life in Post-Collapse America from a variety of perspectives. The change in style and perspective of the different characters is one of the strongest aspects of this work. Pendell's award-winning writing proves sophisticated and literary, raising critical questions for the future of humanity.
The Great Bay begins with our societal structure falling apart. A pandemic has struck the US, and the world, with ghastly consequences. The US population is reduced to 50 million people October 2021. The loss of people and the structure of society, how do people survive? This provocative question is explored throughout the bulk of the text. Much of Pendell’s novel regards the way in which human beings interact with each other and community dynamics, and this observation of community interaction is wherein lies the true greatness of Pendell’s work. The author shows us how time has changed the people's beliefs and their habits. Pendell divides the book into different time periods and gives a brief description of the climatic situation at the beginning of each section. Post-collapse technology, values, and intellect seem to move backwards in time, as memory of the world before the Collapse blends into myth over time.
Because the length of time the novel addresses - 10,000 years - the author uses various mechanisms to tell the reader the story. Instead of reading a post-apocalypse story, its more like reading a "history text" that gives brief glances at the people that remain on the earth and how they deal with the constantly changing world. The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse is an entertaining and thought-provoking novel, as much as study in human nature as it is a political commentary on civilization and the environment.
DALE PENDELL is the author of the award-winning Pharmako trilogy, a literary history of psychoactive plants. His poetry is widely anthologized, most recently in The Wisdom Book of American Buddhist Poetry. Combining the teachings of poet Gary Snyder, Zen teacher Robert Aitken, and philosopher Norman O. Brown, Dale seeks his answers in “wild mind.” He was the founding editor of Kuksu: Journal of Backcountry Writing, a co-founder of the Primitive Arts Institute, and has led workshops at the Naropa Institute and the Omega Institute. In addition to writing, Dale has been a consultant for herbal product development, botanical surveys, and a computer scientist. His most recent books are Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown; The Language of Bird: Notes on Chance and Divination; and The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse, a novel.
