Sally Strange reviewed All the water in the world by Eiren Caffall
Up the Hudson to escape the great flood of New York
5 stars
This is a story about what we preserve in the face of incalculable loss, inspired by the real life histories of scientists, librarians, and archivists rescuing and defending knowledge during war, famine, and collapse. In this case, the collapse is a projected future where the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapse, flooding NYC almost completely. Although it is an extremely bleak future, it's not without hope or respite.
As an upstate New Yorker who has traveled through many of the places mentioned in the book, I found the author's imagining of how various communities along the Hudson and beyond would react to the shutdown of international commerce, advanced medicine, and so on to be scarily plausible. I learned a new word from this book, one that the author did not invent: "hypercane," a category of hurricane that has been proposed but not yet recorded, with sustained wind speeds of …
This is a story about what we preserve in the face of incalculable loss, inspired by the real life histories of scientists, librarians, and archivists rescuing and defending knowledge during war, famine, and collapse. In this case, the collapse is a projected future where the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets collapse, flooding NYC almost completely. Although it is an extremely bleak future, it's not without hope or respite.
As an upstate New Yorker who has traveled through many of the places mentioned in the book, I found the author's imagining of how various communities along the Hudson and beyond would react to the shutdown of international commerce, advanced medicine, and so on to be scarily plausible. I learned a new word from this book, one that the author did not invent: "hypercane," a category of hurricane that has been proposed but not yet recorded, with sustained wind speeds of 500mph (800kph). Scientists theorize that this type of storm could occur when ocean water temperatures reach 50C (122F).
