The Great Bay Chronicles of the Collapse

***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.

Poet Dale Pendell was 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 and The Baby Beats and the 2nd San Francisco Renaissance. Combining the teachings of poet Gary Snyder, Zen teacher Robert Aitken, and philosopher Norman O. Brown, he developed themes of "ancient wisdom/wild mind." Besides writing, Pendell was a consultant for herbal product development and botanical surveys as well as a computer scientist. He was the founding editor of Kuksu: Journal of Backcountry Writing and a cofounder of the Primitive Arts Institute. He died in 2018.