As a native Californian whom is also a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, I was hoping for a great read. What I found was an interesting premise with a one-two punch. First you have the massive die-off of civilization due to the release of a biological agent; then you have the rising sea levels due to global warming. Instead of mankind maintaining or recovering his technology-based society, it instead devolves into a culture of gangs, tribes and religious groups. Not a pretty picture. The rising seas changes the geography of California where once inland towns become coastal or bay-side. Instead of a continuous story line, this book is more of a collection on vignettes as time marches on. An okay read. ( )

There are three different reasons post-apocalypse novels get written: warnings about some impending danger, describing some better world that comes about after destroying ours, or appreciating our world by fictionally dissecting its corpse. This book mostly falls in the first two categories.

The danger, as Pendell sees it, is corporatism, the God of Hoarding - it says so right on p. 40. Corporations lead to wage slavery and worship of money and government thuggery to enforce corporate interests. In the year 2021, this escalates into a massive dieoff via bioweapons released in a war for oil in Central Asia. Even with billions dead and industrial civilization at an end, manmade global warming continues with the seas eventually rising 160 feet. The few survivors can't maintain civilization's infrastructure. Literacy declines. Technology is more scavenged than created. It's not all bad, though. Humans, at least the ones in California, have developed a suspicion of central government and the idea of property beyond chattels that can be carried on the body. We members of the "pre-cle" (pre-Collapse) set eventually become a subject of awe, wonder, and contempt.

Now how seriously you want to take Pendell's diagnosis of contemporary ills and their remedies is a personal matter. (Not very seriously is the answer for me.) However, plenty of post-apocalypse stories are entertaining and thoughtful despite absurd or questionable starting premises.

Pendell's novel covers 16,000 years of time and reminded me of several fine post-apocalypse works. I've always had a fond spot for novels made up of fake documents whether letters, government reports, journals, oral and narrative histories. This book, with the exception of the omniscient third person Panoptic sections, uses that technique. In that, it reminded me of Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka's classic post-nuclear war novel Warday. Its pastoralism and humanity's inability to hold on to its learning and technology reminded me of George R. Stewart's Earth Abides while its dabbling with new, collectivist orders after the convenient killing off of millions reminded me of William Morris' commie utopia News From Nowhere.

However, this book is nowhere near as good as any of those. Pendell is at his best in the opening chapter, and he does bring some nice understatement to individual tragedies usually glimpsed through the lens of a distant historian. He even manages to work in a future homage to Otzi, the famous Iceman. And his maps showing California's new coastline are neat. But he never really creates unique voices for all the many people who tell us their stories in oral histories and diaries. They all sound very similar in tone and style and cadence and vocabulary. And, sometimes, those Panoptic sections aren't much more than a description of altered coastlines elsewhere in the world. Why not give us some more maps instead?

So the entertainment value isn't all it could be. As for thoughtfulness ... Well Pendell doesn't turn a blind eye to the problems of his new societies. The survivors mostly swear off the sins of corporatism but they have plenty of other shortcomings. I do think he is overly optimistic in his speculations as to how long certain technologies could be maintained. On the other hand, I think he is fairly realistic in eschewing the cyclical story of Walter Miller, Jr.'s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz. In Pendell's novel, there is no distant return to our level of technology and civilization.

In short, this one is not in the top tiers of post-apocalypse fiction but an obsessive fan - or citizen of California - might want to give it a look. And it's short enough that a reader not in those categories might not consider it a waste of time. ( )

I got this book on 10 March, 2011, and was reading it Friday, March 11, 2011, as The Great Japanese Disaster was unfolding! Really amazing! This Great Asian Catastrophe of 2011 showed the lights out in Tokyo as the power grid was throttled back to conserve energy and then the nuclear plume began threatening the Great City, Tokyo! By yesterday, Friday, March 18, 2011 , a week later, the city looked deserted!
So for the people actually hit with losing there homes, no gasoline, no power...this book really captures what some Japanese must be
going thru...it also shows the mental negative placebo like effects of pushing the society towards collapse , even thou the physical infrastructure could be brought back pretty fast.. ( )

Because I have an inquiring mind, voracious reading habits, lots of free time, and nearly unlimited access to the collections of university libraries, I have probably read most of the major academic sources concerning the possibility of a global civilization collapse. I have followed up this interest with further research on many side issues. In addition, I have read countless popular fiction and nonfiction books on this topic. Thus, I come to Dale Pendell's book with a more in-depth background on this topic than most readers. That being said, I loved The Great Bay! It is a wholly original vision of a possible future after a global civilization collapse. It is not depressing; it is fascinating. It held my interest from beginning to end. It was easy to finish in one day. The Great Bay made a strong impact on my emotional brain. More important, it is a vision of the future that I will probably not forget.

In this book, Pendell envisions a collapse in which mankind devolves backwards over the span of 10,000 years then begins to evolve forwards toward a complex civilized state. By 16,000 years after the 2021 collapse, mankind is once again on the path toward primitive civilizations and the Earth has, for the most part, healed from the ravages of global warming. If you look at the first page after the table of contents, you'll see that the book actually deals with the first 20,000 years after the 2021 collapse. That page implies that by the year 20,000, mankind appears to have once again achieved a sophisticated society capable of scientific investigation. In other words, complex civilization eventually reevolved.

Current scientific evidence appears to be telling us that all systems evolve toward complexity, and that as systems gets more and more complex, they also gets more fragile--their collapse more devastating. At no time in the history of mankind have we had such a complex global civilization. The complexity of this civilization is growing exponentially. If we continue along the same path, global collapse is inevitable. The question is when and how.

In Pendell's book, he seems to be telling us that after evolving toward a complex state, a system must fall or devolve toward a basic state of stability before it can once again evolve toward complexity. I liked this idea and have not come across it before in any of my reading. Whether or not it is right, it shows a great deal of scientific creativity.

The Great Bay is an odd book. It is a collection of fictional historical primary sources organized into twelve large chronological periods. An essay informing the reader about the state of the Earth precedes each period. These essays tell us about the Earth's climate, plant, animals, ocean currents, glacial and interglacial periods, etc. The fictional primary sources within each period provide information about how mankind is living. Each one feels like a short story. Thus, as a work of fiction, The Great Bay is a visionary collection of linked short stories and essays on the theme of the fate of mankind and the planet Earth after a total global civilization collapse.

I saw much in Pendell's vision that proved that the author had done his homework. I also saw a great deal that scientists and social scientists might seriously question. But this is not the point. The point is that this book can be a real treat for those people who enjoy reading scientific and fictional accounts about a possible near-future global civilization collapse. Unfortunately, I do not think that there are large numbers of such people. This unusual, inventive, and intelligent book will struggle to find a wide and proper market. ( )