Richter Ten

Political and environmental disasters come crashing down in this earthquake sci-fi thriller co-written by the authors of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Memories. When he was seven years old, Lewis Crane survived the Los Angeles earthquake of 1994—but his parents did not. Haunted by the tragedy, Crane has dedicated his life to protecting humanity from similar disasters. Now he is a Nobel Prize–winning earthquake scientist who perfected equipment sensitive enough to predict an earthquake strike down to the minute. And he wants to go further. Crane has formed an organization to explore the idea of stopping earthquakes entirely by fusing the Earth’s tectonic plates together. But what effect will this have on the earth? And as political unrest causes tremors of another kind, can Crane’s audacious plan stop another major earthquake due to hit the United States? Co-written by Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick Award–winning author Mike McQuay, the “two formidable SF talents converge splendidly in this disaster thriller, which offers sleek action-adventure writing, world-class tumult and a coherent near-future based on sound yet innovative social and scientific speculation” (Publishers Weekly).

Near-future story of the struggle to avoid the most colossal destructive earthquake in human history.

Thirty years after the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake killed his family, Lewis Crane has become the world's top seismologist, determined to protect people from his parent's fate. But in a world controlled by Chinese corporations and split by racist and religious strife, many don't want him to succeed.

By developing the scale that bears his name, Charles Richter not only invented the concept of magnitude as a measure of earthquake size, he turned himself into nothing less than a household word. He remains the only seismologist whose name anyone outside of narrow scientific circles would likely recognize. Yet few understand the Richter scale itself, and even fewer have ever understood the man. Drawing on the wealth of papers Richter left behind, as well as dozens of interviews with his family and colleagues, Susan Hough takes the reader deep into Richter's complex life story, setting it in the context of his family and interpersonal attachments, his academic career, and the history of seismology. Among his colleagues Richter was known as intensely private, passionately interested in earthquakes, and iconoclastic. He was an avid nudist, seismologists tell each other with a grin; he dabbled in poetry. He was a publicity hound, some suggest, and more famous than he deserved to be. But even his closest associates were unaware that he struggled to reconcile an intense and abiding need for artistic expression with his scientific interests, or that his apparently strained relationship with his wife was more unconventional but also stronger than they knew. Moreover, they never realized that his well-known foibles might even have been the consequence of a profound neurological disorder. In this biography, Susan Hough artfully interweaves the stories of Richter's life with the history of earthquake exploration and seismology. In doing so, she illuminates the world of earth science for the lay reader, much as Sylvia Nasar brought the world of mathematics alive in A Beautiful Mind.

Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post–WWII Germany, in both broad and very personal terms. This handsomely designed book spans the artist’s rich and varied oeuvre from the early 1960s to the present, including photo paintings, portraits, large-scale abstract series, and works on glass. Essays by leading experts on the artist illuminate Richter’s preoccupation with painting in relation to other modes of representation, and emphasize the ongoing importance of the medium’s formal and conceptual possibilities in contemporary art.

Never get between greedy men and eight billion dollars worth of anything---words to live by, as geophysicist Steven Bell is finding out. In Eastern Oregon, 90,000 cubic feet of mantle-hot gas is roaring out of the Devil's Pore fumarole every second. To Bell, this is just a "leak," a pinhole, relatively speaking. But what is leaking? Where is all that gas coming from? And why is 700 square miles of land subsiding, inch by inch, year by year? The answers to those questions suggest that the fumarole is the visible tip of an iceberg. A disaster of truly monstrous proportions is brewing. Bell wants the fumarole plugged in order to study the problem, but the hot gas is carrying with it a rare-earth element worth billions, an element with military applications. The U.S. government wants Bell to shut up and go away; in nearby Sherman City, Drew Gannon wants Bell dead; 14-year-old Lissa Bell just wants to spend the summer with her dad; and gorgeous ex-model Kate Whitney is caught in the middle, forced into a horrible agenda of her own. Forces of nature, government, greed, and love collide with the potential for an explosion that could make a major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault look like a whisper in the wind.