Crawford Killian, author of the 1979 weather-apocalypse novel Icequake, kindly answers some questions. You can find him here – crof@bsky.social
1. A bit about who you are – where you grew up, education etc
I was born in New York City but grew up in North Hollywood, California until 1950. The family moved to Mexico City so my TV-engineer father could put a TV station (Televicentro) on the air. Four years later we were back in the States and I went through high school in Santa Monica. Then an undistinguished four years at Columbia, return to LA, two years in the US Army—and then, after a couple of dull jobs, my wife and I moved to Vancouver to get the hell away from the Vietnam War. I stumbled into college teaching, loved it, got my MA, and taught for 41 years before retiring in 2008.
2. Do you remember when/how you first heard that human activity might alter the planet’s climate, and what you thought (of course, in the 60s it was maybe dust, or carbon dioxide, warming/cooling)
Theories abounded in the 1960s and 1970s, and I ran across one theory circa 1974 from an Australian scientist who argued that the West Antarctic ice sheet’s own weight was melting its base and the lubricating effect could collapse the ice sheet into the Southern Ocean—where it would reflect enough sunshine back into space to trigger a new ice age. Yeah, I know. You had to be there.
3. How did you come to write Icequake? How long did it take?
I put aside the SF novel I’d been working on for years, did a lot of research, and wrote two drafts of Icequake. A lot of it got written in longhand during endless faculty association meetings. All told, it must have taken about three years. The second draft clicked—published in Canada, Commonwealth rights sold to Futura, a UK publisher, US rights to Bantam, who also wanted a sequel. That was Tsunami, very much the runt of my litter.
4. How was it received?
Futura put a lot of effort into publicizing Icequake, and for a few dizzy weeks in the summer of 1980 it was outselling The Thorn Birds. It didn’t get much critical attention in North America, and Bantam didn’t put a real effort into it, but it did all right. A number of people who’d worked in the Antarctic thought it was pretty accurate, which I was very relieved to hear.
5. Have you re-read it since?
I re-read it a year or two ago, and thought it held together pretty well. Of course I’d accelerated the collapse into a matter of weeks, not decades, but it still seemed plausible. Well, except for the concurrent collapse of the ozone layer and the earth’s magnetic field! I’d set the story in the near future of 1985, so of course much of the technology is really dated…not to mention the sociology. I had a couple of women working at New Shackleton Station, great rarities in those days, but not so much in the present.
6. What have you been doing, these last almost-fifty years since it was published.
I’ve had a very pleasant half-century, thanks! As a full-time college teacher I could pay the mortgage while also writing SF and fantasy novels (and nonfiction books, and writing a weekly column on education for a Vancouver daily paper, the Province). I was able to teach a course in writing fiction based on my own experience, and several of my students went on to publish their own novels. I had fun exploring ideas, but none of my later novels made the kind of money that Icequake did. In the mid-1990s I’d tried to break out of genre, but the market was changing. After a couple of unpublishable novels I packed it in. No regrets—I was lucky to break in when I did. Since then I’ve written hundreds of articles on all kinds of subjects—mostly for the Vancouver online magazine The Tyee (https://thetyee.ca/Bios/Crawford_Kilian/ ). A lot of those articles are on climate change.
7. Complete this sentence. “A knowledge of just how long we’ve known about the problem of carbon dioxide build-up gives us…” (you can say “nothing” or “perspective” or whatever!!) …gives us confirmation that we are very, very slow learners.
8. Anything else you’d like to say.
There really was a bit of debate in the 1970s about the trend of the climate, and I then had no particular opinion one way or the other. But by the early 80s it was clear we really were warming up, and I made passing reference to it in one or two of my later novels. Icequake went out of print long ago (though it’s still available as an e-book. But the science keeps confirming the book’s basic idea—that the Antarctic ice sheets, however vast they may seem, are transient conditions and subject to change.