Fiction in the news — on purpose!

And finally something from NPR that doesn’t revolve around victim disarmament or DACA.

Want some realistic disaster fiction? Particularly you neighbors here in the Pacific Northwest who await The Big One?

Yesterday afternoon a local NPR affiliate, KNKX, reported that the Bellingham Herald commissioned a novella about surviving the inevitable megaquake.

The Riverstyx Foundation in Bellingham conceived and funded the “Imagining the Big One'” project at the instigation of its president, businessman Jim Swift.

Foundation director Heather Flaherty said they were concerned by lack of preparedness and wanted a novel way to engage people.

“It seems like the facts are not working,” she said. “Or they’re working to a point, but how do we get people to take action. So how can we draw people in in a way that is interesting and fun and we educate almost as a head fake? You’re learning through entertainment.”

You can either listen to or read KNKX’s story at the link above.

The novella, by former reporter John Stark, was serialized in the newspaper last month in 28 episodes. With some luck, you’ll find the chapter index and episode links here.*

At the same time (also as reported by KNKX), the emergency services director of Grays Harbor County, far south and west of Bellingham, has begun his own serialized fiction on the Big One, “Moments of Misfortune” (pdf).

Both series look useful and highly readable. Although the incomplete series by emergency manager Chuck Wallace is not the work of a writing pro, Wallace does pretty well for a bureaucrat.

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Then immediately after KNKX performed the minor miracle of not drooling over the prospect of gun control for five minutes, the other Big One — NPR itself — ran a report on what sounds like a very interesting book, just released in the U.S.

Dancing Bears by Withold Szablowski tells true stories about people who lived under communism and weren’t prepared to live free when the Soviet Union collapsed. You can listen here (no transcript available as of this writing).

The dancing bears reference is to actual performing bears in eastern Europe which were released into a park when a law forbade holding them in captivity. The bears had to relearn living as nature intended — and struggled just like the former communist subjects.

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Wow. Ten entire minutes of NPR without a single “shoulder thing that goes up”!

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* I hope. On Chromium, that’s what I found at that link. On Firefox, that link drops me directly into episode 11 and I can’t figure out why. If anybody has a better link to the entire series, please post it in comments. Meanwhile, here’s a direct link to episode 1.