Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
The wildfire that tore through Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016 was the first to force the complete evacuation of a North American city. But “it won’t be the last,” said the editors of Quill & Quire. As author John Vaillant bluntly puts it in his terrifying new book, “There has never been a better time to be a fire.” Global warming has lengthened the season in which forests are dry tinderboxes awaiting a spark, and generations of fire suppression have left vast stretches of dense timber that can burn hotter, faster, and more uncontrollably than forests of the past. The Fort McMurray fire forced 88,000 people to flee, destroyed 2,400 homes and buildings, and cost Canada a record $9 billion. And once Vaillant’s suspenseful account sets the monster rolling, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post, “it is impossible to keep reading, impossible to stop.”
Fort McMurray, the boomtown carved out of Canada’s boreal forest to support the mining of the Alberta oil sands, makes a perfect setting for Vaillant, said Amy Brady in Scientific American. The award-winning author of The Tiger “goes to great lengths to demonstrate that humans have invited a comeuppance,” then provides one, in a blaze of “biblical proportions” that threatens a mining operation that provides 40 percent of U.S. oil imports and represents “one of humanity’s greatest acts of hubris.” Miraculously, no one was killed in the fire. But it grew to cover almost 1.5 million acres and became its own weather system, creating towering clouds, black hail, bolts of lightning, and hurricane-force winds.
“The storytelling is at times slowed by Vaillant’s wanderings,” said David Enrich in The New York Times. He throws in an extensive history of climate science, a meditation on fire’s quasi-spiritual nature, and other unnecessary detours. Many of his human characters, including firefighters and homeowners, also prove less than memorable. Fortunately, “Vaillant fills that void with an unforgettable protagonist”: the fire that locals instinctively nicknamed the Beast. Fire, of course, is not a living thing. “But that doesn’t make it a less daunting antagonist.”