Book Review: Heat

Book Review: 'Heat' by Arthur Herzog

4 / 5 Stars

Arthur Herzog III (1927 - 2010) saw considerable success as a novelist in the 1970s and 1980s. 'The Swarm' (1974) and 'Orca' (1977) are perhaps his best-known books, as they were made into feature films.

Herzog emulated the success of Michael Crichton by producing scientific thrillers that combined an educative, straightforward prose style with themes that were topical during the postwar era. While 'The Swarm' dealt with Africanized honeybees, and 'Orca' with malevolent killer whales, 'Earthsound' (1975) featured earthquakes, and 'The Craving' (1982) took aim at the American preoccupation with dieting.

'Heat', which was published by Signet in August, 1978, bucked the trend during the 1970s in which Global Cooling was the existential environmental threat, focusing instead on the threat from Global Warming. 

The opening chapter of 'Heat' adumbrates the coming catastrophe, before focusing on lead character Lawrence Pick, an engineer who works for the federal thinktank CRISES (Crisis Research Investigation and Systems Evaluation Service). It's a quasi-clandestine agency headquartered at Fort Davis, an elaborate underground complex located outside of Washington, D.C.

After a freak tornado levels the Virginia suburb of Huntsboro, Pick begins to grow alarmed over evidence from many quarters that the Earth's oceans rapidly are warming, a phenomenon that will lead to more chaotic, and catastrophic, weather. Assembling a team of top scientists at the CRISES redoubt (in much the same manner as Crichton had expert researchers assembling at the Wildfire complex in 'The Andromeda Strain'), Pick comes to the grim conclusion that, without drastic measures to reduce global warming, soon civilization will collapse and the planet will become uninhabitable.

But the bureaucrats running CRISES, and serving as science advisors to the President, are reluctant to sound any alarms prior to the conclusion of next year's presidential election. Pick finds himself sidelined as politics take precedent over action. As Americans puzzle over the strange excesses of heat and wind buffeting their neighborhoods, it will be up to Lawrence Pick to shake the bureaucracy from its lethargy........even if so doing gets him imprisoned by the government he has sworn to serve...........

At only 195 pages in length, author Herzog had little superfluous space for crafting his narrative in 'Heat', and his prose style has a crisp, declaratory quality that I find appealing in this day and age of lumbering, 500-plus page novels. The outcome of the book remains uncertain until the very last paragraph. The only reason I settled for a Four-Star Rating, instead of Five, is that some of the final chapters indulge in some action-movie sequences that I found a little too contrived.

Needless to say, as a 1970s 'disaster' novel, 'Heat' retains considerable relevance in the year 2023, and those who believe in Global Warming will find the novel to have a legitimately minatory quality. They, and those who appreciate a good scientific thriller, will want to have a copy of the book on their shelves.