Author | Allan W. Eckert |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Science fiction; Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction |
Published | 1976 (Little, Brown and Company) [1] |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 566 pp (first edition) [1] |
ISBN | 978-0-445-08597-8 |
OCLC | 4452943 |
The HAB Theory is a 1976 science fiction novel by American author Allan W. Eckert. The novel is from the apocalyptic fiction subgenre. Eckert believed that the real-world facts and conclusions he quoted in the novel, were worthy of further exploration. One such conclusion was that hyper-specialization in the physical sciences was a big problem and that more interactions between hyper-specialists was overdue. He wove facts and concepts into the novel form, then his 17th book, to get more minds considering them. The book explores a version of pole shift hypothesis postulated by Professor Charles Hapgood in two volumes, plus the 1967 book Cataclysms of the Earth by Hugh Auchincloss Brown.
When Brown published "Cataclysms", he was in his 90s, so he is represented in the novel by the character Herbert Allan Boardman (The "HAB" of the title) also in his 90s.
Boardman stages a clever faux assassination attempt on the President of the United States as a ruse to draw attention to his theory. The ruse involves a wax .38 caliber bullet propelled only by the cartridge-primer at a Presidential rope-line handshake stop. HAB completes the ruse and survives his arrest long enough to wake up in a hospital and tell his story to a fictional Woodstein which sets the action in motion.
The HAB Theory was Eckert's second novel, but first major fiction publication, and had sold 150,000 copies by 1978. [2] The book was made available via demand printing in 2004, though this version appears to contain a number of typos indicating that it was produced from something a bit earlier than the final published draft. The novel's romantic sub-plot which today seems quite archaic, was consistent with similar storytelling threads of the mid 1970s and was in fact based on the author's own divorce.
The novel borrows heavily from Brown's theory and book, which is that approximately every 6,000–7,000 years the Earth's polar ice caps become over-burdened with ice, creating such an imbalance in the planet's center of gravity, that the Earth's poles and the Earth's equator shift positions. The former poles are soon located somewhere between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, where the weight of the polar ice cap leaves a large circular depression and other dramatic geological changes occur as the huge quantity of water is released by the ice caps melting.
Called "capsizing" in the novel the "rollover" takes place in a single day. Since the velocity of an object at the equator of the Earth is approximately 1,000 MPH (1,674 km/h), any such rapid change in rotational axis is a massive disturbance to everything from a grain of sand to a mountain or an ocean. Humans and their works in such an event would be as fallen leaves before a windstorm. The exception being two places on earth called "pivot points" which the book says can be calculated and further that prior civilizations had calculated them and placed long-term-surviving information at such points. [3]
OOPARTs - "out of place artifacts" real-world scientific anomalies (flattened petrified forests in Nova Scotia, huge depressions in Hudson Bay and the Sahara Desert, ancient maps showing Antarctica's coastline free of ice, woolly mammoths found with un-swallowed food in their mouths) are presented as evidence of The HAB Theory's possible validity. These OOPARTS are interpreted to suggest that human civilizations have existed on earth many times, during intervals like the current 6,000 - odd years of recorded history only to disappear over and over in yet another "capsizing." Thus human civilizations rise from hunter/gatherer/shepherds to builders of cities and flying vehicles - only to see that civilization "rebooted" by the planet's repeated capsizing.
Citing OOPARTS in support of an out-of-the-mainstream theory is a technique used in other works, including for example the well-known: Chariots of the Gods (1968) by Erich von Däniken in which they are interpreted as evidence that extraterrestrial civilizations visited pre-modern earth and influenced historic and pre-historic events.
Imagining then trying to prevent an interesting end of the world scenario, is a well established plot-line in storytelling and fiction. Each tale will have unique dramatic twists. In The HAB Theory, another "capsizing" is overdue, perhaps delayed because the Southern polar ice cap is (by sheer coincidence), centered on top of a land continent, but nevertheless probable, because the Northern polar icecap is centered over the Arctic Ocean.
In the mid-1970s, global cooling was a more common popular headline than global warming, so that fit rather well with this plotline.
No form of a "capsizing" hypothesis is currently accepted among the scientific community. [4] [5]
The Snowball Earth is a geohistorical hypothesis that proposes during one or more of Earth's icehouse climates, the planet's surface became nearly entirely frozen with no liquid oceanic or surface water exposed to the atmosphere. The most academically mentioned period of such a global ice age is believed to have occurred some time before 650 mya during the Cryogenian period, which included at least two large glacial periods, the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations.
The polar climate regions are characterized by a lack of warm summers but with varying winters. Every month a polar climate has an average temperature of less than 10 °C (50 °F). Regions with a polar climate cover more than 20% of the Earth's area. Most of these regions are far from the equator and near the poles, and in this case, winter days are extremely short and summer days are extremely long. A polar climate consists of cool summers and very cold winters, which results in treeless tundra, glaciers, or a permanent or semi-permanent layer of ice. It is identified with the letter E in the Köppen climate classification.
Allan Wesley Eckert was an American novelist and playwright who specialized in historical novels for adults and children, and was also a naturalist. His novel Incident at Hawk's Hill (1971) was initially marketed to adults and selected by Reader's Digest Condensed Books. A runner-up for the Newbery Medal, it was afterward marketed as a children's novel and adapted by Disney for a television movie known as The Boy Who Talked to Badgers (1975).
Graham Bruce Hancock is a British writer who promotes pseudoarchaeological and other pseudoscientific theories involving ancient civilizations and hypothetical lost lands. Hancock speculates that an advanced ice age civilization with spiritual technology was destroyed in a cataclysm, but that its survivors passed on their knowledge to hunter-gatherers, giving rise to the earliest known civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, written in 1838, is the only complete novel by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaler called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile, black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is a 1961 American science fiction disaster film, produced and directed by Irwin Allen, and starring Walter Pidgeon and Robert Sterling. The supporting cast includes Peter Lorre, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Michael Ansara, and Frankie Avalon. The film's storyline was written by Irwin Allen and Charles Bennett. The opening title credits theme song was sung by Avalon. The film was distributed by 20th Century Fox.
Moonseed is a 1998 science fiction novel by British author Stephen Baxter, and the final book in the NASA Trilogy. The story envisions an alternate history in which the canceled Apollo missions went ahead as planned.
Mission of Gravity is a science fiction novel by American writer Hal Clement. The novel was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in April–July 1953. Its first hardcover book publication was in 1954, and it was first published as a paperback book in 1958. Along with the novel, many editions of the book also include "Whirligig World", an essay by Clement on creating the planet Mesklin that was first published in the June 1953 Astounding.
The cataclysmic pole shift hypothesis is a pseudo-scientific claim that there have been recent, geologically rapid shifts in the axis of rotation of Earth, causing calamities such as floods and tectonic events or relatively rapid climate changes.
Globus Cassus is an art project and book by Swiss architect and artist Christian Waldvogel presenting a conceptual transformation of planet Earth into a much bigger, hollow, artificial world with an ecosphere on its inner surface. It was the Swiss contribution to the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale and was awarded the gold medal in the category "Most beautiful books of the World" at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2005. It consists of a meticulous description of the transformation process, a narrative of its construction, and suggestions on the organizational workings on Globus Cassus.
Subterranean fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction, science fiction, or fantasy which focuses on fictional underground settings, sometimes at the center of the Earth or otherwise deep below the surface. The genre is based on, and has in turn influenced, the Hollow Earth theory. The earliest works in the genre were Enlightenment-era philosophical or allegorical works, in which the underground setting was often largely incidental. In the late 19th century, however, more pseudoscientific or proto-science-fictional motifs gained prevalence. Common themes have included a depiction of the underground world as more primitive than the surface, either culturally, technologically or biologically, or in some combination thereof. The former cases usually see the setting used as a venue for sword-and-sorcery fiction, while the latter often features cryptids or creatures extinct on the surface, such as dinosaurs or archaic humans. A less frequent theme has the underground world much more technologically advanced than the surface one, typically either as the refugium of a lost civilization, or as a secret base for space aliens.
Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization is a 1995 pseudoarcheology book by British writer Graham Hancock, which contends that an advanced civilization existed in prehistory, one which served as the common progenitor civilization to all subsequent known ancient historical ones. The author proposes that sometime around the end of the last ice age this civilization ended in cataclysm, but passed on to its inheritors profound knowledge of such things as astronomy, architecture and mathematics.
The phrase "Earth Changes" was coined by the American psychic Edgar Cayce in the 1930s in reference to his belief that the world would soon enter a series of cataclysmic events causing major alterations in human life on the planet.
Hugh Auchincloss Brown was an electrical engineer who advanced a theory of catastrophic pole shift. Brown claimed that massive accumulation of ice at the poles caused recurring tipping of the axis in cycles of approximately 4000–7500 years. He argued that because the earth wobbles on the axis and the crust slides on the mantle, a shift was demonstrably imminent, and suggested the use of nuclear explosions to break up the ice to forestall catastrophe.
Thongor of Lemuria is a fantasy novel by American writer Lin Carter, the second book of his Thongor series set on the mythical continent of Lemuria. It was first published in paperback by Ace Books in 1966. The author afterwards revised and expanded the text, in which form it was reissued as Thongor and the Dragon City, first published in paperback by Berkley Books in 1970. This retitled and revised edition became the standard edition for later reprintings.
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Thongor Against the Gods is a fantasy novel by American writer Lin Carter, the third book of his Thongor series set on the mythical continent of Lemuria. It was first published in paperback by Paperback Library in November 1967, and reissued by Warner Books in August 1979. The first British edition was published in paperback by Tandem in 1970, and reprinted in March 1973. An ebook edition was issued by Wildside Press in July 2015. The book has been translated into Japanese and French.
Thongor in the City of Magicians is a fantasy novel by American writer Lin Carter, the fourth book of his Thongor series set on the mythical continent of Lemuria. It was first published in paperback by Paperback Library in April 1968, and reissued by Warner Books in October 1979. The first British edition was published in paperback by Tandem in January 1970, and reprinted in March 1973. The book has been translated into Japanese and French.
Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus is a fantasy novel by American writer Lin Carter, the sixth book of his Thongor series set on the mythical continent of Lemuria. It was first published in paperback by Berkley Medallion in July 1970, and reprinted in June 1976. The first British edition was published in paperback by Tandem in August 1971, and reissued by Star in April 1979. The book has been translated into Japanese and French.
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