The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse

The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse is a 2010 science fiction novel by Dale Pendell, featuring minor prehistoric elements. It follows historical events and changing geography in the near and far future, after humanity is nearly wiped out by an apocalyptic plague in the year 2020. These changes are told in a combination of omniscient "panoptics", describing general trends in different time periods, with an emphasis on climatic changes, and small-scale vignettes of widely varying formats and lengths, presented as documents compiled by a far-future "Colleagues of Thermocene Studies" group. While the panoptics feature a global perspective, the vignettes focus on the "Great Bay", an inland sea in California created by rising sea levels, particularly a loose affiliation of societies called the Shasta-Tehachapi Confederation of Free Communities.

Plot
In 2020, after two engineered plagues created by the American and Chinese militaries are released into the wild, the majority of the human population of Earth die in a couple of years. Chaos and starvation claim more lives, until the continental United States is left with only a couple million people and no functional government. While there is widespread chaos and starvation in the years immediately following the plague, the survivors are generally able to establish functioning communities quickly. Some groups attempt to recreate pre-collapse social structures, but more often communities choose to re-organize based on religious affiliations, ethical beliefs, ethnicity, and other bases. In general, communities are small and there is extreme diversity in organization and customs between communities. Small amounts of cross-oceanic travel continue for decades after the collapse.

In the decades after the collapse, attempts are made by many communities to continue or recreate industrial processes, but this proves very difficult. While there are some successes early on, difficulties in maintenance, materials, and education cause them to fail sooner or later. Within 200 years, technology has regressed to a pre-industrial level, with a journey from California to Colorado taking four months. While historical knowledge continues to circulate for hundreds of years afterwards, literacy declines precipitously, with only a few societies retaining it. After 1000 years, writing is almost unknown, languages in California have diversified into unintelligibility even across small distances, and the collapse has faded into myth. In the millenia that follow, humanity remains at a roughly stone-bronze age level of technology, with organized societies emerging and collapsing more rapidly than they did in the past.

These social changes are exacerbated by climatic changes, in which the effects of global warming continue to compound long after industrial society disappears, resulting in rising sea levels across the globe, and the formation of an inland sea in California (the "Great Bay"). These are portrayed as being so rapid that an extreme change in sea level can be observed across a single human lifetime, contributing to the decline of settled societies and agriculture. Ten millenia after the collapse, the Earth settles back into a new glacial period as sea levels and global temperatures sink.

A memorandum at the beginning of the novel describes the archaeological excavation of a pre-collapse cemetery by technologically advanced civilization, suggesting that a human civilization re-emerges again in the far future. This would make the book, and the vignettes within, a historical study of that far future society ("Colleagues of Thermocene Studies"), which regards the entire period from the collapse to the onset of the new glacial period as constituting the "Thermocene".