End of the world by snow?

February 9, 2013 4:00 PM

Apocalypse-by-blizzard-book-filter: What is this book that I read back in the '80s?

It was about a snowstorm that never ends (possibly caused in part by human's experiments with cloudseeding), burying everything and presumably causing man's demise. I could have sworn it was "Lucifer's Hammer," but I can't find any mention of a snowstorm in the plot summary, either on Wikipedia or Amazon. (Asking this on the heels of the blizzard is possibly only coincidence. This has been eating at me for a couple weeks.)

posted by computech_apolloniajames to media & arts (10 answers total)

Fallen Angels looks like a possibility, but it was published in 1991.
posted by Bruce H. at 4:08 PM on February 9

Is it Weather War? It came out in 1978. I think this is the book a meteorology professor had us read an excerpt from.
posted by plastic_animals at 4:12 PM on February 9

I don't think it's either of those. The book that I read ended with the White House collapsing from the weight of the accumulated snow, with the final sentence about the snow that kept falling.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 4:46 PM on February 9

From the Wikipedia summary of "The Day After Tomorrow":

The film was inspired by The Coming Global Superstorm, a book co-authored by Coast to Coast AM talk radio host Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. Strieber also wrote the film's novelization. The book "The Sixth Winter" written by Douglas Orgill and John Gribbin and published in 1979, follows a similar theme. So does the novel Ice!, by Arnold Federbush, published in 1978.
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:04 PM on February 9

And it's not The Snow, by Adam Roberts? Right story, but it comes out in 2004.
posted by escabeche at 5:58 PM on February 9

Short story not a novel, but A Pail of Air?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 3:06 AM on February 10

Ok, i started reading The Snow and this really sounds like it, so if it's actually not The Snow but something from the 1980s, I think your best strategy is to read reviews of The Snow until you find one that says "this is basically a reshash of ______ from the 1980s."
posted by escabeche at 8:44 AM on February 10

Was it Blizzard, by George Stone? Last sentence is something to the effect of, "The West Wing was collapsing under an 80-foot snowdrift."
posted by Kibby at 3:16 PM on February 10

Yes! That definitely sounds like the one! Thank you, Kibby!
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 4:37 PM on February 10

And thanks to everybody else for their answers!
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 4:55 PM on February 10