The Age of Miracles

There is a reason why Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel The Age of Miracles is scheduled to be released on June 21 (2012).

June 21 is the longest day of the year and the novel, an apocalyptic meditation on the end of the world, predicts that in the aftermath of massive earthquakes that shook Japan on March 11, 2011, the earth will be experiencing slower rotations and 48+ hour days.

The scientific rationale is as follows:

We now know that the massive earthquake that struck that country on 11 March shifted the planet inches on its axis, shortening the earth's day by a fraction of a second. In The Age of Miracles, which is told through the voice of a 10-year-old Californian girl named Julia, an earthquake shakes the planet but causes the opposite effect [...] The earth's rotation slows and days lengthen, first by six minutes, then 12, then 24. As the phenomenon – known as "the slowing" – takes hold, days stretch to 48 hours, and gravity weakens, with birds ceasing to fly and astronauts stranded far from earth.

Maureen Dowd puts Thompson's novel in an emergent literary tradition called "cosmophobia," which is literally a fear caused by a conviction that a cosmic disaster--like collision of stars--is imminent.

But, as Dowd suggests, voicing the skepticism of scientists David Morrison (Senior Scientist at NASA), cosmophobia is just another largely imaginary fear which isn't going to materialize into reality anytime soon, but will generate money for those who pedal it successfully.

Indeed Thompson's novel has struck a pot of gold in both the U.S. and Western Europe, and has fetched her a pre-release advance of 1 million dollars.