Fred M White was a proflific author of stories for magazines and periodicals at the end of the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth. In 1903 he developed a personal niche in the London Catastrophe genre. In this collection we have all six of them. The quality varies with the nature of the threat - nobody is going to get overexcited at a Stock Market Fraud ('A Bubble Burst'), though how it is done is intriguing. On the other hand, water-borne pestilence ('The River of Death') is hugely relevant to us 120 years later, something even a dedicated Victorian doom-monger could never have envisaged.
Fred White, unlike Richard Jefferies who pioneered the genre (After London, 1886) is an optimist. His 'doomed' London always survives. Like Jefferies, however, he tends towards the consequences of man interfering with nature - smog ('The Four Days' Night'), big freeze ('The Four White Days') and pollution ('The Dust of Death' and the aforemention 'River of Death'). The exception is 'The Invisible Force' in which an electric spark ignites a gas leak and blows up the Tube network, also relevant today, though the way it happens is not.
My favourites were 'Invisble Force' and 'River of Death', but all fizzed with life and ideas. White has a tendency to rely on experts in their field whereas we have been explicitly told by our political masters to ignore them. Not that doing so will ever lead to disaster ... surely?
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