With Storm, first published in 1941, George R. Stewart invented a new genre of fiction, what we might today call the eco-novel. California had been plunged in drought throughout the summer and fall, when, just after the new year, half a world away, a ship on the Pacific reports an unusual barometric reading. In San Francisco, a junior meteorologist in the weather bureau takes note of the anomaly and plots “an incipient little whorl” on the weather map, a developing storm, he suspects, that he pr...