Mother Of Storms by John Barnes in 1994

Background: 21st century, Washington has been nuked and the UN runs much of the world. A UN tactical nuke action against land-grabbing Siberians results in the release of massive amounts of clathrate-trapped methane. In several days, global warming picks up and spawns a massive Pacific hurricane that proceeds to demolish the planet.

While massive storms have some entertainment value, I liked most his chapters on information retrieval, artificial intelligence and space. These three ideas pretty much show up out of the blue 70 pages into the book, and help sustain interest, so that you can read it from the action part, or what technology gets unveiled next. The plot follows the storm concept, i.e. starting off complex like chaos, and then condenses into one big storm that you can't really predict.

It seemed almost as good as EndersGame (say EG was 9/10, this would be 7.5/10), but John Barnes certainly doesn't write like a Mormon (severely objectionable content, but if a child-killer didn't bother you...) or a capitalist (this book has no sequel, but should). FYI, I haven't read fiction in a while (year?), so this provided a refreshing break (and may have skewed my idea of how it ranks, caveat lector)....