Tambora

You are standing in a field in New England in July, and it is snowing. Not a flurry. Snow. The corn is black. The sheep are dead. You have never seen anything like this, and neither has anyone alive, and none of you know why — because the reason is eight thousand miles away and it happened fourteen months ago and the word hasn't reached you yet. In April of 1815, a mountain called Tambora exploded with a force so vast that people heard it in Sumatra, twelve hundred miles distant, and thought it was cannon fire. It threw so much ash and sulfur into the upper air that the sky over the entire planet dimmed for more than a year. Harvests failed from China to Ireland. Grain prices doubled, then doubled again. Tens of thousands starved. In Switzerland, a group of writers sheltering indoors from the unnatural cold held a ghost-story competition to pass the time — and one of them, a teenager named Mary, wrote something that would outlast every government on the continent. Tambora didn't just kill crops. It killed a world that had existed since the last ice age, forced the largest human migration in a century, and may have invented the bicycle — because so many horses starved that engineers began searching for a machine to replace them. One mountain. One eruption. The whole nineteenth century, bent.