Floyd
Fresnel
Reminds me of a sub-story in Lucifer's Hammer, where a comet lands in the Atlantic, and a ton of surfers ride The Big One into NYC until, one by one, they go under. The story follows the last man standing, who dies impacting the side of a skyscraper. xd


Wrong coast, wrong city. I had the rare good fortune to talk to Larry Niven across a round table about that and other L.A. centric short stories he wrote back in the day.

He wrote a similar survival short story called "Inconstant Moon" about a solar flair triggered event which caused a tidal reaction that flooded the West coast (as well as flattened the other side of the planet).

Sadly we all know now that any seismic triggered event would not generate a surfable wave. It would look more like a 400 foot tall version of the Xmas tsunami videos we saw from Indonesia years back. A wall of foam and anything picked up along the way.

Still makes for a nice mental image.
Eh, I read it last summer, and it wasn't Lucifer's Hammer, it was Playgrounds of the Mind and/or Neutron Star, which had excerpts from Lucifer's Hammer.

And in Inconstant Moon, that was boiling and precipitation, not an actual tsunami. It was just raining basketball-sized drops.