This reminded me of the cataclysmic conclusion to The Golden Torc, part two of a four-part scifi/fantasy series, The Saga of Pliocene Exile. If you’ve read it, you know what I’m speaking of; if you haven’t, the Strait of Gilbraltar is created by an unimaginably powerful, revenge-mad character, with horrific consequences for… But I’ll not venture into any further spoilers.
The geologic period in which the actual flood occurred aligns with one timeline of the novel series and I have to wonder whether the author deliberately chose that era with that catastrophe in mind as part of the plotting.
It’s one thing to take an event from history and use it to build a novel around, but how many authors have taken such a remote-in-time (and perhaps not widely known) event from before humans were around to experience it and to pass the knowledge down orally, and created a fictional world in which to place it?
ETA: Reading down to the end of the Wikipedia article, yes, the Zanclean Flood was just one part of the research into several areas Julian May explored in creating this world.
Not quite sure I’m getting what you are after. The one that comes to mind, which might fit the bill is Harry Harrison’s West of Eden series.
In this series the Earth dodged the meteor at the end of the Cretaceous, allowing for an advanced reptilian civilisation to evolve in one part of the (configured as now, since plate tectonics just go on) Earth. But on another part of the Earth, a more standard evolutionary narrative unfolds so there is the inevitable encounter between a Homo sapiens type (but not quite since the precursor primates are different) with the lizard folk.
As a sci-fi reader back then, I thought it was okay. Not earth-shattering (ironic, given the central premise).
I had considered those books but thought it might not qualify because the Extinction event is a pretty well known event, compared to many. And it keeps on getting adapted, including the snoozefest “65”.
I loved the series when I first read it as a pre-teen in the 80s, but when I went back to it later it felt that it did the bio-tech (which for the time was a really rare option) really well, and society building for the dinos. The whole human character felt… unhelpful and unneeded actually on the re-read.
Thinking back on The Saga of Pliocene Exile reminds me that another catastrophe, the Tunguska event, is incorporated into the plot, although there the author unabashedly yanks it out of its historic time, at least as a template for an important plot sequence, with a very different posited cause.
You mean the crash of the Tanu/Firvulag spaceship? That was based on a real asteroid impact site in Europe in prehistory (though May moved it from 14 million years ago to 3 million) (Nördlinger Ries - Wikipedia). Or am I forgetting another incident?
In Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Place stories the Tunguska Event was actually the unexpected result of Nikola Tesla’s experiments in wireless energy transmission; he deliberately created his reputation as a lunatic in order to discredit his research so nobody would duplicate it.
In Larry Niven’s The Green Marauder an ancient (really ancient) alien traveler talks about the civilization that lived on Earth the last time she was there. A race that was destroyed two billion years ago when green plants oxygenated the atmosphere and killed nearly all existing life.
In a Sherlock Holmes pastiche Holmes and WAtson are lured to Siberia by a series of clues ingeniously laid down by Professor Moriarty so that they’d be at the point the Tunguska meteorite struck.
Moriarty, of course, gained fame due to his paper The Dynamics of an Asteroid.
Harry Turtledove’s novella Down in the Bottomlands (which won a Hugo for “Best Novella” in 1994) describes an alternate history situation i which the Mediterranean does NOT flood, but it looks as if it’s about to.
Somewhat similar, in that it deals with the flooding of Mediterranean lowlands, is Jules Verne’s The Invasion of the Sea (L’Invasion de la mer). It was published in 1905, but the first complete English translation didn’t appear until almost a century later, in 1901.It’s about the flooding of a small part of the Sahara to create an “inland sea”. This was something that was actually contemplated, an would probably have worked, but it was never carried out. It would’ve been a salt sea, of course, but it was felt that it would moderate the climate and encourage rainfall.
L. Sprague de Camp wrote several sequels to his classic A Gun for Dinosaur later in his life, and collected them in Rivers of Time, which includes a story about the dinosaur-killing meteor.