IT IS nice to find a novel about climate change that doesn鈥檛 have copious references. And, unlike Michael Crichton in State of Fear, Kim Stanley Robinson gets his climate science broadly right. Indeed, Robinson is generally at his best when painting the backdrop of science and scientists at work.
Unfortunately, Crichton is the better storyteller. This volume, the third in Robinson鈥檚 鈥淪cience in the Capitol鈥� trilogy, spends 200 pages setting things up nicely as the waters of rising oceans and political intrigue lap around the White House, only to founder in an unsatisfying conclusion.
The previous two books portray a US of the near future in denial about the gathering storm of abrupt climate change. Then eco-minded senator Phil Case wins the presidency, and this volume reveals how flawed functionaries of the Washington DC political system try to help him head off looming catastrophe during his first 60 days in office.
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The book opens with the good news that the world鈥檚 insurance industry has funded a mass salting operation in the far North Atlantic that has successfully re-started the Gulf Stream. Case鈥檚 team then gets working on covering Russia鈥檚 forests with carbon-absorbing lichen.
Realising that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is imminent and unstoppable, our heroes hatch a plan to counter sea-level rise by pumping thousands of cubic kilometres of seawater into inland desert basins, and also onto the East Antarctic ice sheet to refreeze it. Cue global action? Maybe, but it is off-stage and we hear little of it. Our heroes, mired in their personal crises, barely leave the Washington Beltway. So in the end this is perhaps more political thriller than realistic speculative/science fiction.
鈥淥ur heroes, mired in crises, barely leave the Beltway鈥�
Even so, although one central character delivers one of the most devastating put-downs of the World Bank I have ever read, somehow the politics goes off half-cocked. Having set up a conflict between science and capitalism, Robinson fails to follow through. Unless, that is, you take his scarcely believable denouement 鈥� US naval subs turn up off China to help the Beijing government go green 鈥� as an indicator of the virtues of socialism.
In the end, what I found most irritating was that the future of the planet was discussed entirely as a piece of Washington theatre. No UN, no Europe, no Africa, no political actors outside the Beltway 鈥� not even a sense of a global human catastrophe being played out. I finished the book thinking that it risks becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Sixty Days & Counting
HarperCollins
