Termination Shock

This is an interesting counterpoint to the Kim Stanley Robinson novel, Ministry of the Future. Where KSR's fiction dealt with climate change via bureaucracy and finance, Stephenson goes a little more cowboy. As I live in West Texas, I was impressed by how on-the-nose his depiction of the area felt, both the geography and the population. He even threw in an off-the-cuff reference to Permian Basin! I know, Stephenson is infamous for his excessive research. Well, not so much the research but his compulsion to share so much of that research, even if it doesn't always need to be there for the story to move forward. In this case, he was telling a big story with a lot of plot threads woven together, and I didn't really register any infodumps.

The characters are given good motivations, the plot moves forward in plausible ways, and things look like they might be solvable by the end. I'll be chewing on some of his ideas for a while longer, but if you're a Stephenson fan, or a fan of international climate change drama (they must exist), highly recommended.

The question at the heart of this book is what all the mid-league players (like your regular everyday billionaire or developing country) will do, when the major emitters reach a point of failure at dealing with climate change that becomes intolerable. That's an interesting and worthwhile question to ask (unfortunately).

While KSR dealt with very much the same thing early in Ministry For the Future, and did it in a crisp little 10 pages that I went back and read just now -- such a contrast to the 200+ pages of flab this book takes to even broach the forbidden subject of geoengineering -- Termination Shock does spend more time on the question's political complexities. To KSR, it's a stopgap and so only a point along the way and not to be lingered over, to Stephenson this is an interesting point of conflict to hang a thriller on.

Also a great joke about a six gun in texas, gotta give him that.

There's a problem when reading e-books: endings can sneak up on you. That happened to me last night, when I got my own termination shock. Wait, it's over? Already??returnreturnI enjoyed the heck out of this novel. A bit reminiscent of REAMDE, it pulls together some fascinating characters from different walks of life and travels the globe. In this case, the first voyage brings the Queen of the Netherlands to Waco, Texas, where the plane she is personally piloting has an unusually bumpy landing thanks to the sudden eruption of a herd of feral hogs (those scary beasts of Twitter meme-fame) onto the runway. They're being pursued by Red, an African-American/Native man who is pursuing the biggest one like Captain Ahab looking for his white whale. After dispatching the massive beast, Red and a contingent of the Cajun Navy (thanks to rising seas, their travels take them to places like Waco) he helps the royal group travel to meet the larger-than-life Texan who owns a fleet of giant truck stops and has come up with a plan to save the world from global warming. returnreturnMeanwhile, a Canadian Sikh who has traveled to India is finding his way into the world of a particularly acrobatic martial art by hanging out at gudwaras and practicing gatka there. He falls in with a Uyghar refugee, two Sikh football hooligans from England, and a New Zealand documentary maker. They eventually travel to the disputed border with China, where a tense diplomacy is played out by men armed only with sticks, rocks, and competing YouTube videos. Both storylines are vividly presented and half the fun is trying to work out how they'll converge, as they eventually do. returnreturnThe Texan's plan involves shooting an element (one that was considered just a dirty part of crude oil) into the stratosphere with a battery of Texas-sized guns. Of course, a change in climate will advantage some (including the Netherlands, hence the queen's presence) and disadvantage others, which puts the whole scheme into the center of a geopolitical struggle which involves high technology, social media, and ... sticks. returnreturnSome of my terminal shock was due to electronic files not having the weight of pages being gradually moved from right to left, signaling the approaching conclusion. But it also seemed surprisingly abrupt, leaving big questions unresolved (though it has bang-up action scenes and plenty of tension). I think I hoped for something more nuanced about what happens next, since the narrative is about competing ideas about how to deal with the climate emergency. There is a gesture toward a future (and I'm SO glad the author didn't indulged in an apocalyptic every-man-for-himself dystopian hellscape/libertarian fantasy of human behavior) but I wanted a slightly smoother landing. Maybe that's the point, though - we have no idea what the future holds, but we have a pretty good idea of what happens if we ignore it as we have for decades. returnreturnIt will make you think, and you'll be tremendously entertained while doing it.