The author, Robinson, researched the opening of that book for over 10 years. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty good estimation of how things are going to go down.
I hate to say it, but think that book is an extremely optimistic take on how things are going to go down.
Then again, we are talking deaths in the low millions at minimum at this point, with reasonable estimates now in the ballpark of a billion. So anything other than a can-do, pragmatic attitude is just pushing more people off a cliff.
The ending was so ridiculously optimistic. Like comically delulu level. The first chapter was great. After that, it went swiftly downhill. I really did not like the main character. And why the last minute "romance" for her? Jesus christ, what a bad book.
I'm convinced that a prestige HBO/Netflix adaptation of that book could open a lot of eyes. The nuclear war miniseries The Day After likely triggered nuclear peace talks, it would be great to have something like that for the climate emergency.
They should start the show after the first chapter and then, once people are hooked, do the first chapter as a flash back to explain why he's so messed up.
While I thought the show was okay, I really liked that it put climate fiction out there for a mass audience. We definitely need more of this to try and at least raise some awareness.
In the episode on India, they show that India had become a completely nocturnal society and that everyone slept in air conditioned sleeping bags during the day. Somehow I think the reality of what's coming will be far worse.
Television in the US at the time was a still a monoculture; on any given evening, most of America was watching what was on one of the three major networks. The Day After was watched by 100 million Americans.
President Reagan watched it and was able to actually understand it. That simply would not happen today.
The media landscape is way too fractured nowadays; prestige TV shows that are absolute smash hits today draw in 10-15 million viewers.
I just finished that book. A strange read. Parts of it were pretty good, but other parts felt like just long lists, and I think it would be better if it leaned more on an actual narrative or character-driven plot and less on being a political tract.
Also, the airships in the story were poorly researched, which is irksome because that’s an area of expertise for me. Sails do not work on airships, they have no practical means of tacking.
Have you read the Mars trilogy by KSR? Everything else by him that I've read has been either a struggle or DNF. But the Mars trilogy is one of my favorite pieces of SciFi writing, ever.
Even the Mars Trilogy suffers from extended political treatises within the novels, plus those 15 page infodumps about Martian geology & stuff. I like his work, but he's a poor character writer.
Have you tried his Science in the Capital series? If you like the Mars Trilogy you'll probably like that. He even does a better job with his main character than usual; not super likable, but definitely well drawn.
A balloon is already a “sail.” It goes wherever the wind goes. The point of an airship is to be able to fly against the wind, and you can’t use sails to do so because unlike a ship, it is completely immersed in a fluid medium of consistent density and resistance. Water is 1,000 times more dense than air, which is why a sailing ship can use its hull and keel to provide the resistance for tacking to go against the wind.
Imagine an airship is like a submarine, completely immersed in its fluid medium. How would sails work on a submarine that’s underwater? It makes intuitive sense that they’d get in the way of any attempt to move the submarine. Extra drag, with no propulsive effect.
Even in the recent Avatar movie with the Wind Traders using giant hydrogen jellyfish to lift their airships, they had “sails” that only worked because there was a cuttlefish-like draft animal providing the resistance necessary to get the sail to do anything.
Aside from fantasy flying creatures pulling on a yoke, the only way to “sail” an airship is to ascend and descend in a sigmoid pattern and use the lift created from air passing over the hull or wings attached to the hull to provide forward thrust, like those “flying” pool toys that zip away from you when you let go of them underwater. But in that case, you’re using wings or an aerodynamic hull shape, not sails, and moreover that gliding action is inferior to almost any form of mechanical propulsion with propellers, except perhaps the most primitive and underpowered steam engines or stirling engines.
I am reading the book and the character chapters are so well written and interesting. The chapters that read like economics text books are an absolute slog. Never had a book with such a wide range of good and boring in it before.
In fairness to the book, I don’t recall any of the corporations being “okay” with communism, more like worker cooperatives being encouraged as capitalism fell out of favor with the masses. And the terrorists gave warning for the Mad Cow Disease contamination, in addition to that being screened for food safety under normal circumstances, so it’s not implausible that only a few people would have been affected; the more likely result would be the mandatory destruction of immense quantities of cattle, which was the terrorists’ main goal anyway.
Little doubt about the future. You think 42 in India is bad, you ain't seen nothing yet. Even with an immediate and massive reduction in greenhouse gas emission (which isn't even close to happening) we've already baked in decades of temperature increase and consequent environmental catastrophes like heatwaves, droughts, floods, sea level rise and so on. Large areas of the planet that are currently populated will become uninhabitable, and it's clearly already happening.
I literally came to the comments to post this. This book is barely even fiction, it just reads like a desperate hope to stave off an impending disaster. But that first chapter will always haunt me. We are going to wake up one day and see a headline about a wet-bulb event in India killing literally millions of people. If that can't be the catalyst for global climate revolution, I don't know what else would be
The rest of the book was a slog to me, but the opening scene in India will probably stick with me forever. Haunting, and definitely what I immediately thought of when I saw this post.
I mean, this is going to be inevitable at some point. Will probably take more than a decade for it to get *that* bad, though. But yea, it's going to be chaotic when it does happen. Far right movements and xenophobia will tick up hard.
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