This is a big book about a lot of things. Knowing that destruction is around the corner and doing almost nothing about it. Using a big crisis to leverThis is a big book about a lot of things. Knowing that destruction is around the corner and doing almost nothing about it. Using a big crisis to leverage personal gain. The Kantian imperative. Rebecca Solnit's observations about disasters. Lovecraftian horrors who hate us. Post-humanism. Plucky bands of space scavengers. Deeply traumatized soldiers. Scientists made of flesh and scientists made of mechanical insects.
In a lot of ways, this is a space opera retelling of Death's fight with the Auditors in Discworld. Only instead of Susan as his secret weapon, it's a band of deeply traumatized scavengers, spies, scientists, soldiers, and one post-human guy name Idris doing their best both against an existential horror that turns planets into abstract art and powerful forces in their own civilization that are looking to win some value out of the apocalypses.
I enjoyed reading it. I'm not sure how the pieces work together. Like Idris through much of this, I can almost see something deep and important.
A hopeful novel about the coming climate catastrophe.
The story is told from the perspective of Brooks Palazzo, a 19 year old living in Burbank a geneA hopeful novel about the coming climate catastrophe.
The story is told from the perspective of Brooks Palazzo, a 19 year old living in Burbank a generation or two from now. Since then and now, the seas rose, coastal cities largely fell, forests burned and glaciers melted.
But the plutocrats and accelerationists took to the seas and the New Green Deal finally passed. Things did get better.
Brooks's parents were heroes who accepted Canada's call for help to safe Calgary from the rising waters of its flood plain. He was orphaned when a plague hit. His grandfather, who feared the future his son was helping to build, took him in. There was love but no fondness.
Grandpa was a Maga. The Magas hated the Green New Deal; the right of everyone to a job; and the right of internal climate refugees to migrate to new cities. He believed we were in a lifeboat and couldn't take anymore people in.
Grandpa dies and Brooks inherits his house just as a refugee caravan comes to town. Brooks is one of the people who gets to help shape Burbank's response. Generous welcome or barred doors? Meanwhile, the Flotilla of plutocrats is arguing for rugged individualism, never mind that many will die. Strengthens the strain.
This book is joyful, didactic, heartbreaking, and hopeful. Awesome people take the time to educate Brooks about the real fights -- what we owe each other; how we get exploited and how we can stand together to stop it; what it takes to make a good legal argument or a good shelter -- and Brooks is earnest enough to listen.
It's not a perfect book. The speechifying is intrusive at times. Doctorow has a lot to say and while I love him saying it, there's time it took me out of the story. He also seems to be taking on Chekhov's Gun in a way that I'm not sure needed to be tackled. The female characters were astonishingly cool and smart in a way that makes me terribly skeptical they really would have gone for this kid.
But it was one of the best books I read this year. I love Cory Doctorow. How he can stare straight into the face of the forces making the world demonstrably worse and still be hopeful impresses the hell out of me. ...more
Utopian, dystopian, hopeful, grim, elegiac, overwhelming, unsettling, full of grief, full of joy. I suspect this book will haunt me the way Aurora hauUtopian, dystopian, hopeful, grim, elegiac, overwhelming, unsettling, full of grief, full of joy. I suspect this book will haunt me the way Aurora haunts me.
One day in the near future, a heat wave hits India and twenty million people die. In one village, only one man survives, Frank, an aid worker who had a few more resources and a bit more luck. He survives deeply burned and deeply scared. After years of therapy, he tries to join an Indian ecoterrorism group, The Children of Kali. They will not have him. But they encourage him to freelance.
Meanwhile, the Ministry for the Future is the United Nations agency tasked with speaking for the future as the climate and economic crises accelerate. Through most of this book, it is run by an Irish bureaucrat, Mary, who had been a political leader once upon a time. Mary is doing her best with her tiny team. One night, Frank kidnaps her and howls in anguish that she is not doing enough. She retorts she's doing all she can. But 20 million dead. Extinction accelerating and oceans rising. When her Switzers come, he escapes into the night. But his words echo.
Mary asks her chief of staff if they should have a black-ops wing. Turns out they might already. She maintains -- mostly -- plausible deniability. As she lobbies bankers to establish new currencies back by carbon sequestration and somebody knocks planes out of the sky and coal fired power plants out of commission. At some point, her chief of staff might himself claim to be Kali and ask the children to stand down. (391). Chiefs of staff are freaking terrifying.
It's a strange book. Heroic scientists and engineers stop the glaciers from sliding into the ocean - some dying in the process -- and heroic kayakers we meet for an instant pluck strangers and neighbors from the flooded streets and save them from the flood, never to be seen again. Through efforts big and small, good and bloody, CO2 levels drop and the seas recede.
There's a lot of death. And also habitat corridors and a general repudiation of extractive capitalism. Some of our survivors watch a family of wolverines eat a dead deer. It's affirming and terrible.
Among the bits I particularly liked:
Remember what Margaret Thatcher said? There is no such thing as society! We laughed out loud. For a while we couldn't stop laughing. Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real. A smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure. It's a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers. The kid of stupidity that should be put in jail." (169)
Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization, and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long. (240)
Everyone know me but no one can tell me. No one knows me even though everyone has heard my name. Everyone talking together makes something that seems like me but is not me. Everyone doing things in the world makes me. I am blood in the streets, the catastrophe you can never forget. I am the tide running under the world that no one sees or feels. I happen in the present but am told only in the future, and then the think they think they speak of the past, but really they are always speaking about the present. I do not exist and yet I am everything.
You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good. (385)
The story jumps from hand to hand. From Frank to Mary. From a slave in a mine to a privileged asshole at Davos. From a photon to history ("Now make me good."). From blockchain to taxes. From a refugee to a kayaker plucking people from a flood. From debt strikers to a scientist on a glacier. Saving the world will take all of us.
I hear a rumor this is the last Kim Stanley Robinson novel. If so, it is a worthy capstone....more
Brilliant conceptual sequel to KSR’s marvelous Science in the Capitol series. Science does not prevail and the seas do rise. The financial markets colBrilliant conceptual sequel to KSR’s marvelous Science in the Capitol series. Science does not prevail and the seas do rise. The financial markets collapse. The US government bails them out and leaves the tax payers with the bill. New York becomes something akin to Venice; New York skyscrapers diamond sheathed islands in the tide lands.
We follow some of the residents of one high rise as they navigate the rising waters. Between them and their ex spouses, they tell a story of our civilization transforming; our id monsters clashing with our higher aspirations on drowned streets.
In the end, the book is less about the rising waters than about the clash between democracy and capitalism.
The book begins: “The sun is always just about to rise.” (1). Which is true for most of the people on Mercury. They either walk in the predawn light oThe book begins: “The sun is always just about to rise.” (1). Which is true for most of the people on Mercury. They either walk in the predawn light or live in the one city, Terminator, that circles Mercury in that same predawn light, driven by the sun like a remote controlled car. The “heat of the coming day expands the tracks, and the city’s undercarriage is tightly sleeved over them; so sunlight drives the city west.” (5). Always announcing the dawn. Until the tracks are attacked and the city melts in the bright light of day.
Most of the book follows Swan Er Hong, the privileged granddaughter of the 7th Lion of Mercury. In Swan's exuberant youth, she designed worlds; little terraria built in the interior of asteroids; open on one end to the sun, engineered as little reservoirs of life as ends to themselves or for the day when Earth can welcome her nonhuman children home again. She has become grumpy with age. Once her city was smashed from the sky, she became positively shrill. She inserts herself into her grandmother’s attempt to save the human race from . . . well, “itself” isn’t quite right. History is closer. From something Swan herself (along with so many others) carries around in her head.
The book is a challenge. Captain Exposition does not show up to explain the world to a clueless POV character (our POV character knows this world better than we ever can). Instead, Wiki-Exposition appears in little passages between the chapters that begin and end as if we’re skimming down passages we already know well, without the standard capitalization and periods that normally signal beginnings and ends. Sometimes, they are awesome, viz:
“all the invisible events make the history of that time hard to write. And all the events continued to occur against the most intense resistance of time, material, and human recalcitrance – human fear, in fact, seizing with a desperate grip imagined props out of the past that were somehow felt to hold the world together. Because of this, there is still and always the risk of utter failure and mad gibbering extinction. There is no alternative to continuing to struggle.” (553)
Swan meets one of the villains in an idyllic world she helped make. They play an inane game. Balls clacking and bouncing through systems can do a lot of good, a lot of damage. She, of course, ends up being one of the heroes of the future, even though she remains grumpy, self centered, and kinda arrogant. Though she has moments of great insight, such as:
“No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn’t true. Each part of the triune brain had its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. That’s good is what’s good for the land. So when you worked as if on the hunt, in light and warmth, at making a landscape – some pace for people to live in for ages to come – then you were triunely happy. Surely that should be enough.” 542.
There were things I loved about this book. Outside of Earth itself, no one hesitates to save each other. I want to believe in that future. The children we sent up the space elevators want to save Earth. I want to believe that.
[mild spoiler ahead]
In a singularly heroic moment, the crew of a ship slam it into a swarm of those billiard balls to save a world. Anyone who can put on a space suit evacuate in one; those who can’t go on the life rafts. This passage was awesome:
“Rescue vessels had been alerted and were already on their way, so everyone would be picked up within hours rather than days. It would all be fine. “Still, it was a spooky thing to dive off an accelerating spaceship into blackness and stars, clothed in nothing but a personal suit. Many a round-eyed person entered the lock, and Swan could sympathize, even though in ordinary circumstances she liked this kind of thing. “Some lock groups jumped out together, holding hands, hoping to stay together; once the ones still inside saw this on the screens, it became something almost every group tried to do. They were social primates, they would take the risk together. No one wanted to die alone.” (482)
[end spoiler] Brought a tear to my eye.
There’s a lot in this book. A meditation on society, capitalism, using others as means to an end, terraforming, genetic engineering, gender thwarting, the possibilities of surviving the sixth great extinction, artificial intelligence, human speciation, on “vampiric rich people moving around the Earth performing a complicated kleptoparasitism on the poor," on becoming something wonderful.
I know there was a lot in this book I did not get. I did not get the meta-significance of all the circles: each planet in its orbit; the fights on the various worlds on the lengths of days planets should be have (such things can be managed with billiard balls of sufficient force) the management of all the circles of life; predators and prey, each eating one another, until the end. I did not get the significance of the box of eyeballs until way too late. I did not think about poor Swan and her frog-man (a genetically engineered scientist from Titan named Wahram) walking around Mercury in the tunnel beneath the train tracks after the city was attacked), like Ra himself piloting the boat of the sun through the darkness or through the sky until they were standing on Olympus Mons.
I don’t understand why KSR made his main POV character so unlikeable. I do not understand why people fall for her. There’s probably something in there about us all being in this together, even with the people who are offputting. But I’m not sure.
This is not a book about the hero's journey in space. Swan and her beau, Wahram, do return the gifts of the solar system to earth in a wonderful, annoying, arrest-worthy way, but it's not the climax of the story; it's a thing they do to solve a problem. Because the Earth is full of poverty and kleptocrats. "No matter what they did, it seemed that the misery of the forgotten ones would keep pulling civilization down, like an anchor they had tied around their own neck. Terran elites would stay on top of an artificial Great Chain of Being until it snapped and everyone fell into the void. A pathetic Gotterdammerung, stupid and banal, and yet still horrible." (378).
"There's no solution but justice for everyone. It's the only thing that will make us safe." (356). So they rebuild Florida and return the animals in bubbles. Swan runs with wolves for a while, before she is rescued by a helicopter.
It's less a heroic tale of science fictional daring do, more of annals of a future history. These things happened and made a better world. Though they do identify some of the baddies who kill and kill to make the worlds they want.
Re-reading it a decade later, I'm struck by how brutal KSR is to the animals brought into space. Humans are almost always saved. The animals we brought with almost never are. Swan bitterly morns this at one point but it might just be that the deer she leaves behind in her beloved city are in her eyeline. That was unsettling.
There is a character who goes up a space elevator in a worm bin. There’s a lot there.
The book ends, “This is for life.” (561). There is no alternative to continuing to struggle. This I believe. And I’m sure Kim Stanley Robinson has something to do with that....more
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