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Termination Shock
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Science Fiction (2021)A visionary technothriller about climate change.
Neal Stephenson's sweeping, prescient new novel transports readers to a near-future world where the greenhouse effect has inexorably resulted in a whirling-dervish troposphere of superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, merciless heat waves, and virulent, deadly pandemics.
One man has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as "elemental." But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied?
Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shock brings together a disparate group of characters from different cultures and continents who grapple with the real-life repercussions of global warming. Ultimately, it asks the question: Might the cure be worse than the disease?
Neal Stephenson's sweeping, prescient new novel transports readers to a near-future world where the greenhouse effect has inexorably resulted in a whirling-dervish troposphere of superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, merciless heat waves, and virulent, deadly pandemics.
One man has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as "elemental." But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied?
Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shock brings together a disparate group of characters from different cultures and continents who grapple with the real-life repercussions of global warming. Ultimately, it asks the question: Might the cure be worse than the disease?
708 pages, Hardcover
First published October 27, 2021
About the author
Neal Stephenson
130 books27.5k followersNeal Stephenson is the author of Reamde, Anathem, and the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), as well as Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,087 reviews
July 24, 2024
I read this latest ultra-near-future story of science fiction by Neal Stephenson on a road trip through the American West. We drove under smoky skies and through swirling wildfire ash. We whipped through thousands of acres of desert transformed into open-air ag factories, irrigated by water trapped by a dam that is four times the size of the big pyramid at Giza. We skirted or traversed some 7 current reservations and countless lands previously promised to and then taken back from the people who already lived there. We were still in the throes of an airborne epidemic yet the fierce individualists of flyover country murmured behind our backs when we went to get hotel coffee wearing a mask. "Think she's gonna rob the place?" No, old-timer, I'm just trying to keep us all alive long enough for you to finish that cigarette you're smoking indoors.
SIGH.
So EVERY PAGE of this rip-roaring globe-trotting totally wonkish yet completely entertaining novel about climate change ("climate change," tsk how have I been converted to this toothless term? It's global fucking warming, not menopause. Not that menopause isn't catastrophic in its own right) had something that pertained to my lived experience RIGHT NOW. You really ought to read it. It's a cogent way to learn about solar geoengineering, Sikh martial arts, the Dutch monarchy, copper and sulfur mining, AND the Line of Actual Control, an incredibly important thing that I didn't know anything about until I read about it in a Neal Stephenson novel and then spent 30 minutes googling -- something a character in this book does in exactly the same way some hundred pages after I did it. Talk about your near-future.
You could read about these things in MIT Technology Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019...) or on The Bridge (https://thebridge.in/featured/gatka-t...) or you could charge your way through this book like I did.
In the vernacular of fifteen years ago Internet language (me I'm going to write near-past science fiction when I retire): this is relevant to my interests.
SIGH.
So EVERY PAGE of this rip-roaring globe-trotting totally wonkish yet completely entertaining novel about climate change ("climate change," tsk how have I been converted to this toothless term? It's global fucking warming, not menopause. Not that menopause isn't catastrophic in its own right) had something that pertained to my lived experience RIGHT NOW. You really ought to read it. It's a cogent way to learn about solar geoengineering, Sikh martial arts, the Dutch monarchy, copper and sulfur mining, AND the Line of Actual Control, an incredibly important thing that I didn't know anything about until I read about it in a Neal Stephenson novel and then spent 30 minutes googling -- something a character in this book does in exactly the same way some hundred pages after I did it. Talk about your near-future.
You could read about these things in MIT Technology Review (https://www.technologyreview.com/2019...) or on The Bridge (https://thebridge.in/featured/gatka-t...) or you could charge your way through this book like I did.
In the vernacular of fifteen years ago Internet language (me I'm going to write near-past science fiction when I retire): this is relevant to my interests.
August 28, 2021
Termination Shock is described as a "techno-thriller about climate change," but I'm not sure it fully delivers on its promise. It is, for one, mostly not thrilling. And while it is certainly about climate change, Stephenson used climate change issues more as a conduit for the rest of the story--in other words, we learn about the climate setting and how it impacts decisions that drive the story but we don't actually see much about how those decisions then impact the climate.
The setting is legitimately interesting. We're in a near future where climate change has driven up temperatures, requiring fancy technology simply to last outside during the daytime in the southern United States. Water levels are rising, threatening low-lying areas around the world. Stephenson also periodically mentions things like COVID-24 and COVID-27, suggesting recurrences of the coronavirus, with other occasional mentions of technology that allows one to scan for exposure risk, but frankly this felt a bit forced. There also seem to have been at least some shifts in global status of certain powerful countries, though we're left to infer that from circumstantial evidence.
Within that setting, we start with a fun opening scene, where the queen of the Netherlands is piloting her plane to Texas, forced to make an emergency landing in Waco because of a storm in Houston, and ultimately crashes into a herd of pigs and also some alligators that have gotten onto the runway. This starts the queen (generally known as Saskia) and her entourage on a trip to meet up with J.R. Schmidt, a wealthy Texan who owns a series of fuel superstations and is known publicly by a caricatured persona that might hide his actual canniness. We also meet Rufus, who's life has been focused on searching for his own Moby Dick, a giant wild pig on which he seeks his revenge. Saskia is headed to meet J.R. for some sort of larger, secret conference that is the impetus for the rest of the story and has potential repercussions for the climate worldwide. There are other characters picked up in the course of this piece of the storyline, but the reality is that there's very little excitement for a long time once we're off the Waco airport runway. The journey to Texas and the covert meeting in the desert there slowly introduce us to the world we're in and the primary challenge that drives the book, but much of the narrative throughout here is Stephenson's love affair with telling us all about the ideas he has rather than anything that might be truly called thrilling. It's interesting enough, but it's a slow burn.
The one semi-thrilling thing that is interspersed with Saskia's storyline is the story of Laks, a Canadian sikh who travels to the Punjab and eventually finds his way to the Line of Actual Control where he engages in fighting the Chinese with sticks and rocks. I hoped for more from this, but this portion of the storyline is really just to set context for the later part of the story, which has nothing to do with the Line of Actual Control.
There's other political semi-intrigue along the way, and various machinations in scattered parts of the world. Certain characters that seem like they will be key end up being relatively unimportant. We spend time with certain events that seem extraneous to the story. And at least one main character opts out of the storyline for reasons that are unexplained and, to me, incomprehensible.
The pace may be said to pick up after about 450 or 500 pages, as we slowly approach the climactic showdown on J.R.'s Texas property, which finally ties many of the storylines together in a reasonably thrilling climax. But it's a lot of buildup for the actual payoff, which is itself helped along by at least one deus ex machina and ultimately feels less satisfying that Stephenson's best work.
I leave this book feeling that there was much of interest but little that fully delivered on its promise. I have the impression that Stephenson had a lot of fascinating ideas about climate change and what the world might look like in another 15 years, and wanted very much to tell us all about his ideas in deep detail (as he is wont to do), and then tried to graft a thriller onto that foundation. So the ideas are neat but the plot felt scattered, and it doesn't help that the characters are generally one-dimensional. And in the end we don't really see how the climate ideas Stephenson so lovingly details actually impact the world, which feels like a letdown, especially since the ideas themselves might fairly be said to be optimistic.
In the end, a solid 3 stars. Good enough, but in my opinion not in the same league as much of Stephenson's previous work.
Thank you to William Morrow and to Goodreads Giveaways for the ARC of this book.
The setting is legitimately interesting. We're in a near future where climate change has driven up temperatures, requiring fancy technology simply to last outside during the daytime in the southern United States. Water levels are rising, threatening low-lying areas around the world. Stephenson also periodically mentions things like COVID-24 and COVID-27, suggesting recurrences of the coronavirus, with other occasional mentions of technology that allows one to scan for exposure risk, but frankly this felt a bit forced. There also seem to have been at least some shifts in global status of certain powerful countries, though we're left to infer that from circumstantial evidence.
Within that setting, we start with a fun opening scene, where the queen of the Netherlands is piloting her plane to Texas, forced to make an emergency landing in Waco because of a storm in Houston, and ultimately crashes into a herd of pigs and also some alligators that have gotten onto the runway. This starts the queen (generally known as Saskia) and her entourage on a trip to meet up with J.R. Schmidt, a wealthy Texan who owns a series of fuel superstations and is known publicly by a caricatured persona that might hide his actual canniness. We also meet Rufus, who's life has been focused on searching for his own Moby Dick, a giant wild pig on which he seeks his revenge. Saskia is headed to meet J.R. for some sort of larger, secret conference that is the impetus for the rest of the story and has potential repercussions for the climate worldwide. There are other characters picked up in the course of this piece of the storyline, but the reality is that there's very little excitement for a long time once we're off the Waco airport runway. The journey to Texas and the covert meeting in the desert there slowly introduce us to the world we're in and the primary challenge that drives the book, but much of the narrative throughout here is Stephenson's love affair with telling us all about the ideas he has rather than anything that might be truly called thrilling. It's interesting enough, but it's a slow burn.
The one semi-thrilling thing that is interspersed with Saskia's storyline is the story of Laks, a Canadian sikh who travels to the Punjab and eventually finds his way to the Line of Actual Control where he engages in fighting the Chinese with sticks and rocks. I hoped for more from this, but this portion of the storyline is really just to set context for the later part of the story, which has nothing to do with the Line of Actual Control.
There's other political semi-intrigue along the way, and various machinations in scattered parts of the world. Certain characters that seem like they will be key end up being relatively unimportant. We spend time with certain events that seem extraneous to the story. And at least one main character opts out of the storyline for reasons that are unexplained and, to me, incomprehensible.
The pace may be said to pick up after about 450 or 500 pages, as we slowly approach the climactic showdown on J.R.'s Texas property, which finally ties many of the storylines together in a reasonably thrilling climax. But it's a lot of buildup for the actual payoff, which is itself helped along by at least one deus ex machina and ultimately feels less satisfying that Stephenson's best work.
I leave this book feeling that there was much of interest but little that fully delivered on its promise. I have the impression that Stephenson had a lot of fascinating ideas about climate change and what the world might look like in another 15 years, and wanted very much to tell us all about his ideas in deep detail (as he is wont to do), and then tried to graft a thriller onto that foundation. So the ideas are neat but the plot felt scattered, and it doesn't help that the characters are generally one-dimensional. And in the end we don't really see how the climate ideas Stephenson so lovingly details actually impact the world, which feels like a letdown, especially since the ideas themselves might fairly be said to be optimistic.
In the end, a solid 3 stars. Good enough, but in my opinion not in the same league as much of Stephenson's previous work.
Thank you to William Morrow and to Goodreads Giveaways for the ARC of this book.
November 22, 2021
Well, it was a surprising three star read for me. This was one of my most anticipated reads of 2021.
Vivid and compelling beginning, slog of a middle (at 700 pages that clocks in at hundreds of eye-crossing pages with lots of things happening to many characters in ways that feel disparate while flogging the pace almost to death) and a really strong finish (like, so good, I was really annoyed about the middle slog all over again, because clearly, this tome could have flown high the whole damned time in the glorious golden geo-engineered skies described in this very book!). Still, YMMV.
I need to think about what else to say but here's my real recommendation: Borrow this one from the library! There's no point in having this around as a dead tree doorstop when you've finished or simply given up. I'll be passing on my copy.
All things considered, I should have just reread Seveneves.❤
Vivid and compelling beginning, slog of a middle (at 700 pages that clocks in at hundreds of eye-crossing pages with lots of things happening to many characters in ways that feel disparate while flogging the pace almost to death) and a really strong finish (like, so good, I was really annoyed about the middle slog all over again, because clearly, this tome could have flown high the whole damned time in the glorious golden geo-engineered skies described in this very book!). Still, YMMV.
I need to think about what else to say but here's my real recommendation: Borrow this one from the library! There's no point in having this around as a dead tree doorstop when you've finished or simply given up. I'll be passing on my copy.
All things considered, I should have just reread Seveneves.❤
November 27, 2021
Neal Stephenson writes Cli-Fi! Of course, what this means in layman's terms is that an author with a penchant for a LOT of research and a brave heart just slammed a close-to-home ecological disaster onto our table and has said, read it and weep.
It's very valid to compare this novel to KSR's The Ministry for the Future, too, in that it has not only an interesting and deep cast of characters over a relatively decent amount of time, near-future, but that the science comes out as a character of its own.
Not as bleak as KSR's recent novel, this one still shows the horrors of rising water levels, human displacement, border clashes, and some real technological solutions that are generally dismissed now because mass-scale geoengineering projects are SCARY. Politically, socially, militarily, it's all going to be a massive mess.
But Neal Stephenson pulls a lot of neat tricks here. From making one of the main characters the young Queen of the Netherlands (Dutch Shell Company), we are given a fascinating look at all this from a different viewpoint. The same goes for the Pig Ahab character in Texas, or the Squeegie Ninja who spends a lot of his time on the Indian/China border doing performative (Cherokee head games) maneuvers since no one wants to go so far as to start using bullets.
I really enjoyed these characters. A lot. Interesting, somewhat weird, but utterly essential to the overall plot that is very much Neal's bailiwick. I'm reminded of the things he accomplished in Reamde. The quality, as well.
This is easily one of the better Cli-Fi SF's I've read, and that's not simply because I have immense respect for the author.
It's very valid to compare this novel to KSR's The Ministry for the Future, too, in that it has not only an interesting and deep cast of characters over a relatively decent amount of time, near-future, but that the science comes out as a character of its own.
Not as bleak as KSR's recent novel, this one still shows the horrors of rising water levels, human displacement, border clashes, and some real technological solutions that are generally dismissed now because mass-scale geoengineering projects are SCARY. Politically, socially, militarily, it's all going to be a massive mess.
But Neal Stephenson pulls a lot of neat tricks here. From making one of the main characters the young Queen of the Netherlands (Dutch Shell Company), we are given a fascinating look at all this from a different viewpoint. The same goes for the Pig Ahab character in Texas, or the Squeegie Ninja who spends a lot of his time on the Indian/China border doing performative (Cherokee head games) maneuvers since no one wants to go so far as to start using bullets.
I really enjoyed these characters. A lot. Interesting, somewhat weird, but utterly essential to the overall plot that is very much Neal's bailiwick. I'm reminded of the things he accomplished in Reamde. The quality, as well.
This is easily one of the better Cli-Fi SF's I've read, and that's not simply because I have immense respect for the author.
October 18, 2021
Can a fan of Neal Stephenson comment here and let me know if this is a prime example of his writing and where it would rank amongst his best works? If it's in the top 5 or 10, I have no shame in saying I won't bother reading anything else by him.
Termination Slog, I mean, Termination Shock, is a book by Neal Stephenson that will unfortunately be available in stores near the end of November. It's a 700+ page novel about characters that aren't very interesting, trying to stop climate change. Obviously I can't reveal much more since I read through an advance copy, but even if I could there really isn't much to say.
It's a book of ideas that doesn't culminate into anything and wouldn't change the mind of a naysayer who doesn't believe in climate change in the first place. It's hard sci-fi at it's worst with bloated descriptions that add nothing to the story and feels more like Stephenson was just wanting to show off how intelligent he is.
Speaking of bloated descriptions, I saw a reviewer on here DNF the book saying it was akin to Stephen King's verbosity but boring. Stephenson constantly adds back story to characters that don't need it and builds upon them in ways that put a halt to any progression that may be trying to happen. Even if the stories were interesting, the cardboard cutout characters are so wooden and lifeless it wouldn't even matter. When they're talking to each other it feels like AI that's trying to figure out what smart, cool people would sound like if they were real humans. It's unbelievable.
Also, I find the shoehorning in of COVID to be pretty tasteless. It was very obviously added in at the last moment to be relevant. It adds nothing and feels lazy.
I'd say I'm sorry for sounding so harsh but I just don't care. Termination Shock is a rambling mess that feels like amateur hour. I was already in a reading slump and this definitely didn't help.
Thank you to William Morrow and Harper Collins Publishers for being kind enough to send me a physical advanced copy of this book.
Termination Slog, I mean, Termination Shock, is a book by Neal Stephenson that will unfortunately be available in stores near the end of November. It's a 700+ page novel about characters that aren't very interesting, trying to stop climate change. Obviously I can't reveal much more since I read through an advance copy, but even if I could there really isn't much to say.
It's a book of ideas that doesn't culminate into anything and wouldn't change the mind of a naysayer who doesn't believe in climate change in the first place. It's hard sci-fi at it's worst with bloated descriptions that add nothing to the story and feels more like Stephenson was just wanting to show off how intelligent he is.
Speaking of bloated descriptions, I saw a reviewer on here DNF the book saying it was akin to Stephen King's verbosity but boring. Stephenson constantly adds back story to characters that don't need it and builds upon them in ways that put a halt to any progression that may be trying to happen. Even if the stories were interesting, the cardboard cutout characters are so wooden and lifeless it wouldn't even matter. When they're talking to each other it feels like AI that's trying to figure out what smart, cool people would sound like if they were real humans. It's unbelievable.
Also, I find the shoehorning in of COVID to be pretty tasteless. It was very obviously added in at the last moment to be relevant. It adds nothing and feels lazy.
I'd say I'm sorry for sounding so harsh but I just don't care. Termination Shock is a rambling mess that feels like amateur hour. I was already in a reading slump and this definitely didn't help.
Thank you to William Morrow and Harper Collins Publishers for being kind enough to send me a physical advanced copy of this book.
September 16, 2021
A 700 page short story or perhaps a collection of short stories. I'll try to explain without revealing the "plot" such as it is. I mean that it's a short story in the sense that there's not what I would call a real or interesting plot here. There is a jumble of ideas, but they never really come together into a cohesive whole. In the last couple chapters the three "main characters" are finally tied together in the same location. Prior to that you're totally in the dark as to why you keep jumping back and forth between two different, unrelated stories with two of the main characters in one story and the third character on the other side of the world. Oh and be prepared for random COVID 19, COVID-24, and COVID-27 mentions that feel completely forced and never tie into the story.
I consider myself a Neal Stephenson fan, especially of his earlier works. Neal Stephenson may have become so popular/well known as to become uneditable and that's a shame because the concepts are good and his writing style remains easy to read, but ultimately this book felt like a waste of time. The contents of this book could be condensed from 700 pages to 150-200 without losing much of anything and would serve as a good introduction to a book which contained a full story. I was 228 pages into the Advance Readers Copy prior to it getting to the first minor point of the book (putting Sulfur into the air to balance carbon) It's a full 45-50% of the book gone before "Termination Shock" is mentioned for the first time. Oh and be prepared for random COVID 19, COVID-24, and COVID-27 mentions that feel completely forced and never tie into the story.
Ultimately there's nothing that really ties this book together for most of it's length and that's why I say it's more like a short story than a novel. Oh and did I mention be prepared for random COVID 19, COVID-24, and COVID-27 mentions that feel completely forced and never tie into the story.
I consider myself a Neal Stephenson fan, especially of his earlier works. Neal Stephenson may have become so popular/well known as to become uneditable and that's a shame because the concepts are good and his writing style remains easy to read, but ultimately this book felt like a waste of time. The contents of this book could be condensed from 700 pages to 150-200 without losing much of anything and would serve as a good introduction to a book which contained a full story. I was 228 pages into the Advance Readers Copy prior to it getting to the first minor point of the book (putting Sulfur into the air to balance carbon) It's a full 45-50% of the book gone before "Termination Shock" is mentioned for the first time. Oh and be prepared for random COVID 19, COVID-24, and COVID-27 mentions that feel completely forced and never tie into the story.
Ultimately there's nothing that really ties this book together for most of it's length and that's why I say it's more like a short story than a novel. Oh and did I mention be prepared for random COVID 19, COVID-24, and COVID-27 mentions that feel completely forced and never tie into the story.
November 18, 2021
Seveneves was my first Neal Stephenson (and my all-time favourite) novel.
I picked up Termination Shock expecting more of the same.
Ouch.
I love Stephenson's deep rambling tangents when they're adding to a story I love. I never fell in love with Termination Shock. It's a vague story, with a lot of philosophising about the things that might happen. There isn't much urgency. It's hardly thrilling.
In Seveneves, humanity is given two years to survive and our best scientists come together to save the species. In Termination Shock, climate change is a slow, disinterested death. Realistic perhaps, but boring as beans.
Laks was by far the only character I cared about. If the story had been half the length, focussed entirely on him and , this would've been a far more positive review. I'm gutted that . So fucking heroic.
Actually, after writing that, I hate this book even more.
Sorry, Neal. We'll always have Seveneves.
I picked up Termination Shock expecting more of the same.
Ouch.
I love Stephenson's deep rambling tangents when they're adding to a story I love. I never fell in love with Termination Shock. It's a vague story, with a lot of philosophising about the things that might happen. There isn't much urgency. It's hardly thrilling.
In Seveneves, humanity is given two years to survive and our best scientists come together to save the species. In Termination Shock, climate change is a slow, disinterested death. Realistic perhaps, but boring as beans.
Laks was by far the only character I cared about. If the story had been half the length, focussed entirely on him and , this would've been a far more positive review. I'm gutted that . So fucking heroic.
Actually, after writing that, I hate this book even more.
Sorry, Neal. We'll always have Seveneves.
February 1, 2022
As long as this is nothing like The Ministry for the Future, I’ll be happy. -7/14/21
1/31/22: Well, it was better than The Ministry for the Future, but still not immune to many of the problems that book had, particularly the pacing and tendency to go off into tangents that, while occasionally interesting, usually seem to do nothing more than increase the page count.
3/5 stars.
1/31/22: Well, it was better than The Ministry for the Future, but still not immune to many of the problems that book had, particularly the pacing and tendency to go off into tangents that, while occasionally interesting, usually seem to do nothing more than increase the page count.
3/5 stars.
March 16, 2024
Neal Stephenson is still a genius, and there are always so very many interesting factoids one can learn from reading a tome like Termination Point.
However, don't expect much of a plot in the conventional sense. This climate change speculative fiction has a lot of interesting things to say about the fall of America (although not as good as the first half of his previous book Fall), and of course the unique scientific take on how geo-engineering with a giant sulfur gun could be the answer to environmental disaster is a hell of a Big Idea premise. Then there's the global politics of it all, the somewhat coherent story of India going to war with Texas while China secretly manipulates, which happens to be from point of view of Netherlands royalty.
But besides whether or not one finds 700 pages of that a bit of a slug... Something feels off. Perhaps being too socially conscious these days prevents me from enjoying things, like I never minded the libertarian ethos of Cryptonomicon back in the day, but there's some awfully weird political subtext I currently can't seem to get over. It's a book about how fossil fuels have destroyed the planet, which is undeniable, and yet there are so many off lines about how it's the Greens who are the problem and won't let anyone make real progress. That the European far right going from climate denial to a pro-geoengineering stance overnight would be a good thing. And the moral of the story is basically to trust an oil billionaire to innovate out of this worldwide problem.
Don't get me wrong, it's fascinating. But it's been a long time since Stephenson wrote the excellent epic Anathem and the outstanding Americana satire Snow Crash. Perhaps he's best at tech thrillers now, not social critiques. I'm still ever curious to know any of his near-future predictions about the state of the country and the world, just can't say it quite works in this particular book.
However, don't expect much of a plot in the conventional sense. This climate change speculative fiction has a lot of interesting things to say about the fall of America (although not as good as the first half of his previous book Fall), and of course the unique scientific take on how geo-engineering with a giant sulfur gun could be the answer to environmental disaster is a hell of a Big Idea premise. Then there's the global politics of it all, the somewhat coherent story of India going to war with Texas while China secretly manipulates, which happens to be from point of view of Netherlands royalty.
But besides whether or not one finds 700 pages of that a bit of a slug... Something feels off. Perhaps being too socially conscious these days prevents me from enjoying things, like I never minded the libertarian ethos of Cryptonomicon back in the day, but there's some awfully weird political subtext I currently can't seem to get over. It's a book about how fossil fuels have destroyed the planet, which is undeniable, and yet there are so many off lines about how it's the Greens who are the problem and won't let anyone make real progress. That the European far right going from climate denial to a pro-geoengineering stance overnight would be a good thing. And the moral of the story is basically to trust an oil billionaire to innovate out of this worldwide problem.
Don't get me wrong, it's fascinating. But it's been a long time since Stephenson wrote the excellent epic Anathem and the outstanding Americana satire Snow Crash. Perhaps he's best at tech thrillers now, not social critiques. I'm still ever curious to know any of his near-future predictions about the state of the country and the world, just can't say it quite works in this particular book.
February 3, 2024
3.5 Stars
Video Review: https://youtu.be/TK6ITg3Q_SM
This is not one of my favourite of Neal Stephenson’s work but a weaker book by this author is still better than most of the science fiction I read. I found some of the ideas explored in this one quite interesting but the story itself felt a bit lacking. I wouldn't recommend starting here with this author but I wanted to read through it as part of their backlist.
Video Review: https://youtu.be/TK6ITg3Q_SM
This is not one of my favourite of Neal Stephenson’s work but a weaker book by this author is still better than most of the science fiction I read. I found some of the ideas explored in this one quite interesting but the story itself felt a bit lacking. I wouldn't recommend starting here with this author but I wanted to read through it as part of their backlist.
December 24, 2021
The adventure story told by this novel takes place in the not-to-distant future, and conditions are much the same as today, only more so. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the air are continuing to increase, and global warming has trended up as predicted decades earlier (i.e. predictions made in today’s present time). Sea level is creeping up and low land elevations are becoming water logged.
Rather than abandon a lot of valuable real estate to the sea, a wealthy Texan has decided to engineer a solution. He has concluded after many years of failed promises, waiting on countries of the world to successfully reduce carbon discharge into the atmosphere is a fool’s errand. He has used his vast wealth to construct a sophisticated complex in the west Texas Chihuahuan Desert capable of shooting sulfur burning jet missiles into the stratosphere with the intention of seeding the sky with sulfur dioxide. Historical experiences with large volcanic explosions has demonstrated that doing this can cool the climate by reflecting sunlight away from the earth.
He is proud of his installation, and early in the story he shows it off to representatives from some of the notable low regions of the world—Netherlands, London, and Venice being three that I remember. Soon similar installations are being planned and constructed in other parts of the world.
The proponents of this geoengineering don’t perceive it as a permanent solution, but rather as a delay of global warming while a better solution can be worked out.
This is a long 700 page novel designed to pull the reader into a realistic future possessing a believable array of technical advances. Much of the first half of the book is spent in character development, creation of parallel plot paths, and portrayal of the back stories upon which the second half of the story can turn into an adventure thriller filled with skies filled with drones and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons turning solid state electronics into useless duds.
Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. Unfortunately, the long length of his books keeps me from reading all of them. But I decided this one was worth the time because of its dealing with climate change and geoengineering. This book is an entertaining story, but I have a feeling that I would be better off reading a nonfiction book if I want to know more about geoengineering.
My interest in geoengineering was sparked by the book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future , by Elizabeth Kolbert. (link is to my review)
Rather than abandon a lot of valuable real estate to the sea, a wealthy Texan has decided to engineer a solution. He has concluded after many years of failed promises, waiting on countries of the world to successfully reduce carbon discharge into the atmosphere is a fool’s errand. He has used his vast wealth to construct a sophisticated complex in the west Texas Chihuahuan Desert capable of shooting sulfur burning jet missiles into the stratosphere with the intention of seeding the sky with sulfur dioxide. Historical experiences with large volcanic explosions has demonstrated that doing this can cool the climate by reflecting sunlight away from the earth.
He is proud of his installation, and early in the story he shows it off to representatives from some of the notable low regions of the world—Netherlands, London, and Venice being three that I remember. Soon similar installations are being planned and constructed in other parts of the world.
The proponents of this geoengineering don’t perceive it as a permanent solution, but rather as a delay of global warming while a better solution can be worked out.
Many are the voices who will say, who has already said quite vocally, that it is at best nothing more than a stopgap solution. I’m sure that our friends from the Maldives, Kolkata, and the Marshall Islands will take a different view. But of course the detractors have a point. It is absolutely the case that we cannot long survive on a program that consists exclusively of bouncing back the sun’s radiation using a thin vale of gas. We must take advantage of the brief respite that such interventions give us to remove carbon from the atmosphere.Weather changes that help one part of the world inevitably hurt another part. Weather simulations as described in this novel suggests that this geoengineering will cause the monsoons in the Punjab region of India to be diminished. India perceives this as a threat to their wellbeing because the Punjab is the “bread basket” of their country. Thus India unilaterally initiates what it calls “environmental peace keeping.” At this point the story turns into a full blown adventure thriller.
This is a long 700 page novel designed to pull the reader into a realistic future possessing a believable array of technical advances. Much of the first half of the book is spent in character development, creation of parallel plot paths, and portrayal of the back stories upon which the second half of the story can turn into an adventure thriller filled with skies filled with drones and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons turning solid state electronics into useless duds.
Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. Unfortunately, the long length of his books keeps me from reading all of them. But I decided this one was worth the time because of its dealing with climate change and geoengineering. This book is an entertaining story, but I have a feeling that I would be better off reading a nonfiction book if I want to know more about geoengineering.
My interest in geoengineering was sparked by the book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future , by Elizabeth Kolbert. (link is to my review)
September 27, 2023
Overall I ended up enjoying this. My main discomfort related to the way a young Sikh character was used in the story.
Some very minor spoilers may be inferred from what follows…and my own personal opinion.
Despite the oblique theme of cultural discovery, there was no mention of the Golden Temple when Laks was in Amritsar. This is a place of great spiritual, cultural, and political history for Sikhs. Among other things, it was the site of Operation Blue Star, a government sanctioned massacre aimed at rooting out Sikh militants and resulting in the deaths of, among others, many civilian pilgrims to the Temple. Four months after Blue Star, Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards, which was quickly followed by anti-Sikh riots which resulted in the deaths of 17,000 Sikhs. In the book, the only oblique mention of anything related to this political history is the brief reference to Sikh separatist radical activity connected to the Canadian West Coast where Laks grew up. That activity so briefly referred to culminated in the bombing of Air India 182, the deadliest act of air terrorism prior to 9/11.
This is not at all meant to be a comprehensive explanation of the long and complicated history that sprouted some radical activism. I only point out to give some context to my discomfort with a storyline that radicalizes a young Sikh man. It plays into a dangerous stereotype that doesn’t at all accord with the reality of the large majority of the Sikh community, which is founded on peace, compassion, and service. The reason I think it played more into stereotype as opposed to the reality of the development and journey of an individual character is because there is no member of the Sikh community here in BC that isn’t acutely aware of the history and activity of the individuals involved in the radical splinter group responsible for Air India 182. That case is enormously complicated, and involved a whole lot more than you will read about on Wikipedia.
I guess my point is that Sikhs already face a lot of discrimination, and playing into stereotypes doesn’t help that. I loved Laks and was so excited to read about a Sikh character given such a prominent role in the story. I just wish it had been more nuanced and provided a little more context.
Some very minor spoilers may be inferred from what follows…and my own personal opinion.
Despite the oblique theme of cultural discovery, there was no mention of the Golden Temple when Laks was in Amritsar. This is a place of great spiritual, cultural, and political history for Sikhs. Among other things, it was the site of Operation Blue Star, a government sanctioned massacre aimed at rooting out Sikh militants and resulting in the deaths of, among others, many civilian pilgrims to the Temple. Four months after Blue Star, Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards, which was quickly followed by anti-Sikh riots which resulted in the deaths of 17,000 Sikhs. In the book, the only oblique mention of anything related to this political history is the brief reference to Sikh separatist radical activity connected to the Canadian West Coast where Laks grew up. That activity so briefly referred to culminated in the bombing of Air India 182, the deadliest act of air terrorism prior to 9/11.
This is not at all meant to be a comprehensive explanation of the long and complicated history that sprouted some radical activism. I only point out to give some context to my discomfort with a storyline that radicalizes a young Sikh man. It plays into a dangerous stereotype that doesn’t at all accord with the reality of the large majority of the Sikh community, which is founded on peace, compassion, and service. The reason I think it played more into stereotype as opposed to the reality of the development and journey of an individual character is because there is no member of the Sikh community here in BC that isn’t acutely aware of the history and activity of the individuals involved in the radical splinter group responsible for Air India 182. That case is enormously complicated, and involved a whole lot more than you will read about on Wikipedia.
I guess my point is that Sikhs already face a lot of discrimination, and playing into stereotypes doesn’t help that. I loved Laks and was so excited to read about a Sikh character given such a prominent role in the story. I just wish it had been more nuanced and provided a little more context.
April 4, 2022
I'm out 72% DNF.
This is review is going to entertain me and probably not anyone else but that is the way I roll.
Termination Shock is like a pointless map. Maps in general are useful for summarizing and combining information into a smaller package in order to easier assimilate and see new and interesting patterns, seeing the forest through the trees as the saying goes. At some point, maps start losing their effectiveness, if we have a wall map of a globe we notice details not otherwised grasped, if we have a wall map of a U.S. State, we are similarly amazed at previously unknown features. We can continue moving down the scale with cities, towns, etc.
If however I have a wall map of...my wall we have lost all the power of scale. Termination Shock has also reached this exact state. It is a book about now, a collection of stories, events and issues that I swear I read in the NY Times yesterday, it contains mundane details and personalities that I can experience walking out my front door. It does not contain anything new, interesting or exciting. I really need at least one of those.
Why two stars instead of one? I usually reserve 1 for books that offend me. This is a coherent story, it just doesn't go anywhere.
This is review is going to entertain me and probably not anyone else but that is the way I roll.
Termination Shock is like a pointless map. Maps in general are useful for summarizing and combining information into a smaller package in order to easier assimilate and see new and interesting patterns, seeing the forest through the trees as the saying goes. At some point, maps start losing their effectiveness, if we have a wall map of a globe we notice details not otherwised grasped, if we have a wall map of a U.S. State, we are similarly amazed at previously unknown features. We can continue moving down the scale with cities, towns, etc.
If however I have a wall map of...my wall we have lost all the power of scale. Termination Shock has also reached this exact state. It is a book about now, a collection of stories, events and issues that I swear I read in the NY Times yesterday, it contains mundane details and personalities that I can experience walking out my front door. It does not contain anything new, interesting or exciting. I really need at least one of those.
Why two stars instead of one? I usually reserve 1 for books that offend me. This is a coherent story, it just doesn't go anywhere.
January 12, 2022
**Beware of spoilers!**
3.5/5 stars
This is my first book of 2022--and by Neal Stephenson--and for me, it was a mixed bag. I think I would have given it four stars if it weren't for the rambling middle section of the book that was a bit of a slog to get through. Sandwiched between the action-packed exposition and climax portions, no less. In my opinion, the book could have been a bit shorter.
I'll give it to Termination Shock though that it set up an interesting premise.
In the near future, in a world very much like ours, but farther along in experiencing the ravages of climate change, an eccentric Texas billionaire wants to save the world, by, how else: the building of a big gun. (I had to enjoy the satire here of taking the American cowboy stereotype to the max.)
The idea was that the gun would consistently fire sulfur dioxide (SO2) up into the atmosphere over the course of multiple years, mimicking a volcanic eruption and cooling down the global temperature.
A stopgap method at best while the world then really hauled it to pull CO2 out of the air.
I believe it was described at one point in the book as someone getting a hand on the steering wheel of a car with a brick on the gas pedal. The car is still going super dangerously fast, but at least it's under control, somewhat.
Powerful computers pressed into service by the world powers shows that this project--cheekily nicknamed "Pina2bo" after the real-life volcano erupted in 1991 and really cooled things down for a bit--benefited certain nations and not so much others.
It would halt sea level rise for several vulnerable locations around the world, including Singapore, Venice (in Italy), and the Netherlands, but may lead to famine in other parts of the world. This unlucky roll of the dice fell onto India, who depended on the yearly coming of the monsoons to produce food. Pina2bo would cause the monsoons to come later or even not at all.
Naturally, this rubbed some the wrong way. General chaos ensues.
So, "geoengineering" had a positive connotation for those who came out a bit better than others from this. For those who got the short end of the climactic stick, terminology started kicking around like "climate terrorism" or "climate destruction" and the eerie "climate peacekeeping."
In reading this, I came out of it not sure if I would support such intentional messing with the climate, but instead was bogged down in the sheer scale of such a change, whether for good or ill. Maybe that was the point of the story. Good books make you think and all.
What about the characters in the story? I liked the assembled cast of unlikely allies and enemies and how people interact when everything is on the line. Yeah, I haven't talked about them much, but you'll have to forgive me that I came away still immersed in all the complications brought up in the world of Termination Shock that we in this reality will have to reckon with. I still have not been able to get the book out of my head, its view of the world from 20,000 feet up.
My head is in the clouds still.
I'll come down eventually!
While Stephenson may have gone a bit overboard on the 20,000-feet-up impersonal narration of things, I still think Termination Shock is a decent read for anyone who likes their sci-fi to make them really think.
-Cora
Find this book and other titles within our catalog.
See also:
The Ministry For the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson
3.5/5 stars
This is my first book of 2022--and by Neal Stephenson--and for me, it was a mixed bag. I think I would have given it four stars if it weren't for the rambling middle section of the book that was a bit of a slog to get through. Sandwiched between the action-packed exposition and climax portions, no less. In my opinion, the book could have been a bit shorter.
I'll give it to Termination Shock though that it set up an interesting premise.
In the near future, in a world very much like ours, but farther along in experiencing the ravages of climate change, an eccentric Texas billionaire wants to save the world, by, how else: the building of a big gun. (I had to enjoy the satire here of taking the American cowboy stereotype to the max.)
The idea was that the gun would consistently fire sulfur dioxide (SO2) up into the atmosphere over the course of multiple years, mimicking a volcanic eruption and cooling down the global temperature.
A stopgap method at best while the world then really hauled it to pull CO2 out of the air.
I believe it was described at one point in the book as someone getting a hand on the steering wheel of a car with a brick on the gas pedal. The car is still going super dangerously fast, but at least it's under control, somewhat.
Powerful computers pressed into service by the world powers shows that this project--cheekily nicknamed "Pina2bo" after the real-life volcano erupted in 1991 and really cooled things down for a bit--benefited certain nations and not so much others.
It would halt sea level rise for several vulnerable locations around the world, including Singapore, Venice (in Italy), and the Netherlands, but may lead to famine in other parts of the world. This unlucky roll of the dice fell onto India, who depended on the yearly coming of the monsoons to produce food. Pina2bo would cause the monsoons to come later or even not at all.
Naturally, this rubbed some the wrong way. General chaos ensues.
So, "geoengineering" had a positive connotation for those who came out a bit better than others from this. For those who got the short end of the climactic stick, terminology started kicking around like "climate terrorism" or "climate destruction" and the eerie "climate peacekeeping."
In reading this, I came out of it not sure if I would support such intentional messing with the climate, but instead was bogged down in the sheer scale of such a change, whether for good or ill. Maybe that was the point of the story. Good books make you think and all.
What about the characters in the story? I liked the assembled cast of unlikely allies and enemies and how people interact when everything is on the line. Yeah, I haven't talked about them much, but you'll have to forgive me that I came away still immersed in all the complications brought up in the world of Termination Shock that we in this reality will have to reckon with. I still have not been able to get the book out of my head, its view of the world from 20,000 feet up.
My head is in the clouds still.
I'll come down eventually!
While Stephenson may have gone a bit overboard on the 20,000-feet-up impersonal narration of things, I still think Termination Shock is a decent read for anyone who likes their sci-fi to make them really think.
-Cora
Find this book and other titles within our catalog.
See also:
The Ministry For the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson
March 23, 2023
I really enjoyed this. It wasn't perfect, it was a little slow, and rather long, but this is Stephenson, and he will have his rants and waffles so help him god. They were mostly utterly fascinating, so I loved it. Learned a LOT bout climate politics, and about sulphur and copper and a whole bunch of things. I laughed and was shook. All in all a fascinating read, that scared me deep in my core about where we will all be in twenty years or so.
November 25, 2021
This book is terrible. Stephenson usually writes either at a good pace, or has lots of interesting and novel ideas, consistently woven into a fascinating universe. This has none of that.
He's never really been a good character writer: literary quality is not why you read this (unlike say Margaret Atwood). But here it starts slow, and the creaky leaden ponderousness of his characterisations gets full forward display, and it's neither interesting nor credible.
Not only that, but he makes several factual errors, which makes you feel as if the book hasn't been edited much, if at all. I come to Stephenson for his factual, fantastical and fascinating ideas, and this lets down on all fronts.
I'm not halfway through it, and I don't know if I can finish it. It's really hard work when you cringe at every page. I can't recommend this book. And politically, I'm not sure where he's going with it wrt climate change, but so far, only one geoengineering (ah, so libertarian) idea of questionable worth has been brought up.
He's never really been a good character writer: literary quality is not why you read this (unlike say Margaret Atwood). But here it starts slow, and the creaky leaden ponderousness of his characterisations gets full forward display, and it's neither interesting nor credible.
Not only that, but he makes several factual errors, which makes you feel as if the book hasn't been edited much, if at all. I come to Stephenson for his factual, fantastical and fascinating ideas, and this lets down on all fronts.
I'm not halfway through it, and I don't know if I can finish it. It's really hard work when you cringe at every page. I can't recommend this book. And politically, I'm not sure where he's going with it wrt climate change, but so far, only one geoengineering (ah, so libertarian) idea of questionable worth has been brought up.
August 12, 2022
This is a fun book about a plan to combat global warming in the near future. All sorts of climate catastrophes are happening, so a small group of people (vigilantes?) have decided to take it upon themselves to fix the problem. Their approach? Climate engineering.
This is a rambling, happy-go-lucky sort of story. Like many of Neal Stephenson's fiction, the best part is not necessarily the overall plot, or even the characters. The best part is the arrangement of a few scenes. In these remarkable scenes, crazy things happen that border on the absurd, practically surreal. It's almost like a long, drawn-out joke that is calculated to have an amazing punch line. Stephenson takes his time to build up the background behind these scenes, and then unleashes them into a spectacular trajectory. I love it!
And, what is "Termination Shock"? That is a potential downside of climate engineering. What happens if people perform climate engineering for a while, successfully counteract the greenhouse effect -- and then pull the plug? That is called "Termination Shock".
This is a rambling, happy-go-lucky sort of story. Like many of Neal Stephenson's fiction, the best part is not necessarily the overall plot, or even the characters. The best part is the arrangement of a few scenes. In these remarkable scenes, crazy things happen that border on the absurd, practically surreal. It's almost like a long, drawn-out joke that is calculated to have an amazing punch line. Stephenson takes his time to build up the background behind these scenes, and then unleashes them into a spectacular trajectory. I love it!
And, what is "Termination Shock"? That is a potential downside of climate engineering. What happens if people perform climate engineering for a while, successfully counteract the greenhouse effect -- and then pull the plug? That is called "Termination Shock".
December 8, 2021
(...)
Complexity and connections: that’s what this book is about. Our planet is complex and connected, politically, financially, culturally, genetically, historically, and as a weather system.
But the book is also about an important disconnection: the disconnect between people and reality.
For starters, there’s the disconnect between “elite cultural and diplomatic circles” and reality. While Termination Shock acknowledges the problematic political course the USA has been on for quite some time – the book is set somewhere after 2029, and the USA by then is “a basket case and global laughingstock” – at the same time Stephenson acknowledges that “on the nuts-and-bolts level of the petroleum and mining industries, they still seemed to get a lot done in the world.” It is something “the chattering classes, who live in that sort of bubble” don’t seem to grasp, just like “the Greens” don’t get that you can’t just stop enough people eating meat or buying cars.
But Stephenson’s main target is not those who offer easy critique of the USA or big footprint lifestyle on social media – it is the West at large. A Chinese character utters what is the very heart of this novel: “It is a very curious thing about the West. This inability, this unwillingness to talk about realities. Basic facts that are obvious to everyone not in your bubble.”
(...)
Full analysis on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
Complexity and connections: that’s what this book is about. Our planet is complex and connected, politically, financially, culturally, genetically, historically, and as a weather system.
But the book is also about an important disconnection: the disconnect between people and reality.
For starters, there’s the disconnect between “elite cultural and diplomatic circles” and reality. While Termination Shock acknowledges the problematic political course the USA has been on for quite some time – the book is set somewhere after 2029, and the USA by then is “a basket case and global laughingstock” – at the same time Stephenson acknowledges that “on the nuts-and-bolts level of the petroleum and mining industries, they still seemed to get a lot done in the world.” It is something “the chattering classes, who live in that sort of bubble” don’t seem to grasp, just like “the Greens” don’t get that you can’t just stop enough people eating meat or buying cars.
But Stephenson’s main target is not those who offer easy critique of the USA or big footprint lifestyle on social media – it is the West at large. A Chinese character utters what is the very heart of this novel: “It is a very curious thing about the West. This inability, this unwillingness to talk about realities. Basic facts that are obvious to everyone not in your bubble.”
(...)
Full analysis on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
December 9, 2021
Too long long long long long long long
I did get involved with a number of the characters, but the tremendous amount of description setting the scene, detailing characters' histories, just WAY too much. I was tremendously relieved when I finally made it over halfway through the book... by the the final hundred pages, I just wanted to know who was going to live and who was going to perish. And at least one who I believe DID perish I have no idea WHO IT WAS. Really? This LONG a book and I don't know what happened to whoever that was? And the horse? The eagles? Give me a break. Jeez...wrap it up! It took long enough to GET THERE. Wrap it ALL up.
~
Thank you to William Morris for this Advance Reader's Copy.
I did get involved with a number of the characters, but the tremendous amount of description setting the scene, detailing characters' histories, just WAY too much. I was tremendously relieved when I finally made it over halfway through the book... by the the final hundred pages, I just wanted to know who was going to live and who was going to perish. And at least one who I believe DID perish I have no idea WHO IT WAS. Really? This LONG a book and I don't know what happened to whoever that was? And the horse? The eagles? Give me a break. Jeez...wrap it up! It took long enough to GET THERE. Wrap it ALL up.
~
Thank you to William Morris for this Advance Reader's Copy.
Read
January 29, 20222022 reads, #6. DID NOT FINISH. So after somewhat guiltily trashing Neal Stephenson's most recent novel, 2019's unreadably tedious virtual-reality morality tale Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, then feeling even more guilty when it eventually became the most popular book review I've ever posted here, out of the 1,532 of them I've now written, I was excited to learn last autumn that the author finally had another new book coming out soon, which I had hoped would give me a chance to finally redeem myself as the slobbering fanboy I am. After all, I usually love Stephenson's heady, conceptually dense speculative tomes -- whether that's his early pioneering cyberpunk novels from the 1990s, his shift into historical fiction with the three-volume "Baroque Cycle," the mind-blowingly unique concepts of such mature work as Anathem and Seveneves, or even the pure caper glee of such clever action-adventures as Reamde -- and I had really been hoping that the newest book would get us back on the kind of firm footing that has consistently made Stephenson one of the world's greatest living authors during the vast majority of my adult life. (His first big breakthrough, 1992's Snow Crash, came out when I was 23, if that gives you a sense of how his timeline relates to mine.)
But alas, 2021's Termination Shock was not it; and while I didn't find myself passionately hating it like I did Fall, I had a perhaps even worse reaction this time, which was to find the whole thing so incredibly boring and flat that I eventually gave up right around page 200 and returned it to the library unfinished. There's a complex series of reasons for why that is, starting with the fact that its main subject, climate change and how to possibly fix it, is simply one I don't find interesting; and in fact it's fair to say that I have yet to read any book in the rapidly expanding new genre known as "ecothrillers" that I've actually liked, in that the combination of wonky earth science lectures and self-righteous Greta Thunberg-style sermons that typically marks this genre leaves me both cold and with a bad taste in my mouth. I also have to confess that I simply didn't like having this book set in the deeply rural American South, an admittedly personal bias that comes with the times we live in; and so having the main protagonist be a cartoonishly exaggerated caricature of an eccentric Texas billionaire, who literally does everything short of growing a Yosemite Sam mustache and firing pistols in the air to remind you of that fact, just didn't sit well with me at all, nor did having the entire first hundred pages be a loving ode to how great and industrious all those hard-working far-right Trump fans in the Deep South actually are, once you get to know them and all, which seems to be Stephenson's act of atonement for having these exact same people be the instigators of a Christian Republic violent coup of the US government in Fall.
The main problem here, though, is that the patented Stephenson Storytelling Machine simply seems to be breaking down a little these days from age and overuse, leading to a book whose complicated clockwork of moving parts is just a little more noticeable than it's been before, a little more stale, a little stiffer and less well-oiled. For example, one thing Stephenson has become known for is setting aside large amounts of space in his book for fascinating digressions, whether that's to deeply examine the backstory of a minor character or to really explain a complicated scientific concept with the kind of care and attention it deserves; but while that's effortless and delightful in a book like Anathem, which is essentially an entire string of these digressions tacked together for a thousand pages, here the sausage-making just calls a lot more attention to itself, with entire sections early on (and I'm assuming also later in the book) that feel like Stephenson's not really into the spirit of it all, but is just delivering the overexplained text because he knows that that's what his fans are expecting from him. That's perhaps the most damning criticism I can make of this book, that it often feels like one of those technothrillers from an only mediocre author (which, let's face it, most technothriller authors are), where they get this one simple idea stuck in their head ("What if this Guardian article I recently read about a theoretical end to climate change could actually be enacted in the real world?"), then stuffs a thousand pages of filler around the hundred pages needed to actually tell that story, so to cement their reputation as a Big Important Writer who's discussing Big Important Ideas.
That may perhaps be the most heartbreaking thing about Termination Shock, when all is said and done; that while I at least found Fall so terrible that it made me actively angry, this one elicited only a bored shrug before giving up a third of the way through, thinking to myself, "So I guess the rumors are true -- Michael Crichton didn't actually die, and is continuing to pound out subpar speculative thrillers every year from a secret bunker somewhere near Seattle." Your reaction might be much different, depending on how you in particular react to the various story elements mentioned above; but for sure, everyone should approach this book with their expectations as low as possible, and with a fair amount of nostalgia for the days when Stephenson could do no wrong, an age that now seems to be permanently over.
But alas, 2021's Termination Shock was not it; and while I didn't find myself passionately hating it like I did Fall, I had a perhaps even worse reaction this time, which was to find the whole thing so incredibly boring and flat that I eventually gave up right around page 200 and returned it to the library unfinished. There's a complex series of reasons for why that is, starting with the fact that its main subject, climate change and how to possibly fix it, is simply one I don't find interesting; and in fact it's fair to say that I have yet to read any book in the rapidly expanding new genre known as "ecothrillers" that I've actually liked, in that the combination of wonky earth science lectures and self-righteous Greta Thunberg-style sermons that typically marks this genre leaves me both cold and with a bad taste in my mouth. I also have to confess that I simply didn't like having this book set in the deeply rural American South, an admittedly personal bias that comes with the times we live in; and so having the main protagonist be a cartoonishly exaggerated caricature of an eccentric Texas billionaire, who literally does everything short of growing a Yosemite Sam mustache and firing pistols in the air to remind you of that fact, just didn't sit well with me at all, nor did having the entire first hundred pages be a loving ode to how great and industrious all those hard-working far-right Trump fans in the Deep South actually are, once you get to know them and all, which seems to be Stephenson's act of atonement for having these exact same people be the instigators of a Christian Republic violent coup of the US government in Fall.
The main problem here, though, is that the patented Stephenson Storytelling Machine simply seems to be breaking down a little these days from age and overuse, leading to a book whose complicated clockwork of moving parts is just a little more noticeable than it's been before, a little more stale, a little stiffer and less well-oiled. For example, one thing Stephenson has become known for is setting aside large amounts of space in his book for fascinating digressions, whether that's to deeply examine the backstory of a minor character or to really explain a complicated scientific concept with the kind of care and attention it deserves; but while that's effortless and delightful in a book like Anathem, which is essentially an entire string of these digressions tacked together for a thousand pages, here the sausage-making just calls a lot more attention to itself, with entire sections early on (and I'm assuming also later in the book) that feel like Stephenson's not really into the spirit of it all, but is just delivering the overexplained text because he knows that that's what his fans are expecting from him. That's perhaps the most damning criticism I can make of this book, that it often feels like one of those technothrillers from an only mediocre author (which, let's face it, most technothriller authors are), where they get this one simple idea stuck in their head ("What if this Guardian article I recently read about a theoretical end to climate change could actually be enacted in the real world?"), then stuffs a thousand pages of filler around the hundred pages needed to actually tell that story, so to cement their reputation as a Big Important Writer who's discussing Big Important Ideas.
That may perhaps be the most heartbreaking thing about Termination Shock, when all is said and done; that while I at least found Fall so terrible that it made me actively angry, this one elicited only a bored shrug before giving up a third of the way through, thinking to myself, "So I guess the rumors are true -- Michael Crichton didn't actually die, and is continuing to pound out subpar speculative thrillers every year from a secret bunker somewhere near Seattle." Your reaction might be much different, depending on how you in particular react to the various story elements mentioned above; but for sure, everyone should approach this book with their expectations as low as possible, and with a fair amount of nostalgia for the days when Stephenson could do no wrong, an age that now seems to be permanently over.
September 1, 2022
Absolutely brilliant!
I've been a long-time reader of Stephenson. The level I've liked his books has gone up and down depending on the release. Termination Shock has the best elements of his work to date and I found it to be in the upper echelon of my favorites of his novels (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Anathem, Reamde). No spoilers below.
Stephenson's ability to connect a variety of vastly disparate nodes into a comprehensive whole is unprecedented. Lots has been made of the dramatic intro to the book (queen-piloted plane crashing into wild hogs being hunted by a Commanche drone pilot on a revenge mission in a painfully overheated Texas), but it's indicative of the whole. He's, of course, done this before (organs, code breaking, and intercontinental cable laying, for example), and in a more complex manner (monks, math, and inter dimensional travel, for example), but never in such a fun and relatable fashion. The jumps and cuts of the different elements rubbing against each other were consistently surprising and enjoyable.
The most intriguing component to me, however, was the elaborate network of metaphors layered over the story itself. In addition to the story and character arcs, the dialogue, characters, and actions also function as metaphors for current discussion and arguments on various sides of climate change. Some of the silly one-liners or jokes have deeper meaning on further reflection getting readers to consider the consequences of the world's actions and inactions on the climate.
Again, highly recommended.
I received an ARC with the request for a review. This review was not influenced in any way by that.
June 24, 2022
This could have been an article.
So I love Neal Stephenson and will read anything he writes. He's one of those authors whose average star rating doesn't mean anything because he is so unique and a lot of his stuff just doesn't click with people which doesn't say anything about the quality and brilliance of his works. Termination Shock is a perfectly fine book but it was too long and honestly could've just been written as a speculative piece on the near future of climate engineering and the geopolitical consequences and saved both Neal and the reader muddling through 600+ pages of unproductive plot to get to the same point.
To be clear, I did like this book. I like the characters and the overall plot was ok. The real reason the book is good is Neal takes on a tour of how one person could, in a straightforward way, start to re-engineer the climate. The consequences of this would be legion and unpredictable as an arms race may ensue trying to mitigate the unpredictable affects of reversing climate change across the globe. Again, the very reasons I liked this book could've just been done in a lengthy article and essay that I also would've enjoyed without spending so much time with a slogging pace and with plot points that didn't seem very relevant.
If you haven't read Neal, don't make this your first book. Start with either Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon and then move onto something like Anathem or Seveneves, all great books.
So I love Neal Stephenson and will read anything he writes. He's one of those authors whose average star rating doesn't mean anything because he is so unique and a lot of his stuff just doesn't click with people which doesn't say anything about the quality and brilliance of his works. Termination Shock is a perfectly fine book but it was too long and honestly could've just been written as a speculative piece on the near future of climate engineering and the geopolitical consequences and saved both Neal and the reader muddling through 600+ pages of unproductive plot to get to the same point.
To be clear, I did like this book. I like the characters and the overall plot was ok. The real reason the book is good is Neal takes on a tour of how one person could, in a straightforward way, start to re-engineer the climate. The consequences of this would be legion and unpredictable as an arms race may ensue trying to mitigate the unpredictable affects of reversing climate change across the globe. Again, the very reasons I liked this book could've just been done in a lengthy article and essay that I also would've enjoyed without spending so much time with a slogging pace and with plot points that didn't seem very relevant.
If you haven't read Neal, don't make this your first book. Start with either Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon and then move onto something like Anathem or Seveneves, all great books.
March 23, 2022
As Termination Shock is a long near-future sci-fi novel about climate change, it invites comparison with Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future. This is an interesting comparison to make, but I don’t think Stephenson’s novel comes out of it too well. Whereas Robinson’s narratives on climate change are concerned with communities, pressure groups, and social systems, Stephenson grounds his in technology and individuals acting unilaterally. The plot of Termination Shock can be summarised as follows: a Texan billionaire decides to start geoengineering the fast-warming world. It’s a highly intriguing conceit, however the plot is more focused on the technicalities of how to geoengineer than the consequences. Although some political impacts are explored in the second half of the book, I found the focus on individual characters limited the depth of this. Basically, Kim Stanley Robinson has set a high bar.
Taken on its own merits, there is a lot to like in Termination Shock. My favourite chapters were at the very beginning, as these combine ingenious world-building and high farce. Texas, we learn, has been taken over by feral hogs and one of the protagonists makes a living hunting them. There are some excellent action scenes, including fights that reminded me of how much I enjoyed Snow Crash. In fact, the whole novel reminded me of Stephenson’s earlier work (and somewhat of Cory Doctorow’s near-future fiction) as it is more of a techno-thriller than the thoughtful and slower-paced Anathem, for example. The point of view characters are an interesting bunch and the world-building includes lots of great details, including COVID variants still circulating. Everyone has N95 masks handy and one of the main characters lacks a sense of smell due to coronavirus.
On the other hand, there is a lot of technical exposition that frankly dragged. The Texan billionaire, T.R. Schmidt, is given a full hundred and twenty pages to explain his geoengineering scheme, and it isn’t as if he then shuts up about it. I sympathised with the group dragged along on his lengthy tour, which could have been a goddamn powerpoint presentation. This chunk of the book naturally has a much slower pace than the rest, much of which has an exciting and thriller-ish velocity. A great deal of time is devoted to answering the question: how would rogue geoengineering be technically possible? Stephenson answered this thoroughly. I was less convinced by his answer to the question: why would a billionaire undertake rogue geoengineering in the first place?
To my mind Termination Shock is not a fully realised novel about geoengineering, despite the very detailed explanation of how it could take place. The narrative is a lot more interested in the billionaire than I was, with limited detail on how the rest of the world lived with his decisions. Yet as a techno-thriller, it’s slowed down by excessive exposition. I did have fun reading it, albeit while wishing it would take a slightly different direction.
Taken on its own merits, there is a lot to like in Termination Shock. My favourite chapters were at the very beginning, as these combine ingenious world-building and high farce. Texas, we learn, has been taken over by feral hogs and one of the protagonists makes a living hunting them. There are some excellent action scenes, including fights that reminded me of how much I enjoyed Snow Crash. In fact, the whole novel reminded me of Stephenson’s earlier work (and somewhat of Cory Doctorow’s near-future fiction) as it is more of a techno-thriller than the thoughtful and slower-paced Anathem, for example. The point of view characters are an interesting bunch and the world-building includes lots of great details, including COVID variants still circulating. Everyone has N95 masks handy and one of the main characters lacks a sense of smell due to coronavirus.
On the other hand, there is a lot of technical exposition that frankly dragged. The Texan billionaire, T.R. Schmidt, is given a full hundred and twenty pages to explain his geoengineering scheme, and it isn’t as if he then shuts up about it. I sympathised with the group dragged along on his lengthy tour, which could have been a goddamn powerpoint presentation. This chunk of the book naturally has a much slower pace than the rest, much of which has an exciting and thriller-ish velocity. A great deal of time is devoted to answering the question: how would rogue geoengineering be technically possible? Stephenson answered this thoroughly. I was less convinced by his answer to the question: why would a billionaire undertake rogue geoengineering in the first place?
To my mind Termination Shock is not a fully realised novel about geoengineering, despite the very detailed explanation of how it could take place. The narrative is a lot more interested in the billionaire than I was, with limited detail on how the rest of the world lived with his decisions. Yet as a techno-thriller, it’s slowed down by excessive exposition. I did have fun reading it, albeit while wishing it would take a slightly different direction.
December 13, 2021
(Updated and expanded review on my blog)
Termination Shock is a near-future science fiction novel/technothriller about climate change. Specifically, it imagines a geoengineering project designed to reduce the Earth's heating, and how it might play out globally.
To tell this story, Neal Stephenson assembles a global cast and sends them on a lot of travel. The main locales are West Texas, the Netherlands, and New Guinea.
Stylistically, Termination Shock is very Stephenson, full of his classic wry humor, deep dives into topics, feats of martial arts, lots of engineering, and a geek's view of human interactions.
Without getting into spoilers, I can describe the book's first half, which is mostly stage-setting for the second. A Texan zillionaire sets up an enormous gun (seriously) (very Jules Verne, I think) to blast sulfur into the stratosphere, shows it off to a global audience, then starts the vast machine going. It's a fait accompli. Stopping it would suddenly warm the Earth even more, which is what the title term describes.
That global audience includes leaders from London and Venice, as cities especially sensitive to the sea level rise aspect of climate change. The main part of that audience is a crew from the Netherlands, including its queen, and their actions and reflections take up most of the rest of the story. A B-plot involves a Sikh martial artist who trains, then fights dramatically against Chinese competitors for the Punjab.
Now for spoilers:
Overall, this is an engaging novel. It explores a real-world problem - geoengineering - and does so with political imagination and technical expertise. This is the kind of thing near-future science fiction can do well.
A few pieces didn't sit well with me. The Sikh hero plot ended well, but it felt padded out by the author's martial arts enthusiasm. Some of the characters were surprisingly thin, like Willem, a major narrative host, whose personal life barely flickers around the plot.
Various notes:
-Stephenson describes a vast Dutch engineering project in loving detail. This recalls his recent calls for humanity to attempt more such.
-the novel argues that climate change will change some geopolitics, with "some places that most people have never heard of... becom[ing] the Suez Canals of the future." (500) And here's a term to conjure with: climate peacekeeping. (579)
-America appears in an interesting way. As a nation it's mostly marginal, with characters mocking it without reprove.
-the book is more sex-positive than the rest of Stephenson's work, which is progress.
-technologies in play: deepfakes, hydrogen-fueled aircraft, earthsuits (air conditioned gear for dangerously hot climates), personal cooling devices ("Me-Fridgerators"!), drone troop carriers, non-nuclear EMP generators, and lots of drones in general.
Otherwise, recommended.
Some good quotes:
Termination Shock is a near-future science fiction novel/technothriller about climate change. Specifically, it imagines a geoengineering project designed to reduce the Earth's heating, and how it might play out globally.
To tell this story, Neal Stephenson assembles a global cast and sends them on a lot of travel. The main locales are West Texas, the Netherlands, and New Guinea.
Stylistically, Termination Shock is very Stephenson, full of his classic wry humor, deep dives into topics, feats of martial arts, lots of engineering, and a geek's view of human interactions.
Without getting into spoilers, I can describe the book's first half, which is mostly stage-setting for the second. A Texan zillionaire sets up an enormous gun (seriously) (very Jules Verne, I think) to blast sulfur into the stratosphere, shows it off to a global audience, then starts the vast machine going. It's a fait accompli. Stopping it would suddenly warm the Earth even more, which is what the title term describes.
That global audience includes leaders from London and Venice, as cities especially sensitive to the sea level rise aspect of climate change. The main part of that audience is a crew from the Netherlands, including its queen, and their actions and reflections take up most of the rest of the story. A B-plot involves a Sikh martial artist who trains, then fights dramatically against Chinese competitors for the Punjab.
Now for spoilers:
Overall, this is an engaging novel. It explores a real-world problem - geoengineering - and does so with political imagination and technical expertise. This is the kind of thing near-future science fiction can do well.
A few pieces didn't sit well with me. The Sikh hero plot ended well, but it felt padded out by the author's martial arts enthusiasm. Some of the characters were surprisingly thin, like Willem, a major narrative host, whose personal life barely flickers around the plot.
Various notes:
-Stephenson describes a vast Dutch engineering project in loving detail. This recalls his recent calls for humanity to attempt more such.
-the novel argues that climate change will change some geopolitics, with "some places that most people have never heard of... becom[ing] the Suez Canals of the future." (500) And here's a term to conjure with: climate peacekeeping. (579)
-America appears in an interesting way. As a nation it's mostly marginal, with characters mocking it without reprove.
-the book is more sex-positive than the rest of Stephenson's work, which is progress.
-technologies in play: deepfakes, hydrogen-fueled aircraft, earthsuits (air conditioned gear for dangerously hot climates), personal cooling devices ("Me-Fridgerators"!), drone troop carriers, non-nuclear EMP generators, and lots of drones in general.
Otherwise, recommended.
Some good quotes:
...where Willem came from, a Rhine was sort of a big deal;. A third of the Netherlands' economy passed up and down one single Rhine. They had, in effect, built a whole country around it. Here, though, people were gunning their pickup trucks over a causeway bestriding two and a half Rhines just as a temporary diversion of a seven-Rhine river over yonder.
It was one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale. (96)
February 3, 2023
This is a recent (2021) cli-fi (climate fiction, usually a science fiction that is chiefly concerned with global warming and similar issues) novel from the multiple SFF award winner Neal Stephenson. I have to admit, I’m a fan, who read almost all books by the author, so my review can be even more biased than usual.
As several reviews by my friends already noted, this book can be seen as a debate with The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), which was published in 2020 and which I reviewed here. Both books even use the same idea, adding sulfur dioxide to the stratosphere to prevent the immediate effects of global warming. This is a method with a recent historical precedent, namely Global environmental effects of 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, and which while quite technically feasible right now, has quite questionable long term effects, unequally spread around the globe. However, if in The Ministry KSR depicts a government’s response (at 4% of the book, so not largely a spoiler), after all, he in his other novels has quite socialist approaches to the problems (heck even the title of this book hints on it), Stephenson goes old school private initiative as a guiding force, with a multibillionaire playing god/saving the Earth and this approach is at least much less common in modern Western mainstream SF, therefore it can get a point from me for just not following the crowd.
The story starts with Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia, 40-something Queen of the Netherlands almost crashing her plane during landing in Texas, for wild boars run at the airfield. There she meets Rufus. “Most people address me as Red”, an American with some Comanche blood. He is on his personal crusade – feral boars ate his daughter and he tries exterminate as many of them as possible and like the captain of Moby-Dick or, the Whale, he seeks for his girl’s murderer. This is already the second book I’ve read that mentions the problem, the first was Domesticating Dragons.
As it turns out, the queen is on a secret mission of meeting the US billionaire, who decided singlehandedly (meaning with his own money, but with quite a few hired people) to stop global warming by the abovementioned sulfur dioxide, even if the delivery method he uses is different.
There is a parallel storyline about a Sikh from Richmond, British Columbia, who travels to India to help them with oxygen supply for intensive care in hospitals as well as to dwell in Sikh culture and learn a stick fighting technique, which quite soon he’ll put in use at the LAC - the Line of Actual Control – armistice line between China and India, high in the mountains – after the ceasefire in the 1960s there are constant skirmishes where no firearms are used, but sticks and stones. If you Google it, this is a real thing, on some level mind-blowing – two nuclear powers have their ‘volunteers’ going hand-to-hand combat at territories hardly suited to life.
There is a lot more in the book. Pluses of the story for me – I got new to me knowledge in an easy entertaining form, I like unusual characters, big projects, near-futureness of it. At the same time, the story is less ‘flowing’ than some of his earlier works, there are jibes at Greens that feel too childish, a straw man fallacy. A good but not great book.
As several reviews by my friends already noted, this book can be seen as a debate with The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR), which was published in 2020 and which I reviewed here. Both books even use the same idea, adding sulfur dioxide to the stratosphere to prevent the immediate effects of global warming. This is a method with a recent historical precedent, namely Global environmental effects of 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, and which while quite technically feasible right now, has quite questionable long term effects, unequally spread around the globe. However, if in The Ministry KSR depicts a government’s response (at 4% of the book, so not largely a spoiler), after all, he in his other novels has quite socialist approaches to the problems (heck even the title of this book hints on it), Stephenson goes old school private initiative as a guiding force, with a multibillionaire playing god/saving the Earth and this approach is at least much less common in modern Western mainstream SF, therefore it can get a point from me for just not following the crowd.
The story starts with Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia, 40-something Queen of the Netherlands almost crashing her plane during landing in Texas, for wild boars run at the airfield. There she meets Rufus. “Most people address me as Red”, an American with some Comanche blood. He is on his personal crusade – feral boars ate his daughter and he tries exterminate as many of them as possible and like the captain of Moby-Dick or, the Whale, he seeks for his girl’s murderer. This is already the second book I’ve read that mentions the problem, the first was Domesticating Dragons.
As it turns out, the queen is on a secret mission of meeting the US billionaire, who decided singlehandedly (meaning with his own money, but with quite a few hired people) to stop global warming by the abovementioned sulfur dioxide, even if the delivery method he uses is different.
There is a parallel storyline about a Sikh from Richmond, British Columbia, who travels to India to help them with oxygen supply for intensive care in hospitals as well as to dwell in Sikh culture and learn a stick fighting technique, which quite soon he’ll put in use at the LAC - the Line of Actual Control – armistice line between China and India, high in the mountains – after the ceasefire in the 1960s there are constant skirmishes where no firearms are used, but sticks and stones. If you Google it, this is a real thing, on some level mind-blowing – two nuclear powers have their ‘volunteers’ going hand-to-hand combat at territories hardly suited to life.
There is a lot more in the book. Pluses of the story for me – I got new to me knowledge in an easy entertaining form, I like unusual characters, big projects, near-futureness of it. At the same time, the story is less ‘flowing’ than some of his earlier works, there are jibes at Greens that feel too childish, a straw man fallacy. A good but not great book.
December 8, 2021
Four well deserved stars.
For me Neal Stephenson is one of the great contemporary science fiction writers and this novel proves it again. Of course I can point out some flaws in this book, but I think it is inevitable in a work as ambitious as this one.
I do not say anything about the plot (if you want you can read the synopsis), only to emphasize that among many other topics the author treats how the initiative of a single man -of course it helps if he/she is very rich- can change things on a planetary level . To put it more clearly, an Elon Musk-style character, as was also the case in Seveneves.
For me Neal Stephenson is one of the great contemporary science fiction writers and this novel proves it again. Of course I can point out some flaws in this book, but I think it is inevitable in a work as ambitious as this one.
I do not say anything about the plot (if you want you can read the synopsis), only to emphasize that among many other topics the author treats how the initiative of a single man -of course it helps if he/she is very rich- can change things on a planetary level . To put it more clearly, an Elon Musk-style character, as was also the case in Seveneves.
September 21, 2021
Excellent climate sci-fi, set in the near future. Interwoven stories from vastly different global socioeconomic viewpoints keep it flowing quickly. Global climate politics are not just policy wonk discussions here, but twisty plot points. This was a “late night” read, keeping me up late to finish.
ARC provided by NetGalley.
ARC provided by NetGalley.
February 4, 2022
3.5
Fun and suspenseful, but not his best book.
But the characters, as usual, are vividly drawn, eccentric, and very much alive.
Fun and suspenseful, but not his best book.
But the characters, as usual, are vividly drawn, eccentric, and very much alive.
October 14, 2021
I just finished Neal Stephenson's new novel Termination Crash. It started out pretty good, but then got real slow and plodding. It picked up around page 250 (out of 706), and then an awkward sex scene at about 280. In fact anything dealing with sex in this book was awkward in the way a teenage is talking about sex is usually awkward. Then is got slow again. It picked up in the second half, and the last 100 or so pages were real good. The story takes place in a not too distant future where concerns of climate change, rising temperature, and rising oceans are the main concerns. There is an interesting cast of characters including the Queen of the Netherlands, a Texas billionaire, a Sikh warrior, and a pig hunter who turns into The Drone Ranger (that's not a spelling mistake). The closeness to our times was unsettling, like I was looking into the 10 or 20 years into the future (no 'current date' is ever mentioned). The mention of things that happened in our last year or two are many, including COVID still being a problem, the US insurrection with that Viking dude, YouTube, Google Maps, Drones, AR goggles, and internet slang. All in all, it was a well told story, as Stephenson in my opinion is a solidly good author, but stared out way to slow for my taste. The best parts for me were the sci-fi elements of inventions just years away from now. But the best part is the actual premise of the book which I'll try not to spoil, but it does involve The Biggest Gun in the World. The point is, that if humanity, or a few humans, try to do something about climate change on a global level, and things start changing (in some places for the better, in some places for the worse), what would happen if that suddenly was stopped? The answer: Termination Shock. The climate might go into shock, just as a patient might if you suddenly stopped giving them the meds you've given the for so long, that suddenly stated showing signs of unwanted side effects. All in all, I'm going to give this book 3/5 stars. I would only recommend it to those who love the author, or want to read climate change sci-fi.
August 16, 2021
Termination Shock
It's the near future and climate change is intense. Daytime temperatures in Houston routinely exceed 45 C (~115 F) and people are struggling to survive. Feral swine roam the countryside, and voracious alligators swim upstream searching for cooler water. Sea level rise is starting to inundate low-lying areas, and people are considering extreme measures.
Termination Shock is another hard sci-fi novel by Neal Stephenson. The story follows several groups of people as they travel the globe, from Houston, to The Netherlands, and Papua building machines to combat climate change. A young Indian Canadian martial artist travels to Punjab to defend his homeland from aggressors and finds himself at the center of a geopolitical storm.
In his typical style, Stephenson explores the complexities of a world on the edge of drastic change. His story examines deep personal relationships and how those relationships inform the activities of nations, allowing individuals to force action while governments tarry. Everyone has their own priorities, and they are often at odds.
Termination Shock is relevant to today's climate and political situation. If you are a fan of near-future hard sci-fi, enjoy geopolitical drama, or are concerned about climate change this book will appeal to you.
It's the near future and climate change is intense. Daytime temperatures in Houston routinely exceed 45 C (~115 F) and people are struggling to survive. Feral swine roam the countryside, and voracious alligators swim upstream searching for cooler water. Sea level rise is starting to inundate low-lying areas, and people are considering extreme measures.
Termination Shock is another hard sci-fi novel by Neal Stephenson. The story follows several groups of people as they travel the globe, from Houston, to The Netherlands, and Papua building machines to combat climate change. A young Indian Canadian martial artist travels to Punjab to defend his homeland from aggressors and finds himself at the center of a geopolitical storm.
In his typical style, Stephenson explores the complexities of a world on the edge of drastic change. His story examines deep personal relationships and how those relationships inform the activities of nations, allowing individuals to force action while governments tarry. Everyone has their own priorities, and they are often at odds.
Termination Shock is relevant to today's climate and political situation. If you are a fan of near-future hard sci-fi, enjoy geopolitical drama, or are concerned about climate change this book will appeal to you.
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