This is a trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson novels about how humanity deals with global warming:
40 Signs of Rain (2004)
50 Degrees Below (2005)
60 Days and Counting (2007)
KSR is probably most famous for his series about terraforming Mars (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars). This is a series about terraforming Earth...
These are really interesting books though they're nearly complete failures as novels. Throughout much of the story, the main character is suffering from a brain condition that impedes decision-making-- I think the idea here is this is a metaphor for humanity as a whole, which faced with global warming is displaying a weird paralysis of it's own. In these stories the main character very rarely takes positive action, and when he does, nothing positive ever seems to come of it.
The trouble with this is that the form of the novel almost completely depends on human agency: the central figures in the story have to be capable of significant action to solve the problem at hand. It's very difficult to get a novel to work if you're intent on undermining the very idea of effective, individual action-- "War and Peace" is one of the few successful examples that I know of.
But then, if "the problem at hand" is global warming, the actual solutions are not likely to fit in the scale of a novel. Jack Ryan is not going to uncover a secret global warming engine hidden in Siberia and destroy it in the last scene.
In this series, the main character is a scientist who takes a job with the NSF, which puts him as close to the center of the action as one person can be-- he gets to run around and consult with experts in and out of government, hob nob with presidential candidates and through some personal quirks of his own, he gets involved Tibetan Buddhists, a few groups of homeless guys in the park, and even-- my personal favorite among melodramatic plot devices-- a beautiful mysterious female spy.
In general Kim Stanley Robinson has a lot of respect for scientists, in particular he really admires the culture of science-- I've seen him talk about this subject a few times at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. Everyone capable of being a scientists is almost certainly capable of finding more commercial work that would pay better, but instead they volunteer to live a more moderate existence, they're motivated by peer-group approval and their own interest in the work they're doing, far more so than financial gain (KSR likes to play around with anti-consumerist slogans like "Enough is Enough"). This thinking is part of the reason he's chosen to write novels with the scientist-as-hero (however unheroic this one happens to be), and one of the names these books go by is the remarkably dull-sounding "Science in the Capitol series".
Kim Stanley Robinson takes it as a given that we've already messed-up the planet too much to expect that we're going to solve the problem by backing-off on burning hydrocarbons: we're stuck with a need to use "amelioration" tactics; we have to find "technical fixes"; we have to learn to intentionally transform the biosphere while we're living in it-- this is a notion that many people find really scary (for good reason) and they would rather not even think about, but like KSR, I suspect we've got to go there.
In KSR's scenario, one of the first crisises that hit in this series is when the rapid melting of polar ice floods the North Atlantic with low-salinity, low density water which interferes with the circulation of the Gulf Stream. The human race, for once, reacts correctly, and engages in a massive civil engineering project to transport salt to that region of the ocean-- they succeed in dumping enough of it to actually re-start the Gulf Stream. This particular triumph then has a nasty social side-effect throughout the rest of the series: everyone figures that global warming must be no big deal, that they'll always be able to find another technical fix like this to cover any problem-- they don't recognize the special circumstances that made this particular tweak much easier than solving the real problems which is going to take something like sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere.
On that front, by the way, there's an interesting side-bit where some friends of the main character have done some wild-cat exploring of bio-engineering ideas, and they've taken it upon themselves to release modified plants and lichens that they expect will trap a lot of atmospheric carbon. It's not at all clear to the main character that this was a good idea-- he can imagine scenarios where it, in fact, goes horribly wrong-- but it's a fait accompli and there's not much they can do but just wait and see what happens with it. (I suspect it's going to be a hot topic in the near future: can we find ways to experiment with ideas like that sanely without just rolling the dice?)
There's one more bit of terraforming-of-terra in KSR's scenarios that I wanted to talk about: KSR has humanity combating rising ocean levels by setting up huge pumping stations on the perimeter of Antarctica-- they pump the water inland, adding to the southern ice pack. The oddity here is that KSR specifies that they're doing this using solar power-- however you feel about the current solar power mania, I think it should be immediately obvious that this is a very unlikely use for it: sunlight in Antarctica is limited to half of the year, and very oblique in any case (the efficiency would be terrible without also building a lot of structure to angle them toward the sun). This is a particularly strange idea when you consider a throwaway detail earlier in the series: the main character asks someone in the nuclear navy if it's possible to use submarines as emergency power sources, and gets an answer like "sure, we do stuff like that all the time". Wouldn't it make a nice dramatic scenario, a fleet of nuclear subs stationed around Antarctica, running pumping stations to control the ocean level? It's got a swords-into-plowshares angle going for it that I like (it's a better use of nuclear subs than preparing for a hypothetical first strike from a suddenly revived Soviet Union).
There's a strange detail in one of the many subplots of these stories, where one of the main characters is the father of a particularly wild and unruly young boy who one of the Tibetan mystics diagnoses as a victim of demonic possession-- without actually believing this makes any sense, the father let's them exorcise the boy, and weirdly enough it seems to "work": suddenly the child is much more calm and manageable. Over time the boy's father finds that he can't shake the impression that there's something wrong here now, this boy isn't really his son any more. His real son had that wild nature that had been removed... the father actually asks the mystics if they can undo the exorcism.
This is a pretty peculiar element to include in a series about "Science in the Capitol", and I can only speculate what role it was intended to play here-- it could be that Robinson thought that the books were unbalanced without a non-scientific viewpoint represented. Looking back on it, I think this young boy may be yet another metaphor for the human race as a whole: we have our unruly demonic aspects, a wild nature that gets us into trouble... but if you could magically get rid of that, would we remain human?
And indeed, the monkey-nature of humanity is something Robinson touches on at various points in his writing (in the works at hand, for example, the main character goes through a phase where he's enamored of what he calls "sociobiology": he likes to make "ook-ook" noises to himself when no one else is around).
It sometimes seems to me though that Robinson himself is someone who doesn't really get the spirit of monkey, he's a very sane, straight-forward guy without much of the trickster about him... this is a bit of a flaw in a series that tries to cover humanity's engagement with global warming. Much of the story has to be a story of derangement, the sheer craziness of the people who don't want to engage with the problem. Trying to get inside their heads would be the real challenge...
- Some older notes of mine about Kim Stanley Robinson:
- GETTING_WARM
- ANARCHIC_ROBINSON