Hardcover, 896 pages
Published Nov. 15, 2021 by William Morrow.
Termination Shock takes readers on a thrilling, chilling visit to our not-too-distant future – a world in which 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?
Termination Shock sounds a clarion alarm, ponders potential solutions and dire risks, and wraps it all together in an exhilarating, witty, mind-expanding speculative adventure.
This was a fun read that focussed on a bunch of sub-plots with different characters who eventually, of course, all come together.
I particularly enjoyed the sub-plots about hunting feral hogs and the volunteer fighters at the Line of Actual Control between China and India.
Content warning Mild spoilers about some topics covered by the book
While his heroes might be horse riding vagabonds or rocket riding scientists, I have a feeling that everything that Neal Stephenson writes is essentially a techno-thriller. With Termination Shock this is true in both the theme as well as the style, and Stephenson again demonstrates his mastery over this hybrid genre.
This time around the topic is the climate crisis, a solution to which is presented in groovy technical details. Story takes place in a near future. It carries over the increasingly plausible and dystopian depiction of US that we've previously seen in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. Though this time the story is more global, so we get to see other places in more detail. I especially appreciated European locales.
Characters are typically clever, witty or stoic, if a bit stylized (no-one really info-dumps in their everyday conversations like that). Not the most believable bunch, but I liked them.
There are the standard weak points as well. The story drags on a bit, and I lost interest in it after a while. It took me almost a year to finish the book because I dropped it around 2/3 of the way through and it took a vacation for me to pick it up again.
In the end, if you like Stephenson you'll like this book. If you don't there's probably nothing revolutionary here that will change your mind. And if you haven't read much of him so far there are better books to pick up first.
I wanted to like this more, because I was an early Stephenson fan from Zodiac days, and I still consider Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon to be masterful storytelling. But this? Almost insultingly silly character development, implausible relationships, and a strangely attenuated focus, given the backdrop of the most complex and unrelentingly global problem of our age. If Kim Stanley Robinson's approach to anthropocentric climate change tries to take too sweeping a view (at the expense of character development and human cultural complexity), here Stephenson suffers the opposite failing: too narrow a focus on the relationships around a particular technology, which reveals his increasingly stark limitations as a character-based storyteller. The one character he does manage to make compelling? Well, no spoilers, but I was shocked at the lazy (and infuriatingly bad) conclusion of that particular arc.
Ever since Snow Crash, Stephenson has had me hooked. So, I can say only good things about this book. Great story, great characters, etc., etc.
I do feel that in a few years, we might (very strong might) find ourselves speaking about this book the same way we speak about the aforementioned work: as some sort of prophetic vision of the future and how we will come to deal with climate change.
I also have to say that the author sneaks in some current affairs. There are things mentioned that may require future readers to check Wikipedia, and there are a few nuanced opinions too.
I took off one star because I feel like the story wasn't quite ready to end and it all rapped up nest and tidy in the swiftest way possible.
