欧宝娱乐

Utopian, dystopian, hopeful, grim, elegiac, overwhelming, unsettling, full of grief, full of joy. I suspect this book will haunt me the way Aurora haunts me.

One day in the near future, a heat wave hits India and twenty million people die. In one village, only one man survives, Frank, an aid worker who had a few more resources and a bit more luck. He survives deeply burned and deeply scared. After years of therapy, he tries to join an Indian ecoterrorism group, The Children of Kali. They will not have him. But they encourage him to freelance.

Meanwhile, the Ministry for the Future is the United Nations agency tasked with speaking for the future as the climate and economic crises accelerate. Through most of this book, it is run by an Irish bureaucrat, Mary, who had been a political leader once upon a time. Mary is doing her best with her tiny team. One night, Frank kidnaps her and howls in anguish that she is not doing enough. She retorts she's doing all she can. But 20 million dead. Extinction accelerating and oceans rising. When her Switzers come, he escapes into the night. But his words echo.

Mary asks her chief of staff if they should have a black-ops wing. Turns out they might already. She maintains -- mostly -- plausible deniability. As she lobbies bankers to establish new currencies back by carbon sequestration and somebody knocks planes out of the sky and coal fired power plants out of commission. At some point, her chief of staff might himself claim to be Kali and ask the children to stand down. (391). Chiefs of staff are freaking terrifying.

It's a strange book. Heroic scientists and engineers stop the glaciers from sliding into the ocean - some dying in the process -- and heroic kayakers we meet for an instant pluck strangers and neighbors from the flooded streets and save them from the flood, never to be seen again. Through efforts big and small, good and bloody, CO2 levels drop and the seas recede.

There's a lot of death. And also habitat corridors and a general repudiation of extractive capitalism. Some of our survivors watch a family of wolverines eat a dead deer. It's affirming and terrible.

Among the bits I particularly liked:

Remember what Margaret Thatcher said? There is no such thing as society!
We laughed out loud. For a while we couldn't stop laughing. Fuck Margaret Thatcher, I said when I could catch my breath. And I say it again now: fuck Margaret Thatcher, and fuck every idiot who thinks that way. I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real. A smelly mass of unwashed anxious citizens, no doubt about it. But a society for sure. It's a life or death thing, society, and I think people mainly do recognize that, and the people who deny it are stupid fuckers. The kid of stupidity that should be put in jail." (169)

Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization, and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long. (240)

Everyone know me but no one can tell me. No one knows me even though everyone has heard my name. Everyone talking together makes something that seems like me but is not me. Everyone doing things in the world makes me. I am blood in the streets, the catastrophe you can never forget. I am the tide running under the world that no one sees or feels. I happen in the present but am told only in the future, and then the think they think they speak of the past, but really they are always speaking about the present. I do not exist and yet I am everything.

You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good. (385)

The story jumps from hand to hand. From Frank to Mary. From a slave in a mine to a privileged asshole at Davos. From a photon to history ("Now make me good."). From blockchain to taxes. From a refugee to a kayaker plucking people from a flood. From debt strikers to a scientist on a glacier. Saving the world will take all of us.

I hear a rumor this is the last Kim Stanley Robinson novel. If so, it is a worthy capstone.