Book Review by Jim Turner
There’s a worrysome reduced volume of flow in the Gulf Stream—truth or fiction? Apparently that hasn’t been detected yet, but a study by British scientists in Nature has warned that “The system of circulating water currents that moderates northern Europe’s weather is 30 percent slower than it was nearly 50 years ago.”1 So it is questionable how much we can count on the Gulf Stream in the future—a problem for the next generation of Americans? Kim Stanley Robinson has built a novel on an emerging truth: the climate can turn on a dime, and it’s a problem for us! As Liz Else wrote in the New Scientist, “In the case of the Younger Dryas event about 10,000 years ago, the ice age lasted about 3000 years but took as few as three to set in.”2
The novel Fifty Degrees Below begins with a terribly destructive winter that quickly overwhelms Washington D.C. along with most of North America and Europe, once the Gulf Stream falters. The novel gives much attention to the ecological impacts, but its main focus is on government and the National Science Foundation (NSF). It’s not implausible that even after such a heavy climate shift, government would still be obstructed by entrenched economic interests. Robinson himself has won an NSF grant and has served on a selection panel for its writers program, so he’s well placed for imagining how progressives at NSF would confront this crisis. His treatment of science is reliable because he calls upon scientists to edit pages of his rough drafts that relate to their specialties.
This novel is fact filled, but it’s not slow going for those aware of global warming. It can flesh out our anticipations of what’s to come if present trends continue. The story has a broad reach—it includes characters from some other nations, giving a vivid view of how rising ocean levels may affect their homelands. Robinson has put a lot of effort into creating characters quirky enough to engage our attention, but I‘d say that he deserves no more than a B for characterization and dialogue. The human interaction in this novel was not gripping enough to recur in my mind.3 Still, this is an optimum novel. Robinson needed to get it out the door soon enough in order to timely address our global warming debate.
Who can enjoy reading Fifty Degrees Below? Book reviewers have recommended it for academic libraries, public libraries, and school libraries. You should read it so that you can discuss it and recommend it to neighbors and friends who know about global warming but are not yet impressed enough to change their habits. Give a copy to a student to read during summer break—nerdy is “in” this year, and the level of scientific information in this book deserves anyone’s respect.
One more reason to read Robinson’s book: he’s optimistic! Fifty Degrees Below is volume two in a three-novel series. Here’s what Robinson says about volume three which he’s still working on:
I’m a utopian writer and I like happy endings. I think that is what science fiction is for, ultimately. So I’m going to postulate a US president who acts like a modern Franklin D. Roosevelt with his “bold and persistent experimentation” approach to solving big problems. And it will work—as it would in the real world.4
I have not read Forty Signs of Rain—the first volume, but I found Fifty Degrees Below to be a good read anyway. (Here’s hoping that volume three can be titled Sixty Ways to Thwart the Profiteers!) But even this present novel, Fifty Degrees Below, can supply an invigorating sense that the worm has turned, and the good guys are on the way to winning! To immerse yourself in the triumphs in volume three to come, you need to invest your attention in the suspenseful days of Fifty Degrees Below.
1 Juliet Eilperin, “Deep-Water Currents Slowing, Report Says” Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2005, p. A16.
2 Liz Else, “Down to the last chilling detail,” New Scientist, October 8, 2005, p. 56.
3 (In contrast, my A grade would go to Patrick O’Brian for his Stephen Maturin, the naturalist/physician/spy character in his novels of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars.)
4 Else, at p. 56.