Fall & rise
The mercurial Neal Stephenson explores the unintended consequences of a unilateral effort to reverse global warming.
Zeeland has a problem. The region of the Netherlands that New Zealand is – rather randomly – named after is a collection of islands and peninsulas extending out into the North Sea. Much of it is reclaimed land; it lies below sea level and is protected by a truly vast series of dams, sluices and flood barriers. These were constructed after a storm in 1953, which flooded the region and killed thousands. Zeeland is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Many of its residents keep an axe in their attic so that on the day the sea returns, they won’t get trapped up there by the rising waters; they’ll be able to hack their way out on to the roof.
Termination Shock is climate-change science fiction: a genre some critics call “cli fi”. It’s set 10 or 15 years in the future. The world is hotter, wetter in some places, drier in others. Technology is a little better: self-driving cars are a mature technology, so there are many more of them on the roads. There have been a couple more pandemics, none of them catastrophic. Supply-chain disruptions are a problem. So are feral hogs. The world is still our world; slightly worse in some ways, better in others. But this is about to change – not because of climate change, but because of the way Neal Stephenson predicts we’ll react to it.
This is Stephenson’s 17th novel. Since the publication of Snow Crash, in 1992, he has been one of the world’s most successful science-fiction writers. But he’s won very few awards, and Termination Shock is another reminder of how he’s one of our most profound and imaginative novelists, but also, simultaneously, quite a bad writer. Like all his recent works, this new book is long, bloated, filled with pointless characters and random discursions into diverse technical subjects that have nothing to do with the plot. It doesn’t end so much as come to a halt when the author’s interest in his own story winds down.
When he isn’t being undisciplined and boring, Stephenson is bleakly, horribly fascinating.
But when he isn’t being undisciplined, obsessive and boring, Stephenson is bleakly, horribly fascinating.
What happens, he wonders, when the regions of the world that are wealthy yet relatively powerless – places like Venice, Singapore, the City of London, the Netherlands – realise there isn’t going to be any global green new deal? That we’ll continue to flood the atmosphere of our planet with carbon. That the waters will rise. The sea will come for them. He predicts that they’ll band together and act. Not through politics or multilateral diplomacy – the environmental movement has spent 50 years demonstrating the total futility of such measures. They will act unilaterally. In Termination Shock, they begin geoengineering the Earth’s climate by dumping vast amounts of sulphur into the atmosphere. This will scatter more of the sunlight falling on to our planet back into space, and that will balance out the increased warming from atmospheric carbon. The world will cool and they’ll be saved.
This could have catastrophic impacts on other parts of the world, though, threatening droughts and famines. Those regions will retaliate, attempting to shut down the geoengineering projects. The neologism “climate peacekeeping” will enter geopolitics. Just as the development of nuclear weapons transformed the balance of power in the 20th century, the emergence of climate geoengineering will bring about a rapid realignment of powers and interests. And all of this takes place in a world in which the US is essentially a failed state. It has been “Facebooked”, to use Stephenson’s term from a previous novel: its information ecosystem has been destroyed by social media, so the nation no longer has a consensus reality for the population or its politicians to cohere around. Instead of elected politicians, the decisive actors in Stephenson’s vision of the future are billionaires, energy companies, fund managers, and the intelligence agencies of authoritarian regimes.
And what happens if a geoengineering project manages to cool the world and reverse climate change? Unfortunately, the sulphur doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for very long. It drifts back to Earth, so you have to keep shooting up more and more of it. And what happens if the nations that are negatively affected by geoengineering manage to prevent you from doing that? The heat comes back. Not slowly, like the gradual warming we’ve experienced over the past 150 years. It comes back very, very fast, an event climate modellers refer to as a “termination shock”. ▮
TERMINATION SHOCK, by Neal Stephenson (HarperCollins, $36.99)
All of this takes place in a world in which the US is essentially a failed state. It has been “Facebooked”.