I just finished Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock and I wanted to write something longer-form about it than would fit in a text, so I thought the next size up was webpage. This review is very likely to have major spoilers.
Termination Shock is a classic Neal Stephenson sci-fi book in the model of Snow Crash, one of my all-time favorites: it's about everything all at once and every part of it is surprisingly deep and thoughtful.
In this case, the McGuffin is geo-engineering. The book follows the strange political ramifications that could come out of realized climate change pressuring states and billionaires to engineer the earth's stratosphere to allow in less light. This would reduce global temperatures while humans figure out how to deal with the fundamental greenhouse effect issue. The name of the book is actually a reference to the snapback effect that is likely to happen when such measures are suddenly stopped. Essential to the book is the fact that how you implement these measures inevitably creates winners and losers, and the stakes are habitability for millions of people.
The part about Termination Shock that I can't decide how I feel about is how it is completely of its time. Snow Crash was a book ahead of its time in the way that only great science fiction can be. It created a vocabulary and aesthetic of tech in 1992 that is still dominant. Facebook just renamed itself to Metaverse, a word coined in Snow Crash. Termination Shock, on the other hand, is technically set in the near future, but could very believably be about 2022. I think more of the book is dedicated to the history of geo-engineering than the future of it. These parts are extraordinarily well-researched and were the most enjoyable parts of the book.
A few of the things I looked up:
One of the largest man-made moving structures is a sea wall in the Netherlands that is mind-bogglingly enormous.
There are real people fighting each other with martial arts, including rock-throwing, on the contested border between India and China near the Himalayas.
There's a city being built in Saudi Arabia that is a completely green tech utopia.
That said, the current-ness of Termination Shock was a bit of a bummer. Neal Stephenson, Mind of the Future, has been dragged through the present with the rest of us. The book feels like it was written by someone who has spent the last ten years living on Twitter, which I know Stephenson has because I followed him there for a lot of it. It's surprisingly horny, for better or for worse. The all over the place-ness of his writing style feels sullied by the world of social media throwing all over the place-ness into my face all the time; maybe the problem is that the world caught up to the Mind of the Future.
In all, I thought it was pretty good. I struggled to get through the first half but really enjoyed the second half. It takes a lot of pages to be made to care about so many individual stories. I really enjoy climate change science and from that perspective, it was a lot like Ministry for the Future, but with more focus and a much more developed narrative. I think most people interested in Neal Stephenson or climate change science fiction would enjoy it.
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