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Science in the Capital #1-3
Green Earth
GREEN EARTH takes the stories first told in FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN, FIFTY DEGREES BELOW and SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING and combines them in a fully updated, compressed and compelling single volume.
Catastrophe is in the air. Increasingly strange weather events are pummelling the Earth. When the Gulf Stream shuts down and the Antarctic ice sheet starts melting, climate extremes multiply, and some winters hit like an ice age.
New U.S. President Phil Chase is on a he’s determined to solve climate change. His science advisor, Frank Vanderwal, is a bit more messed up. When massive floods hit Washington, Frank finds himself living in a treehouse and in love with a woman who’s definitely not what she seems, one who will draw him into the shadowy world of Homeland Security, and other, blacker agencies.
Only science can save the day. Frank knows he has to find a way to save the world so that science can proceed.
Catastrophe is in the air. Increasingly strange weather events are pummelling the Earth. When the Gulf Stream shuts down and the Antarctic ice sheet starts melting, climate extremes multiply, and some winters hit like an ice age.
New U.S. President Phil Chase is on a he’s determined to solve climate change. His science advisor, Frank Vanderwal, is a bit more messed up. When massive floods hit Washington, Frank finds himself living in a treehouse and in love with a woman who’s definitely not what she seems, one who will draw him into the shadowy world of Homeland Security, and other, blacker agencies.
Only science can save the day. Frank knows he has to find a way to save the world so that science can proceed.
1040 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 3, 2015
368 people are currently reading
2393 people want to read
About the author
Kim Stanley Robinson
250 books7,490 followersKim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He has published 22 novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. The Atlantic has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article in The New Yorker, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 155 reviews
September 18, 2021
My first dose of KSR (as the author is usually abbreviated) was in 2009 when I read is Alternate History novel The Years of Rice and Salt. Looking back, it feels very strange, that of all things it’s been this novel instead of his far better known CliFi novels or his Mars trilogy that got me introduced to his work. From there on, I dug my way very slowly through his works, mostly a novel each year. Green Earth waited quite a long time on my shelf. I bought it when it’s been published, six years ago in 2015, not long after I’ve read his Aurora. But then, a reading slump hit me hard and it got pushed back each time a new kid from KSR was on the block.
It felt daunting to start this 1100 pages doorstopper of a book, and the reviews didn’t indicate a must-read page-turner. The original “Science in the Capital” trilogy consisted of Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). The author cut 300 pages from these books, updated it with current facts (you can find an essay by him about that process at io9) and revised it as the title at hand.
The novel couldn’t read more relevant, more timely, more precisely: like last year’s U.S. election, and the breaking off of a huge part off West Antarctica (which really happened).
The core of the book lets a scientist face radical climate change as part of the political swamp of Washington D.C. Officially set somewhere in the nearest future, it doesn’t feel like SF, but reads like it could happen right now. As often, KSR throws in additional balls in this juggling:
Buddhism, biotechnology and investment capital, homelessness, sociobiology, surveillance, life in Washington D.C., life in a treehouse, life with a fractious toddler.
The cast is limited to a few people: main protagonist is scientist Frank Vanderwal working at the National Science Foundation in the capital. Frank faces a very interesting character development, turning from grumpy scientist who doesn’t come along well with people to a nature loving altruist going off-grid, caring for run-away zoo animals and people at the edge of society. He’s driven by a kind of awaking during a Buddhist talk, and a romantic encounter in an elevator where he falls in love with a mysterious woman.
That encounter exposes him to a spy thriller with ever present surveillance which Charles Stross couldn’t have done better.
That fractious toddler is the son of another protagonist, Charlie Quibler, working for senator Phil Chase (who you might know as a background voice in Antarctica) who is soon to become President. Charlie drives the senator’s climatic agenda.
This might be the most biographic novel of KSR: The author spreads out a good part of his own experiences across these two characters: as “Mr. Mom”, he cared for his own children. He knows every pebble around Frank’s home San Diego and often enough hiked the Sierra Nevada.
Other novels from him are weak in characters, but this one couldn’t be stronger with its super-detailed, tight third person narration.
And there is a lot of climatic action, as one might expect: the Gulf Stream was stalled by a huge intake from Greenland’s sweet water. This led very fast to weather phenomena like a flooded capital, and later on the literal “Fifty Degrees Below” in Washington D.C., freezing everything. Add to that the breaking away of the West Antarctic, as already started in Antarctica, and you get a doomsday scenario with raising sea level, failing crops, and weather catastrophes.
Counter that with large scale Terraforming, like pulling a fleet of ships filled with 500,000,000 tons of salt to restart the Gulf Stream or happily pumping sea water back to the Antarctic.
„You put salt in the ocean?“ [..] Rudra laughed his helpless deep belly laugh.
That’s also very typical for KSR, as he doesn’t write dystopian novels but always positive, hopeful CliFis. Which is exactly what I need, because I’m very pessimistic about my children’s (climatic) future.
This is also one of the most U.S. centric novels from KSR. The rest of the world is mostly mentioned in side-notes. He cites long passages of transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Main protagonist Frank reads his daily Emerson, and Thoreau’s famous Walden is a kind of role-model for Frank’s relocating to a tree-house in a nearby park. I have to confess, that my eyes got crossed every time I read those passages and I soon started skip-reading. I understand, that both were immensely influential. Especially the concept “Civil Disobedience” would lead to a kind of political science revolution in the book. But it was the first time that I’ve been exposed to those two philosophers – here in Germany they feel more like a local U.S. phenomenon, and they aren’t mentioned in school or politics – and that kind of reading is just not my thing at all. I’m more into Buddhistic summaries like:
„It is easy to live multiple lives. What is hard is to be a whole person.“
For sure, the novel is not a light read, not a page-turner. It took me a good while to read through it. But I always felt entertained, never trivialized, the book is well-researched, keeps an optimistic perspective and is often enough funny.
Yes, there are better KSR novels around, but I’m really glad to have read it, as it fits into the whole picture of KSR’s works and complements it very well.
It felt daunting to start this 1100 pages doorstopper of a book, and the reviews didn’t indicate a must-read page-turner. The original “Science in the Capital” trilogy consisted of Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). The author cut 300 pages from these books, updated it with current facts (you can find an essay by him about that process at io9) and revised it as the title at hand.
The novel couldn’t read more relevant, more timely, more precisely: like last year’s U.S. election, and the breaking off of a huge part off West Antarctica (which really happened).
The core of the book lets a scientist face radical climate change as part of the political swamp of Washington D.C. Officially set somewhere in the nearest future, it doesn’t feel like SF, but reads like it could happen right now. As often, KSR throws in additional balls in this juggling:
Buddhism, biotechnology and investment capital, homelessness, sociobiology, surveillance, life in Washington D.C., life in a treehouse, life with a fractious toddler.
The cast is limited to a few people: main protagonist is scientist Frank Vanderwal working at the National Science Foundation in the capital. Frank faces a very interesting character development, turning from grumpy scientist who doesn’t come along well with people to a nature loving altruist going off-grid, caring for run-away zoo animals and people at the edge of society. He’s driven by a kind of awaking during a Buddhist talk, and a romantic encounter in an elevator where he falls in love with a mysterious woman.
That encounter exposes him to a spy thriller with ever present surveillance which Charles Stross couldn’t have done better.
That fractious toddler is the son of another protagonist, Charlie Quibler, working for senator Phil Chase (who you might know as a background voice in Antarctica) who is soon to become President. Charlie drives the senator’s climatic agenda.
This might be the most biographic novel of KSR: The author spreads out a good part of his own experiences across these two characters: as “Mr. Mom”, he cared for his own children. He knows every pebble around Frank’s home San Diego and often enough hiked the Sierra Nevada.
Other novels from him are weak in characters, but this one couldn’t be stronger with its super-detailed, tight third person narration.
And there is a lot of climatic action, as one might expect: the Gulf Stream was stalled by a huge intake from Greenland’s sweet water. This led very fast to weather phenomena like a flooded capital, and later on the literal “Fifty Degrees Below” in Washington D.C., freezing everything. Add to that the breaking away of the West Antarctic, as already started in Antarctica, and you get a doomsday scenario with raising sea level, failing crops, and weather catastrophes.
Counter that with large scale Terraforming, like pulling a fleet of ships filled with 500,000,000 tons of salt to restart the Gulf Stream or happily pumping sea water back to the Antarctic.
„You put salt in the ocean?“ [..] Rudra laughed his helpless deep belly laugh.
That’s also very typical for KSR, as he doesn’t write dystopian novels but always positive, hopeful CliFis. Which is exactly what I need, because I’m very pessimistic about my children’s (climatic) future.
This is also one of the most U.S. centric novels from KSR. The rest of the world is mostly mentioned in side-notes. He cites long passages of transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Main protagonist Frank reads his daily Emerson, and Thoreau’s famous Walden is a kind of role-model for Frank’s relocating to a tree-house in a nearby park. I have to confess, that my eyes got crossed every time I read those passages and I soon started skip-reading. I understand, that both were immensely influential. Especially the concept “Civil Disobedience” would lead to a kind of political science revolution in the book. But it was the first time that I’ve been exposed to those two philosophers – here in Germany they feel more like a local U.S. phenomenon, and they aren’t mentioned in school or politics – and that kind of reading is just not my thing at all. I’m more into Buddhistic summaries like:
„It is easy to live multiple lives. What is hard is to be a whole person.“
For sure, the novel is not a light read, not a page-turner. It took me a good while to read through it. But I always felt entertained, never trivialized, the book is well-researched, keeps an optimistic perspective and is often enough funny.
Yes, there are better KSR novels around, but I’m really glad to have read it, as it fits into the whole picture of KSR’s works and complements it very well.
March 16, 2016
Green Earth is an updated, mashed-up version of previous books Robinson had written in a series he called Science in the Capitol. Although I hadn’t read the earlier novels, I could see the “seams” where material had been patched together, with plots condensed and the development of some plots dropped completely. That didn’t bother me. The story is still coherent and full of good information about what could happen in our oceans and at our ice caps to cause sudden or “abrupt” climate change and what the consequences of that might look like. This is global warming in the developed world. In Green Earth, we enter the lives of men and women who are healthy, smart, powerful, and privileged--kayakers paddling on the National Mall as Washington DC floods, hikers in California documenting the loss of favorite alpine meadows, home-owners mourning their expensive beach-front property. And these recognizable and supremely likeable characters, this recognizable and privileged world, is what makes the reality of something so dramatic, so planet-altering, so inconceivable as climate change accessible to many of Robinson’s readers. We read this book while traveling in an airplane, or at home surrounded by our own middle-class stuff, and we think—yes, this could really happen.
Green Earth is a deeply, weirdly, refreshingly hopeful book. Its most science-fictiony leap may be the “thought experiment” of American politicians and scientists putting shoulders to the wheel and trying to save the world together.
It is interesting to compare this book with The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, which is at the other extreme—a charismatic Dr. Jekyll to Robinson’s staid and pleasant Mr. Hyde. In The Water Knife’s bleak and broken city of Phoenix, Arizona, in the not-so-very-distant future, the United States has fallen apart into warring states, with refugees from the south desperately trying to reach the north. Bacigalupi draws heavily on scientific research about what extreme drought will look like in the American Southwest, mixes into that the brutal and horrific violence of the drug cartels happening along the border now, adds everything we know and feel about corrupt politics and amoral multinational corporations—and the result also feels frighteningly and utterly real. Absolutely scary. Yes, we think. Oh my God. Get the family in the car! We need a plan!
Both books are powerful nature writing. Arctic winters sweeping through the Northeast. Coastal cities flooded. Governments bankrupted. The refugees of Texas and New Mexico fighting over plastic bags of urine-recycled water. The grit of dust storms and smoke of fires blowing out the lungs of the have-nots while the haves build hermetically-sealed towers protected by private armies…all based on the news we are reading today.
What we do next with this information—that human-caused climate change is going to have enormous consequences, perhaps for you and me personally, perhaps in our lifetimes—is up to us. And I won’t argue that fiction is better at prompting people to action than nonfiction. But I do believe that books like Green Earth and The Water Knife create vivid scenes and images that live in our psyche in a way that the numbers and facts of global warming do not.
American nature writing--and the environmental movement--began serendipitously with a handful of nineteenth-century thinkers and writers: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, John Muir. And if they had been writing instead in the 21rst century? Who knows? Perhaps they’d be writing science fiction.
Green Earth is a deeply, weirdly, refreshingly hopeful book. Its most science-fictiony leap may be the “thought experiment” of American politicians and scientists putting shoulders to the wheel and trying to save the world together.
It is interesting to compare this book with The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, which is at the other extreme—a charismatic Dr. Jekyll to Robinson’s staid and pleasant Mr. Hyde. In The Water Knife’s bleak and broken city of Phoenix, Arizona, in the not-so-very-distant future, the United States has fallen apart into warring states, with refugees from the south desperately trying to reach the north. Bacigalupi draws heavily on scientific research about what extreme drought will look like in the American Southwest, mixes into that the brutal and horrific violence of the drug cartels happening along the border now, adds everything we know and feel about corrupt politics and amoral multinational corporations—and the result also feels frighteningly and utterly real. Absolutely scary. Yes, we think. Oh my God. Get the family in the car! We need a plan!
Both books are powerful nature writing. Arctic winters sweeping through the Northeast. Coastal cities flooded. Governments bankrupted. The refugees of Texas and New Mexico fighting over plastic bags of urine-recycled water. The grit of dust storms and smoke of fires blowing out the lungs of the have-nots while the haves build hermetically-sealed towers protected by private armies…all based on the news we are reading today.
What we do next with this information—that human-caused climate change is going to have enormous consequences, perhaps for you and me personally, perhaps in our lifetimes—is up to us. And I won’t argue that fiction is better at prompting people to action than nonfiction. But I do believe that books like Green Earth and The Water Knife create vivid scenes and images that live in our psyche in a way that the numbers and facts of global warming do not.
American nature writing--and the environmental movement--began serendipitously with a handful of nineteenth-century thinkers and writers: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, John Muir. And if they had been writing instead in the 21rst century? Who knows? Perhaps they’d be writing science fiction.
April 14, 2016
Please read the full 2583 word analysis on Weighing A Pig...
Green Earth is a revised version of The Science In The Capital-trilogy, a near future series on climate change, American politics and science. The original trilogy consists of Forty Signs Of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days And Counting (2007). They were meant to be one long novel all along. In movies, most director’s cuts are longer, but not here so… Robinson cut about 300 pages, still leaving Green Earth to be a mammoth of 1069 pages. It’s unclear how much updating took place, if any – there’s about a decade of extra research and data on climate change since the first volume was published, and it’s not unthinkable that KSR tinkered a bit with some of the data in the original books too.
You can read the 6 page introduction of the book on io9. It is an excellent text by KSR himself on the reasons for this revision, and he tackles some other interesting topics too. His take on the ethics of contemporary literature & science fiction is bold, and rings very true to these ears.
Also, my original idea had been to write a realist novel as if it were science fiction. This approach struck me as funny, and also appropriate, because these days we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together. If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.
I’ll start with some remarks about the book in general, and afterwards zoom in a bit on the 3 parts. I should probably mention that I made about 7 times as many notes while reading as I do for most reviews, and some of that is surely on behalf of the 1000+ page count, but still. Green Earth is an extremely rich book, and this review should have been at least twice as long to do justice to the scope of its ideas: I’ll leave a lot unsaid. So, don’t forget to read the book too!
(...)
Green Earth is a revised version of The Science In The Capital-trilogy, a near future series on climate change, American politics and science. The original trilogy consists of Forty Signs Of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Days And Counting (2007). They were meant to be one long novel all along. In movies, most director’s cuts are longer, but not here so… Robinson cut about 300 pages, still leaving Green Earth to be a mammoth of 1069 pages. It’s unclear how much updating took place, if any – there’s about a decade of extra research and data on climate change since the first volume was published, and it’s not unthinkable that KSR tinkered a bit with some of the data in the original books too.
You can read the 6 page introduction of the book on io9. It is an excellent text by KSR himself on the reasons for this revision, and he tackles some other interesting topics too. His take on the ethics of contemporary literature & science fiction is bold, and rings very true to these ears.
Also, my original idea had been to write a realist novel as if it were science fiction. This approach struck me as funny, and also appropriate, because these days we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together. If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.
I’ll start with some remarks about the book in general, and afterwards zoom in a bit on the 3 parts. I should probably mention that I made about 7 times as many notes while reading as I do for most reviews, and some of that is surely on behalf of the 1000+ page count, but still. Green Earth is an extremely rich book, and this review should have been at least twice as long to do justice to the scope of its ideas: I’ll leave a lot unsaid. So, don’t forget to read the book too!
(...)
August 24, 2016
Not as good as his Mars trilogy. 69 pages of climate change drama mixed with 1000 pages of male navel gazing. Does NOT pass Bechdel test. For NSF fanboys and paleo-bros only.
March 16, 2016
What a bummer. I've been excitedly working through Kim Stanley Robinson's novels after 'discovering mars' last year , and this is the first true disappointment (after reading the Mars Trilogy, Antarctica, 2312, and Aurora).
Robinson is at his best when describing landscapes, the ongoing physical processes that generate those forms and ecosystems, and the tenuous dependency of humans upon their planet's (and planets') geology and ecology. While that dependency is here in spades, the typically lyric descriptions are sorely missed. Were these culled in the edit?
The author can generally be hit-or-miss on characters, in 'Mars' managing to craft incredibly compelling stories for a dozen or more protagonists who evolve continuously through the trilogy. In 'Antarctica' a handful are similarly developed, each with a compelling story arc. Here, only Frank gets a proper arc while the other protagonists/point-of-view characters lack agency and passively float through the story, dragging down hundreds of pages into tedium.
I feel like to book could be consolidated even further, and end up as a tight, single novel of about half this length. Ditch the Quibblers entirely, or reduce them to minor characters, and slash the surveillance subplot, and the story would suddenly come into focus as we follow Frank and Diane's efforts at 'terraforming earth' in response to catastrophic climate change. (Frank's subplot about 'going feral' is also incredibly compelling, but this could almost be another character).
Robinson is at his best when describing landscapes, the ongoing physical processes that generate those forms and ecosystems, and the tenuous dependency of humans upon their planet's (and planets') geology and ecology. While that dependency is here in spades, the typically lyric descriptions are sorely missed. Were these culled in the edit?
The author can generally be hit-or-miss on characters, in 'Mars' managing to craft incredibly compelling stories for a dozen or more protagonists who evolve continuously through the trilogy. In 'Antarctica' a handful are similarly developed, each with a compelling story arc. Here, only Frank gets a proper arc while the other protagonists/point-of-view characters lack agency and passively float through the story, dragging down hundreds of pages into tedium.
I feel like to book could be consolidated even further, and end up as a tight, single novel of about half this length. Ditch the Quibblers entirely, or reduce them to minor characters, and slash the surveillance subplot, and the story would suddenly come into focus as we follow Frank and Diane's efforts at 'terraforming earth' in response to catastrophic climate change. (Frank's subplot about 'going feral' is also incredibly compelling, but this could almost be another character).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 6, 2017
Green Earth is a single novel, assembled from a three-book series that came out in the mid-aughts. Robinson decided that the work would read better if combined into a single book, with some passages excised and (I'm guessing) some adjustments made to bring the story up to present day science.
This is well worth the time to read -- it's long, but in most places, thought-provoking and engaging. Here we have the story of a group of scientists and politicians, working together to avert or at least contain environmental disaster related to global warming. The story begins in a year (not far off, I think) in which the balance has been tipped and disastrous weather patterns abruptly start taking a dramatic toll on humans in coastal areas, islands and indeed worldwide. Food supply is affected, coastlines are plunged underwater, floods, droughts and uncharacteristic heat and cold are widespread.
Robinson deals with the response to this situation on a personal and political level. Individuals who care, but who have been part of a slow-moving research and policy machinery, are galvanized into bold action. Politicians who deny science and are beholden to polluting industries lose the support of voters, and a science-friendly president is swept into office. (Given that I was reading this book as Trump was sworn into office, I had the feeling -- surely not intended by Robinson -- that this was an alternate reality tale. But maybe it could be real... just a few years away...)
Folded into this mix of science and politics is a Buddhist spiritual philosophy, as key characters are influenced by befriending members of a small but vibrant nation whose previous home, a small island, is threatened by rising sea levels.
In today's political climate, my cynicism is nearly impenetrable. But Green Earth did a good job of showing me what could happen if only our nation's best minds were freed of political and corporate shackles and allowed to do their best work to avert disaster. The specific scientific advances in this book may or may not end up being the real answers, but wouldn't it be great to enable our real-world scientists with the money and political support it takes to find out?
This is well worth the time to read -- it's long, but in most places, thought-provoking and engaging. Here we have the story of a group of scientists and politicians, working together to avert or at least contain environmental disaster related to global warming. The story begins in a year (not far off, I think) in which the balance has been tipped and disastrous weather patterns abruptly start taking a dramatic toll on humans in coastal areas, islands and indeed worldwide. Food supply is affected, coastlines are plunged underwater, floods, droughts and uncharacteristic heat and cold are widespread.
Robinson deals with the response to this situation on a personal and political level. Individuals who care, but who have been part of a slow-moving research and policy machinery, are galvanized into bold action. Politicians who deny science and are beholden to polluting industries lose the support of voters, and a science-friendly president is swept into office. (Given that I was reading this book as Trump was sworn into office, I had the feeling -- surely not intended by Robinson -- that this was an alternate reality tale. But maybe it could be real... just a few years away...)
Folded into this mix of science and politics is a Buddhist spiritual philosophy, as key characters are influenced by befriending members of a small but vibrant nation whose previous home, a small island, is threatened by rising sea levels.
In today's political climate, my cynicism is nearly impenetrable. But Green Earth did a good job of showing me what could happen if only our nation's best minds were freed of political and corporate shackles and allowed to do their best work to avert disaster. The specific scientific advances in this book may or may not end up being the real answers, but wouldn't it be great to enable our real-world scientists with the money and political support it takes to find out?
September 21, 2022
I have never been so happy to finish a book in my entire life. 3/5 stars, I hated Frank so that’s the reason for the rating. Charlie was annoying. But loved the political stuff even if it seems far fetched by 2022’s polarization.
August 3, 2019
Green Earth is surprisingly compelling. I didn't think a trilogy compressed into a single thousand-page novel would work. But it does. This strange combination–a book about Tibetan buddhism, the right wing deep state, election security, presidential politics, the role of public science, biotech, stay-at-home dads, romance, and of course the climate change–somehow holds together. I won't say the book wouldn't have been better with a few less pages and a few less threads. But then again, it might have been much worse. One of the ways Robinson gets you to stick with him through a thousand pages is to toss you from one thread to the next. You're always waiting for something to resolve. And Green Earth keeps you waiting until the end.
Read
September 9, 2016I've put the status of this book to "read", but I've only read a little over half. I've parked it for now (will probably come back to it some time in the future). I moderately enjoyed what I've read so far, however, being that it's actually a previous trilogy condensed into one book, it's very long, and has rather pushed my patience.
I really enjoyed the first section (based on the first book of the trilogy). And I've moderately enjoyed the second section, however, I've now "parked" it twice to read other books - the first parking was to read Ready Player One (loved it - tons of nostalgic fun), and now the second parking is to read Michael Connelley's The Crossing (awesome so far - a true page turner that moves at a brisk pace with great characters - Bosch is one of the all time great literary characters, at least in that genre).
The fact that I've parked Green Earth twice now doesn't bode too well. It has some really interesting elements (as with all KSR, lots of science, some politics, some sociology, and environmentalism with climate change), and realistic, interesting, and likeable characters. But the overall plot/story just moves at a leisurely, meandering pace. And in the second section, where our main protagonist Frank decides to live in a tree house in Washington DC's Rock Creek Park, and hang with homeless people and frisbee golf players, gets rather repetitive and directionless. And I get rather bored with Frank's navel gazing. It too has some interesting elements, but it just gets bogged down at times. This has made the book a bit of chore (a pleasant chore, but a chore nonetheless), rather than any sort of a page turner or source of inspiration or entertainment.
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my absolute favorite authors. See my reviews of 2312 and Aurora. I loved those, especially Aurora. In fact, I count Aurora as one of the best books I've ever read.
But Green Earth is a different animal. It's not absorbing me like the other two KSR books mentioned above. It's pleasant and interesting, but nothing great so far.
What I think I should have done is just read it one section at a time, sort of like reading the original trilogy. This book is long, and I'm rather busy and have other books I want to read. But also having the sections broken up would be a good pacing for me, rather than attempting to power through it all at once.
I didn't give Green Earth a star rating, because I didn't finish it. But when I come back to it, I will. For now, it's just an "incomplete".
I really enjoyed the first section (based on the first book of the trilogy). And I've moderately enjoyed the second section, however, I've now "parked" it twice to read other books - the first parking was to read Ready Player One (loved it - tons of nostalgic fun), and now the second parking is to read Michael Connelley's The Crossing (awesome so far - a true page turner that moves at a brisk pace with great characters - Bosch is one of the all time great literary characters, at least in that genre).
The fact that I've parked Green Earth twice now doesn't bode too well. It has some really interesting elements (as with all KSR, lots of science, some politics, some sociology, and environmentalism with climate change), and realistic, interesting, and likeable characters. But the overall plot/story just moves at a leisurely, meandering pace. And in the second section, where our main protagonist Frank decides to live in a tree house in Washington DC's Rock Creek Park, and hang with homeless people and frisbee golf players, gets rather repetitive and directionless. And I get rather bored with Frank's navel gazing. It too has some interesting elements, but it just gets bogged down at times. This has made the book a bit of chore (a pleasant chore, but a chore nonetheless), rather than any sort of a page turner or source of inspiration or entertainment.
Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my absolute favorite authors. See my reviews of 2312 and Aurora. I loved those, especially Aurora. In fact, I count Aurora as one of the best books I've ever read.
But Green Earth is a different animal. It's not absorbing me like the other two KSR books mentioned above. It's pleasant and interesting, but nothing great so far.
What I think I should have done is just read it one section at a time, sort of like reading the original trilogy. This book is long, and I'm rather busy and have other books I want to read. But also having the sections broken up would be a good pacing for me, rather than attempting to power through it all at once.
I didn't give Green Earth a star rating, because I didn't finish it. But when I come back to it, I will. For now, it's just an "incomplete".
February 15, 2020
If you’re looking for a sweeping exploration into the potential of catastrophic abrupt climate change and the ways that a competent United States Government would lead the world in handling this crisis, this is not the book for you. If you are more interested in male navel gazing, this is the book for you. Over 1,000 pages of some dude objectifying every woman he sees, bad YA style falling in love at first sight and attempting to live off the grid. “Frank moves into Central Park and reads a lot of Emerson” actually would have been a great concept on its own, but I was expecting to read about the climate change stuff.
Other subplots that would have been far more interesting books:
Caroline single handedly taking down a black box intelligence agency trying to rig an election (without Frank, please - whatever did happen to that second flash drive, anyway?)
Following Marta and Yann as they go from gene insertion to terraforming lichen that maybe goes awry team
All of the abrupt climate change and terraforming! This is the book I thought we were going to read and desperately want to find out there.
Nearly all of the real story happens off screen and we are left with 200 pages of “Frank can’t make decisions because he was hit in the face with a board and has a hematoma”
Other subplots that would have been far more interesting books:
Caroline single handedly taking down a black box intelligence agency trying to rig an election (without Frank, please - whatever did happen to that second flash drive, anyway?)
Following Marta and Yann as they go from gene insertion to terraforming lichen that maybe goes awry team
All of the abrupt climate change and terraforming! This is the book I thought we were going to read and desperately want to find out there.
Nearly all of the real story happens off screen and we are left with 200 pages of “Frank can’t make decisions because he was hit in the face with a board and has a hematoma”
August 11, 2016
KSR is still one of my favourite authors, for sure, but I didn't like this as much. The characters were a bit too boring. Normally I don't mind if they're there just to advance KSR's arguments, but it didn't seem like he was adding anything new (maybe that's because I'm used to reading his later books). There wasn't a whole lot of crazy new science, but what was there was fun: the antarctic pipeline in particular was cool, but also the lichen and the salt in the Greenland runoff to restart the Gulf Stream/thermohaline cycle. The Emmerson/Thoreau stuff was boring, I've never liked those guys. And D.C. is probably the most physically boring corner of the solar system that KSR has ever visited. Even he seems bored by it.
Green Earth is a condensed version of his Science in the Capitol trilogy, and occasionally I felt like the plot was taking weird leaps and I had to fill in the blanks myself, though I actually enjoyed that aspect.
Green Earth is a condensed version of his Science in the Capitol trilogy, and occasionally I felt like the plot was taking weird leaps and I had to fill in the blanks myself, though I actually enjoyed that aspect.
March 28, 2017
I really wanted to like this book. Its topic is so worthy and its ideas so excellent. Unfortunately I struggled through it in a state of vegetative boredom. While the global warming stuff was brilliant, quite a lot of the story is bogged down with Life In The Capital and none of it was in the least bit interesting. I feel as if I should apologise for not liking it. I did try, though, and stuck with it to the end, while thinking almost all the time that almost everything I was reading was just superfluous. Frankly, this was intensely dull.
Read
November 8, 2015I must admit defeat on this one. Kim Stanley Robinson is one of those authors whose books I often love. But he also produces others I just cannot get on with and this is one of those. Too much of the biotech science - and there is buckets of it - flew over my head while the pace of the book is leisurely to say the least. I read 155p so I'm happy that I gave it a good try.
June 10, 2020
I was gonna say "hey, would you like an extremely long book about climate change, government conspiracy, and Buddhism?" but it turns out this is a three-book compilation, so really that's on me.
THIS IS WHY I NEVER FINISH AN ACTUAL BOOK CHALLENGE.
THIS IS WHY I NEVER FINISH AN ACTUAL BOOK CHALLENGE.
May 1, 2019
This is a realistic science fiction saga about climate change. The book is made up of a trilogy that was edited and combined into one giant volume. If I had read the first book as a separate volume then I probably would not have continued, because although I found the subject matter very interesting, the writing style and the various characters did not impress me. As a whole set, though, I find that the books become more intriguing, and after the first book, the story starts to focus in on fewer characters that have their stories developed into something more interesting.
The scope of topics that the trilogy covers is quite large. Overall, it's a story about climate change and the efforts to mitigate it, taking place in the very near future (practically today) and set primarily in Washington, D.C. It deals of course with worldwide environmental issues from a scientific point of view, but also government policy, international relations, the scientific publication process and funding, elections tampering, Buddhism, corrupt intelligence agencies, and personal human stories involving work, family, and romance, which brings to light just how many elements are intertwined in the efforts of dealing with climate change. Several parts of the book are very intellectually stimulating and reading it can be very eye-opening and educational. Other parts drag on forever. It seems that the author just started writing with no end in sight, as none of the three books seem to have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
If I were to rate this based on how entertained I was, I'd give it 3 stars. Rating it based on the multitude of ideas that I was introduced to, I'd give it 5 stars. I can definitely say that I learned a lot from this book, but it took me nearly a year to get through it and I had to put it down every once in a while and read entire other books just to lighten up my life. I would only recommend trying to read this trilogy if you have a really strong interest in climate change mitigation. If not, you might die of boredom.
The scope of topics that the trilogy covers is quite large. Overall, it's a story about climate change and the efforts to mitigate it, taking place in the very near future (practically today) and set primarily in Washington, D.C. It deals of course with worldwide environmental issues from a scientific point of view, but also government policy, international relations, the scientific publication process and funding, elections tampering, Buddhism, corrupt intelligence agencies, and personal human stories involving work, family, and romance, which brings to light just how many elements are intertwined in the efforts of dealing with climate change. Several parts of the book are very intellectually stimulating and reading it can be very eye-opening and educational. Other parts drag on forever. It seems that the author just started writing with no end in sight, as none of the three books seem to have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
If I were to rate this based on how entertained I was, I'd give it 3 stars. Rating it based on the multitude of ideas that I was introduced to, I'd give it 5 stars. I can definitely say that I learned a lot from this book, but it took me nearly a year to get through it and I had to put it down every once in a while and read entire other books just to lighten up my life. I would only recommend trying to read this trilogy if you have a really strong interest in climate change mitigation. If not, you might die of boredom.
November 25, 2024
lol it took me a year to read this
June 7, 2024
This is actually three books sandwiched together into this very lengthy edition, the first of which was published 20 years ago. It's interesting to see what predictions KSR got right and which were far off the mark (spoiler - China).
March 14, 2018
"Green Earth was so intense and so realistic. Climate change, Tibetan Llamas, hipster presidents, dead drops, rigged elections, tree houses, homeless frisbee freaks. It's got everything. And its characters were so well drawn. They felt like members of my own family. I wept bitter tears as I read the last page of this extraordinary novel. If only Stanley had written dozens more installments...."
I might have penned the forgoing thoughts in an alternate universe -- a silicon- or ketchup-based universe. But not in this one. Not with a straight face, at least.
Green Earth may be THE most mediocre book I've ever read. It's certainly the longest totally mediocre book I've ever persisted (why?) in slogging my way through. Is the author the same Kim Stanley Robinson who wrote Red Mars and Galileo's Dream -- first-rate books both? That does not compute. One or the other is definitely an imposter. That, or the KSR who wrote Green Earth did so during long bouts of alcohol- or sugar-induced stupor, or while seriously multi-tasking. Green Earth is that bad. Truly. 5 stars for the page count. -5 for the quality of the story, the writing, and the characters. An average 0 stars rounded to 1 since Goodreads enforces a minimum-level positive response.
Mother of God, Batman, that was some CRAZY boring read. (Dear Lord, may I never again hear -- or see in print -- the vocable "Ooooooooop!")
And the coup de grace: KSR was inspired to edit three separate books of his into this mega-umami novel by the example of Peter Matthiessen, who did the same with his novel Shadow Country. KSR, I know PM. Green Earth is no Shadow Country. Nuf said.
I might have penned the forgoing thoughts in an alternate universe -- a silicon- or ketchup-based universe. But not in this one. Not with a straight face, at least.
Green Earth may be THE most mediocre book I've ever read. It's certainly the longest totally mediocre book I've ever persisted (why?) in slogging my way through. Is the author the same Kim Stanley Robinson who wrote Red Mars and Galileo's Dream -- first-rate books both? That does not compute. One or the other is definitely an imposter. That, or the KSR who wrote Green Earth did so during long bouts of alcohol- or sugar-induced stupor, or while seriously multi-tasking. Green Earth is that bad. Truly. 5 stars for the page count. -5 for the quality of the story, the writing, and the characters. An average 0 stars rounded to 1 since Goodreads enforces a minimum-level positive response.
Mother of God, Batman, that was some CRAZY boring read. (Dear Lord, may I never again hear -- or see in print -- the vocable "Ooooooooop!")
And the coup de grace: KSR was inspired to edit three separate books of his into this mega-umami novel by the example of Peter Matthiessen, who did the same with his novel Shadow Country. KSR, I know PM. Green Earth is no Shadow Country. Nuf said.
December 15, 2019
I'm a sucker for Kim Stanley Robinson, so I want to give this 4 stars because I enjoyed it, but it packs less of a punch than the rest of what I've read of his works and probably doesn't deserve more than a 3 because its focus is too muddled. It has an interesting hook (how to fight climate change from within the US government), but I think it suffers both from core concept, continuity of theme, and some issues in execution. Green Earth is a somewhat-abridged combination of 3 books called the "Science in the Capital" trilogy - I didn't read those alone and just read this complete version.
The book focuses on the ethnobiologist Professor Frank Vanderwal who is finishing a year-long tour of duty at the NSF [National Science Foundation]. After a lecture from a Buddhist monk from a small island nation that is threatened to flood from climate change who notes that extreme rationality is a form of madness (among other things), Frank has a small mental breakdown and writes a letter to the NSF head excoriating the agency for its lack of action on confronting climate change. However, instead of yelling at him for his pomposity, the NSF head puts him in charge of a team devoting the NSF to becoming an active political player to confront climate change head-on, which is the "main" plot point of the rest of the book.
After a massive hurricane (that evokes Katrina and Sandy but was written before them), Frank lives in a treehouse in the woods, despite climate change stopping the Gulf Stream and causing a cold snap that makes for a deadly cold winter across the hemisphere. The book concurrently traces Frank's interest in scientific Buddhism, rock climbing, life on the Savannah for early humans, and frisbee golf as he works through his love life (his interests split between an ex, the head of the NSF, and a married secret agent at some dark agency that can only meet when they aren't being tracked), his work fighting climate change at the NSF, his efforts to track escaped zoo animals in the park where he lives, and a variety of hijinks with the local homeless population. Even for a three-book epic, that's a lot of ground to cover, and I haven't mentioned that a good number of the chapters of the book aren't about Frank at all but cover the Quiblers: a family where the mother works at the NSF alongside Frank and the father splits between at-home parenting a child he thinks might be a reincarnation of some Tibetan Lama and working on climate change legislation for a Senator.
I like the somewhat counter-intuitive focus of the middle of the book on climate affecting the gulf stream and causing cold weather as it's a narrative counter to a simple "global warming" issue. But the book is doing too many things at once. I don't think that the book has a great literary quality to it in terms of having very well-developed characters that interact in realistic ways or experience meaningful personal growth. So the amount of time spent on Frank falling in and out of love is a disappointing focus of a setting that could do a lot more with what he's working on in the science of it all and the fallout from ecological collapse or rising sea levels. The characters go to the island of the above-mentioned Buddhists, but before we can get invested in what's happening or even get a good feel for what life is like for its people, it sinks below the ocean forever. That should have been an impactful moment, but there wasn't enough characterization of the place or its people beforehand.
There are other plot points about intelligence agencies feuding with each other, rigging elections, and tracking the populace that form a big piece of the last third of the book, but the spy thriller stuff doesn't really fit into this book about a university professor-turned-bureaucrat. I think Robinson is trying to make a broader point that there are embedded interests that will fight the structural changes in the political economy that are required to properly fight climate change, but, while entertaining, it all comes away muddled.
Like the rest of his work, Robinson has fun tangents throughout: Frank takes up looking for escaped zoo animals because it 'reminds' him of what life was like for early hunter-gatherers, and he tries to emulate that lifestyle; there's a bunch of stuff about science, Buddhism, and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Frank's frisbee golf buddies are "freegans" that only live off of food that can be obtained for free, largely from the waste generated by restaurants and groceries throwing away good food; there's a subplot about genetically engineered lichen in Russia. But not enough of it comes back to any cohesive theme, they end up as a bunch of fun thought experiments that don't really go anywhere or connect together.
Unfortunately, these "fun tangents" form most of the book's too-long length. Some of this is because it's fundamentally not that interesting of a story to cover the life of a bureaucrat. But moreso because it touches a lot on the life of Frank Vanderwal in ways that are semi-interesting to read about, but don't serve any thematic purpose. The timeline is only over a year or two, which really compresses what you can do in a story about fighting climate change, even if a presidential campaign gets shoved in there as well. A ground-level view of climate change is important and interesting, but New York 2140 did that better. By situating itself in the seat of US governmental power, the book had the promise of being a higher-level account, but then got bogged down with playing with characters in plots that don't end up paying off.
The focus on Frank's love-life was especially a let-down because it puts a strong "male gaze" on a lot of the book without really adding much to it. It didn't develop him more as a character, it just reduced more of the female characters to subjects of possible romantic interest for him, which isn't a useful or interesting angle, and I found rather off-putting. The lack of interesting female characterization actually quite bugged me and took me out of the setting because it was so jarring - I almost want to knock another star off for that alone, but I had enough fun with it that 2 stars would be too harsh.
I like the idea - the question of what we can do to confront climate change is interesting and the story Robinson weaves has some good points to it. Anyone working at the NSF or in government should at least read a synopsis. I had fun the whole way through (though it got slow in places), but I wouldn't put it on any "best of" list - the promise was better than the product.
The book focuses on the ethnobiologist Professor Frank Vanderwal who is finishing a year-long tour of duty at the NSF [National Science Foundation]. After a lecture from a Buddhist monk from a small island nation that is threatened to flood from climate change who notes that extreme rationality is a form of madness (among other things), Frank has a small mental breakdown and writes a letter to the NSF head excoriating the agency for its lack of action on confronting climate change. However, instead of yelling at him for his pomposity, the NSF head puts him in charge of a team devoting the NSF to becoming an active political player to confront climate change head-on, which is the "main" plot point of the rest of the book.
After a massive hurricane (that evokes Katrina and Sandy but was written before them), Frank lives in a treehouse in the woods, despite climate change stopping the Gulf Stream and causing a cold snap that makes for a deadly cold winter across the hemisphere. The book concurrently traces Frank's interest in scientific Buddhism, rock climbing, life on the Savannah for early humans, and frisbee golf as he works through his love life (his interests split between an ex, the head of the NSF, and a married secret agent at some dark agency that can only meet when they aren't being tracked), his work fighting climate change at the NSF, his efforts to track escaped zoo animals in the park where he lives, and a variety of hijinks with the local homeless population. Even for a three-book epic, that's a lot of ground to cover, and I haven't mentioned that a good number of the chapters of the book aren't about Frank at all but cover the Quiblers: a family where the mother works at the NSF alongside Frank and the father splits between at-home parenting a child he thinks might be a reincarnation of some Tibetan Lama and working on climate change legislation for a Senator.
I like the somewhat counter-intuitive focus of the middle of the book on climate affecting the gulf stream and causing cold weather as it's a narrative counter to a simple "global warming" issue. But the book is doing too many things at once. I don't think that the book has a great literary quality to it in terms of having very well-developed characters that interact in realistic ways or experience meaningful personal growth. So the amount of time spent on Frank falling in and out of love is a disappointing focus of a setting that could do a lot more with what he's working on in the science of it all and the fallout from ecological collapse or rising sea levels. The characters go to the island of the above-mentioned Buddhists, but before we can get invested in what's happening or even get a good feel for what life is like for its people, it sinks below the ocean forever. That should have been an impactful moment, but there wasn't enough characterization of the place or its people beforehand.
There are other plot points about intelligence agencies feuding with each other, rigging elections, and tracking the populace that form a big piece of the last third of the book, but the spy thriller stuff doesn't really fit into this book about a university professor-turned-bureaucrat. I think Robinson is trying to make a broader point that there are embedded interests that will fight the structural changes in the political economy that are required to properly fight climate change, but, while entertaining, it all comes away muddled.
Like the rest of his work, Robinson has fun tangents throughout: Frank takes up looking for escaped zoo animals because it 'reminds' him of what life was like for early hunter-gatherers, and he tries to emulate that lifestyle; there's a bunch of stuff about science, Buddhism, and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Frank's frisbee golf buddies are "freegans" that only live off of food that can be obtained for free, largely from the waste generated by restaurants and groceries throwing away good food; there's a subplot about genetically engineered lichen in Russia. But not enough of it comes back to any cohesive theme, they end up as a bunch of fun thought experiments that don't really go anywhere or connect together.
Unfortunately, these "fun tangents" form most of the book's too-long length. Some of this is because it's fundamentally not that interesting of a story to cover the life of a bureaucrat. But moreso because it touches a lot on the life of Frank Vanderwal in ways that are semi-interesting to read about, but don't serve any thematic purpose. The timeline is only over a year or two, which really compresses what you can do in a story about fighting climate change, even if a presidential campaign gets shoved in there as well. A ground-level view of climate change is important and interesting, but New York 2140 did that better. By situating itself in the seat of US governmental power, the book had the promise of being a higher-level account, but then got bogged down with playing with characters in plots that don't end up paying off.
The focus on Frank's love-life was especially a let-down because it puts a strong "male gaze" on a lot of the book without really adding much to it. It didn't develop him more as a character, it just reduced more of the female characters to subjects of possible romantic interest for him, which isn't a useful or interesting angle, and I found rather off-putting. The lack of interesting female characterization actually quite bugged me and took me out of the setting because it was so jarring - I almost want to knock another star off for that alone, but I had enough fun with it that 2 stars would be too harsh.
I like the idea - the question of what we can do to confront climate change is interesting and the story Robinson weaves has some good points to it. Anyone working at the NSF or in government should at least read a synopsis. I had fun the whole way through (though it got slow in places), but I wouldn't put it on any "best of" list - the promise was better than the product.
September 20, 2019
review of
Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 6-15, 2019
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
In addition to thousands of bks neatly placed on shelves in my personal library I have large piles of bks elsewhere in my house awaiting some sort of processing. There's a very large literature new arrivals section, a much smaller one for SF, a smaller one for crime fiction, an even smaller one for poetry, the smallest of all for plays, multiple large piles for miscellaneous, & then small piles on my bed for read-soon. Maybe more than 500 bks just in these piles. Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth was in the SF pile, the largest of all the SF bks &, as such, the one least likely to be read any time soon. & then I decided to read it anyway. I'm glad I did. Perhaps ironically b/c, as the author explains in his Introduction: "my original idea had been to write a realist novel as if it were science fiction" (p xii). In other words, I picked it to read off my SF piles & it turned out to not quite be SF despite its author having already written another massive SF bk called Red Mars.
Originally, this had been a trilogy, even larger than Green Earth's 1069+ pp. I wd've been fine w/ reading the original immensity but the author decided to edit it:
"So with those above considerations in mind, I went through my text and cut various extraneous details, along with any excess verbiage I could find (and I could). Inspired by Matthiessen, who compared his middle volume to a dachsund's belly, and shortened his original 1,500 pages to 900, I compressed about 1,100 pages to about 800. Nothing important was lost in this squishing, and the new version has a better flow, as far as I can tell. Also, crucially, it now fits into this one volume, and is thereby better revealed for what it was all along, which is a single novel." - pp xii-xiii
Well, in the print version herein reviewed, that "800" pages manifests itself as almost 1,100 pp & it still "fits" & is still "a single novel". Is there an upper limit to how many pages one volume can hold? The Complete Works Lewis Carroll (Vintage Books) is a one volume 1,294 pp paperback from 43 yrs ago & it still hasn't fallen apart yet. Joseph McEllroy's Women and Men (Dalkey Archive) is a one volume 1,192+ pp paperback from 26 yrs ago & it's still holding together fine too. I cd name many other examples but I'll restrict myself to one more 'classic': Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (Penguin Books) wch is a one volume 1,444+ pp paperback from 35 yrs ago that's still holding together. I've read them all. Where do I find the time?!
"It's a story about many things: climate change, science administration and politics, Buddhism, biotechnology and investment capital, homelessness, sociobiology, surveillance, life in Washington D.C., life in a treehouse, life with a fractious toddler. A kitchen sink makes an appearance. With that much thrown in, it should not be surprising that the story "predicted" quite a few things that have since come to pass; near-future science fiction always does that.
"Still, working on this version I was startled pretty often by such pseudo-predictions. That the storm that wrecks the East Coast was named Sandy is strange enough to be one of J. W. Dunne's examples of precognition in An Experiment With Time—in other words, a coincidence, but quite a coincidence." - p xiii
J. W. Dunne's An Experiment With Time & José M. R. Delgado's Physical Control of the Mind are 2 bks I've had on my 'too-read' list for over 40 yrs now. I still haven't read them. Seeing the Dunne mentioned in Green Earth reminds me of how much more there is for me to read before I die.
"Most disturbing, perhaps, is the way the National Security Agency's recently revealed surveillance program has confirmed and even trumped this book's spy plot. There were signs when I was writing that this kind of thing was going on, but I thought I was exaggerating it for satiric effect. Not at all. You are a person of interest, your calls are recorded, and computer programs are rating your potential danger to the system. And elections? Cross your fingers!" - p xiv
This combined edition is from 2015. The 1st section of it is from 2005. That makes Robinson at least 25 yrs behind the times as far as NSA surveillance reality is concerned. In Covert Action Information Bulletin Number 11, December, 1980, there's an article entitled "Big Brother 1980: The National Security Agency: The Biggest Eavesdropper of Them All - A CAIB Interview" Introduction by Stewart Klepper. The opening paragraph for this article states:
"Imagine this. It is 1984, and the government annouces that henceforth, because of foreign threats and growing terrorism, no sealed mail will be delivered. All mail will be scanned by computer, based primarily on the address and return address, and any mail to or from potential security risks will be read and copied. Shocking? Yet this situation already exists for almost all telegrams and phone calls coming into or going out of the U.S. The main difference is that this policy has never been announced; it was, for may years, one of the better kept secrets of our intelligence community." - CAIB 11, Dec, 1980, p 35
The article is 9pp. It goes into substantial detail. It was written 39 yrs ago. Imagine how sophisticated surveillance has become since then.
I don't have much of an opinion about Global Warming. Since belief in Global Warming is an unwritten law requirement for acceptance as a 'liberal/left-winger' & since I find any 'peer pressure' annoying, I reserve having an opinion on the subject until I feel like I'm truly knowledgable on it — wch I'm not likely to ever be. I can say that I read Michael Crichton's State of Fear, a bk that ridicules belief in Global Warming, & found it repulsively unconvincing (see my review: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15... ). Now I've read Green Earth, wch makes a strong case for believing in Global Warming, & found it very intelligent & convincing.
"The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons—on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one Calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree C. If all this energy were captured by the Earth's atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees C in one day.
"Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time.
"A good portion of Earth's albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive feedback loop." - p 3
A contingent of Buddhists moves near a contigent of scientists.
""Yes," Anna said. "I saw your arrival ceremony, and I was wondering where you all come from."
""Thank you for your interest," the youth said politely, ducking his head and smiling. "We are from Khembalung."
""Yes, but . . ."
""Ah. Our country is an island nation, in the Bay of Bengal, near the mouth of the Ganges."
""I see," Anna said, surprised; she had thought they would be from somewhere in the Himalayas. "I hadn't heard of it."
""It is not a big island. Nation status has been a recent development, you could say. Only now are we establishing a representation."
""Good idea. Although, to tell the truth, I'm surprised to see an embassy in here. I didn't think of this as being the right kind of space."
""We chose it very carefully," the young monk said." - p 8
"He got up stiffly. It was midafternoon already. If he left soon he would be able to hack through the traffic out to Great Falls. By then the day's heat would have subsided, and the gorge walls would be nearly empty. He could climb till sunset, and do some more thinking about this algorithm, in the only place in the D.C. area left with a touch of nature to it." - p 18
One of the reasons why I find Green Earth so convincing as an ecological narative is b/c I grew up in Baltimore, a mere 10 hr jog from the small town where I lived from ages 3 to 22 to the Great Falls Park wch I don't recall ever hearing of until I read this bk — & Robinson's descriptions of the environment are so familiar that I can immediately relate. Can't you just imagine my firm fit body in tight spandex running gear covered w/ ads for the products that've made it so that a 10 hr jog doesn't even make me out of breath? Can't you imagine that spandex tight around my erect.. Oh, well, what I'm getting at here is that I hope to meet you, woman review reader, at Great Falls Park someday soon where we'll fall madly in love w/ each other even though I don't really, uh, match the description I've just written.
"At Great Falls, the Potomac River builds up speed and force as it falls over a series of steep, jagged rocks and flows through the narrow Mather Gorge. The Patowmack Canal offers a glimpse into the early history of this country. Great Falls Park has many opportunities to explore history and nature, all in a beautiful 800-acre park only 15 miles from the Nation's Capital." - https://www.nps.gov/grfa/index.htm
What can I say? (As my firned Lizard always sd) It's not just the environment being so familiar, it's things like the following:
"The invention of set theory, and the finessing of the various paradoxes engendered by considering sets as members of themselves. The discovery of the incompletability of all systems." - p 19
Ok, that's where I live (not really). I've written a math humor bk called Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory). There're movies of me reading from it online:
484. "Is this a Black Theorem?"
- shot at tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's launch of his book entitled "Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory)" at the Glitter Box Theater in Pittsburgh on April 1, 2017E.V.
- shot using 2 mini-dv camcorders & 1 iJones
- edit finished April 10, 2017E.V.
- 1700X1275 (4/3)
- 1:01:38
- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/gw48jIh0oS4
480. ""Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich" Reading at Té Café"
- tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE reading from his 'pataphysics / math / humor / cognitive dissidence book at the Open Poetry/Prose Mic night on Wednesday, March 8, 2017
- landscape camcorder: Jonathan Wayne, portrait camcorder: Marc V. Rock-Steady
- 9:41
- 1700X1275 (4/3)
- edit finished March 10, 2017
- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/pWiuslygsWo
If you're a Moslem, forget about facing Mecca X-number of times a day to pray to Allah. Read my math bk instead. If you have to learn English to do it, so be it. If you feel motivated to translate it into Arabic or any other language please just do a good job. There are some subtle ideas in there that it's very important be understood w/ utter clarity. You owe it to the memory of Avicenna.
My point is, set theory is extremely important to me, so are Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems — even though I admit to having not even an amateur mathematician's understanding of them. Just read my bk, you don't have to understand that either.
Robinson's not exaggerating when he states that "It's a story about many things: climate change, science administration and politics, Buddhism, biotechnology and investment capital, homelessness, scoiobiology, surveillance, life in Washington D.C., life in a treehouse, life with a fractious toddler". If you're not interested in one or more of those topics, never fear, Robinson's writing about the rest of them is wonderful.
"Indeed, one method of inserting the altered DNA into the body was to put it into a virus and give the patient a viral infection, benign in its ultimate effects because the altered DNA reached its target. But since the body fought viral infections, it was not a good solution. You didn't want to compromise further the immune systems of people who were already sick.
"So, for a long time now they had been the same as everyone else chasing the holy grail of gene therapy, a "targeted nonviral delivery system."" - p 26
Or, at least, that's what they were doing before I came along & convinced them that Herpes was the best medium & that my penis was the best insertion device. The drawback being that I only came to the assistance of women I found attractive. Sorry, guys, but as I like to say: "I hate women.. but I hate men even more."
Not only can I feel deeply connected to this story b/c the environment described is a very familiar one, b/c the mathematics are important to me — but also b/c Robinson mentioned Second Story Books fairly often. I worked for Second Story from 1984 to 1988. Of course, if Robinson had been really on top of the crème de la crème he wd've had to fit NORMAL'S in there somewhere. NORMAL'S is the bkstore I cofounded 1989 w/ other ex-Second Story people.
"He stopped in at Second Story Books, the biggest and best of the area's several used bookstores. It was a matter of habit only; he had visited it so often with Joe asleep on his back that he had memorized the stock, and was reduced to checking the hidden books in the inner rows, or alphabetizing sections that he liked. No one in the supremely arrogant and slovenly shop cared what he did there. It was soothing in that sense." - p 43
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 6-15, 2019
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
In addition to thousands of bks neatly placed on shelves in my personal library I have large piles of bks elsewhere in my house awaiting some sort of processing. There's a very large literature new arrivals section, a much smaller one for SF, a smaller one for crime fiction, an even smaller one for poetry, the smallest of all for plays, multiple large piles for miscellaneous, & then small piles on my bed for read-soon. Maybe more than 500 bks just in these piles. Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Earth was in the SF pile, the largest of all the SF bks &, as such, the one least likely to be read any time soon. & then I decided to read it anyway. I'm glad I did. Perhaps ironically b/c, as the author explains in his Introduction: "my original idea had been to write a realist novel as if it were science fiction" (p xii). In other words, I picked it to read off my SF piles & it turned out to not quite be SF despite its author having already written another massive SF bk called Red Mars.
Originally, this had been a trilogy, even larger than Green Earth's 1069+ pp. I wd've been fine w/ reading the original immensity but the author decided to edit it:
"So with those above considerations in mind, I went through my text and cut various extraneous details, along with any excess verbiage I could find (and I could). Inspired by Matthiessen, who compared his middle volume to a dachsund's belly, and shortened his original 1,500 pages to 900, I compressed about 1,100 pages to about 800. Nothing important was lost in this squishing, and the new version has a better flow, as far as I can tell. Also, crucially, it now fits into this one volume, and is thereby better revealed for what it was all along, which is a single novel." - pp xii-xiii
Well, in the print version herein reviewed, that "800" pages manifests itself as almost 1,100 pp & it still "fits" & is still "a single novel". Is there an upper limit to how many pages one volume can hold? The Complete Works Lewis Carroll (Vintage Books) is a one volume 1,294 pp paperback from 43 yrs ago & it still hasn't fallen apart yet. Joseph McEllroy's Women and Men (Dalkey Archive) is a one volume 1,192+ pp paperback from 26 yrs ago & it's still holding together fine too. I cd name many other examples but I'll restrict myself to one more 'classic': Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (Penguin Books) wch is a one volume 1,444+ pp paperback from 35 yrs ago that's still holding together. I've read them all. Where do I find the time?!
"It's a story about many things: climate change, science administration and politics, Buddhism, biotechnology and investment capital, homelessness, sociobiology, surveillance, life in Washington D.C., life in a treehouse, life with a fractious toddler. A kitchen sink makes an appearance. With that much thrown in, it should not be surprising that the story "predicted" quite a few things that have since come to pass; near-future science fiction always does that.
"Still, working on this version I was startled pretty often by such pseudo-predictions. That the storm that wrecks the East Coast was named Sandy is strange enough to be one of J. W. Dunne's examples of precognition in An Experiment With Time—in other words, a coincidence, but quite a coincidence." - p xiii
J. W. Dunne's An Experiment With Time & José M. R. Delgado's Physical Control of the Mind are 2 bks I've had on my 'too-read' list for over 40 yrs now. I still haven't read them. Seeing the Dunne mentioned in Green Earth reminds me of how much more there is for me to read before I die.
"Most disturbing, perhaps, is the way the National Security Agency's recently revealed surveillance program has confirmed and even trumped this book's spy plot. There were signs when I was writing that this kind of thing was going on, but I thought I was exaggerating it for satiric effect. Not at all. You are a person of interest, your calls are recorded, and computer programs are rating your potential danger to the system. And elections? Cross your fingers!" - p xiv
This combined edition is from 2015. The 1st section of it is from 2005. That makes Robinson at least 25 yrs behind the times as far as NSA surveillance reality is concerned. In Covert Action Information Bulletin Number 11, December, 1980, there's an article entitled "Big Brother 1980: The National Security Agency: The Biggest Eavesdropper of Them All - A CAIB Interview" Introduction by Stewart Klepper. The opening paragraph for this article states:
"Imagine this. It is 1984, and the government annouces that henceforth, because of foreign threats and growing terrorism, no sealed mail will be delivered. All mail will be scanned by computer, based primarily on the address and return address, and any mail to or from potential security risks will be read and copied. Shocking? Yet this situation already exists for almost all telegrams and phone calls coming into or going out of the U.S. The main difference is that this policy has never been announced; it was, for may years, one of the better kept secrets of our intelligence community." - CAIB 11, Dec, 1980, p 35
The article is 9pp. It goes into substantial detail. It was written 39 yrs ago. Imagine how sophisticated surveillance has become since then.
I don't have much of an opinion about Global Warming. Since belief in Global Warming is an unwritten law requirement for acceptance as a 'liberal/left-winger' & since I find any 'peer pressure' annoying, I reserve having an opinion on the subject until I feel like I'm truly knowledgable on it — wch I'm not likely to ever be. I can say that I read Michael Crichton's State of Fear, a bk that ridicules belief in Global Warming, & found it repulsively unconvincing (see my review: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15... ). Now I've read Green Earth, wch makes a strong case for believing in Global Warming, & found it very intelligent & convincing.
"The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons—on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one Calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree C. If all this energy were captured by the Earth's atmosphere, its temperature would rise by ten degrees C in one day.
"Luckily much of it radiates back to space. How much depends on albedo and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, both of which vary over time.
"A good portion of Earth's albedo, or reflectivity, is created by its polar ice caps. If polar ice and snow were to shrink significantly, more solar energy would stay on Earth. Sunlight would penetrate oceans previously covered by ice, and warm the water. This would add heat and melt more ice, in a positive feedback loop." - p 3
A contingent of Buddhists moves near a contigent of scientists.
""Yes," Anna said. "I saw your arrival ceremony, and I was wondering where you all come from."
""Thank you for your interest," the youth said politely, ducking his head and smiling. "We are from Khembalung."
""Yes, but . . ."
""Ah. Our country is an island nation, in the Bay of Bengal, near the mouth of the Ganges."
""I see," Anna said, surprised; she had thought they would be from somewhere in the Himalayas. "I hadn't heard of it."
""It is not a big island. Nation status has been a recent development, you could say. Only now are we establishing a representation."
""Good idea. Although, to tell the truth, I'm surprised to see an embassy in here. I didn't think of this as being the right kind of space."
""We chose it very carefully," the young monk said." - p 8
"He got up stiffly. It was midafternoon already. If he left soon he would be able to hack through the traffic out to Great Falls. By then the day's heat would have subsided, and the gorge walls would be nearly empty. He could climb till sunset, and do some more thinking about this algorithm, in the only place in the D.C. area left with a touch of nature to it." - p 18
One of the reasons why I find Green Earth so convincing as an ecological narative is b/c I grew up in Baltimore, a mere 10 hr jog from the small town where I lived from ages 3 to 22 to the Great Falls Park wch I don't recall ever hearing of until I read this bk — & Robinson's descriptions of the environment are so familiar that I can immediately relate. Can't you just imagine my firm fit body in tight spandex running gear covered w/ ads for the products that've made it so that a 10 hr jog doesn't even make me out of breath? Can't you imagine that spandex tight around my erect.. Oh, well, what I'm getting at here is that I hope to meet you, woman review reader, at Great Falls Park someday soon where we'll fall madly in love w/ each other even though I don't really, uh, match the description I've just written.
"At Great Falls, the Potomac River builds up speed and force as it falls over a series of steep, jagged rocks and flows through the narrow Mather Gorge. The Patowmack Canal offers a glimpse into the early history of this country. Great Falls Park has many opportunities to explore history and nature, all in a beautiful 800-acre park only 15 miles from the Nation's Capital." - https://www.nps.gov/grfa/index.htm
What can I say? (As my firned Lizard always sd) It's not just the environment being so familiar, it's things like the following:
"The invention of set theory, and the finessing of the various paradoxes engendered by considering sets as members of themselves. The discovery of the incompletability of all systems." - p 19
Ok, that's where I live (not really). I've written a math humor bk called Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory). There're movies of me reading from it online:
484. "Is this a Black Theorem?"
- shot at tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE's launch of his book entitled "Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory)" at the Glitter Box Theater in Pittsburgh on April 1, 2017E.V.
- shot using 2 mini-dv camcorders & 1 iJones
- edit finished April 10, 2017E.V.
- 1700X1275 (4/3)
- 1:01:38
- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/gw48jIh0oS4
480. ""Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich" Reading at Té Café"
- tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE reading from his 'pataphysics / math / humor / cognitive dissidence book at the Open Poetry/Prose Mic night on Wednesday, March 8, 2017
- landscape camcorder: Jonathan Wayne, portrait camcorder: Marc V. Rock-Steady
- 9:41
- 1700X1275 (4/3)
- edit finished March 10, 2017
- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/pWiuslygsWo
If you're a Moslem, forget about facing Mecca X-number of times a day to pray to Allah. Read my math bk instead. If you have to learn English to do it, so be it. If you feel motivated to translate it into Arabic or any other language please just do a good job. There are some subtle ideas in there that it's very important be understood w/ utter clarity. You owe it to the memory of Avicenna.
My point is, set theory is extremely important to me, so are Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems — even though I admit to having not even an amateur mathematician's understanding of them. Just read my bk, you don't have to understand that either.
Robinson's not exaggerating when he states that "It's a story about many things: climate change, science administration and politics, Buddhism, biotechnology and investment capital, homelessness, scoiobiology, surveillance, life in Washington D.C., life in a treehouse, life with a fractious toddler". If you're not interested in one or more of those topics, never fear, Robinson's writing about the rest of them is wonderful.
"Indeed, one method of inserting the altered DNA into the body was to put it into a virus and give the patient a viral infection, benign in its ultimate effects because the altered DNA reached its target. But since the body fought viral infections, it was not a good solution. You didn't want to compromise further the immune systems of people who were already sick.
"So, for a long time now they had been the same as everyone else chasing the holy grail of gene therapy, a "targeted nonviral delivery system."" - p 26
Or, at least, that's what they were doing before I came along & convinced them that Herpes was the best medium & that my penis was the best insertion device. The drawback being that I only came to the assistance of women I found attractive. Sorry, guys, but as I like to say: "I hate women.. but I hate men even more."
Not only can I feel deeply connected to this story b/c the environment described is a very familiar one, b/c the mathematics are important to me — but also b/c Robinson mentioned Second Story Books fairly often. I worked for Second Story from 1984 to 1988. Of course, if Robinson had been really on top of the crème de la crème he wd've had to fit NORMAL'S in there somewhere. NORMAL'S is the bkstore I cofounded 1989 w/ other ex-Second Story people.
"He stopped in at Second Story Books, the biggest and best of the area's several used bookstores. It was a matter of habit only; he had visited it so often with Joe asleep on his back that he had memorized the stock, and was reduced to checking the hidden books in the inner rows, or alphabetizing sections that he liked. No one in the supremely arrogant and slovenly shop cared what he did there. It was soothing in that sense." - p 43
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
April 26, 2020
Based on reviews here at goodreads, I'm some sort of jerk because I love this novel. So be it. The lesson is to stop reading others' reviews. Why attack someone you don't know because they like a book you don't care for? I am re-evaluating whether to continue this little review project I'm doing. I'm not sure this is the sort of community I want to be a part of.
To the book: this is my pick for the novel of the century so far. It is an uplifting tale of human ingenuity and the will to improve, a story which contains the full purview of humanity and which attempts to articulate a way forward through political, social and cultural paralysis in the face of dire global catastrophe, a cri de coeur for the natural world we rapaciously abuse on a daily basis.
There is an underlying love in this book, an adjurement to cherish and nurture our planet, the only planet we have or will ever have, for the sake of others (if we won't do it for ourselves).
Yes, it is long. Yes, it is ponderous and full of philosophical musings and personal failings. These are meant to convey the weakness of humanity in a fictionalized context which aims to capture the spirit of the actual world. Not everyone is a moral paragon. I find all of the game theory asides and Buddhist longings interesting.
A fine, fine, fine book not for everyone, apparently. Worth a try, even if you decide you don't care for it. Take it from me, a bona fide jerk.
To the book: this is my pick for the novel of the century so far. It is an uplifting tale of human ingenuity and the will to improve, a story which contains the full purview of humanity and which attempts to articulate a way forward through political, social and cultural paralysis in the face of dire global catastrophe, a cri de coeur for the natural world we rapaciously abuse on a daily basis.
There is an underlying love in this book, an adjurement to cherish and nurture our planet, the only planet we have or will ever have, for the sake of others (if we won't do it for ourselves).
Yes, it is long. Yes, it is ponderous and full of philosophical musings and personal failings. These are meant to convey the weakness of humanity in a fictionalized context which aims to capture the spirit of the actual world. Not everyone is a moral paragon. I find all of the game theory asides and Buddhist longings interesting.
A fine, fine, fine book not for everyone, apparently. Worth a try, even if you decide you don't care for it. Take it from me, a bona fide jerk.
February 8, 2021
Kim Stanley Robinson has a fundamental misunderstanding of how zoos work.
September 30, 2016
When this newly edited single volume version of Robinson's climate change trilogy came out I had no plans to read it. I loved the originals and still have the hardcovers sitting on my shelf, so what would be the point? But then I read the author's explanation and got to thinking, if I was going to reread this story, then why not go for the streamlined version? Plus I was curious about the impact of trimming 300 pages. Would the omissions be obvious? Would favourite scenes that still stick in my head be missing?
Happily, the new version exceeds my expectations. All my fondly remembered bits are there, and it flows even better than the original, with less infodump and less of the repetition needed for a story told over 3 volumes, years apart.
So, Green Earth is even better than the original, and if a single volume reissue gets more people to read it then all the better. Now I'm thinking it would be interesting to see him apply the same process with the Mars Trilogy...
Happily, the new version exceeds my expectations. All my fondly remembered bits are there, and it flows even better than the original, with less infodump and less of the repetition needed for a story told over 3 volumes, years apart.
So, Green Earth is even better than the original, and if a single volume reissue gets more people to read it then all the better. Now I'm thinking it would be interesting to see him apply the same process with the Mars Trilogy...
February 28, 2016
Was this really a KSR book? I wanted to like it, I really did, as I loved the 'Mars' trilogy. On the surface, I didn't see how this book could miss-the idea sounded great. Here's the problem-there is very little focus on the main idea of the book, and too much time devoted to character development and subplots that added nothing. Example-way too many pages were wasted on the Dalai Lama and a bunch of other buddhist buddies. That entire section could have been tossed from the book, and it would not have skipped a beat. I can't say the book had nothing to offer-KSR is a gifted writer, and there were sections of this book that I devoured. However, on the whole, for a book that was supposed to be about science and politics, there was very little of either, and too much character story that was not needed. I will have to try '2312' and hope that restores my faith.
May 30, 2020
Having absolutely loved the Mars trilogy, I’ve looked forward to digging into this for a long time, just somewhat intimidated by the 1000+ pages ahead of me.
Turns out that finally deciding to read it during the COVID19 pandemic proved to be very good timing. There are so many similarities in the politics and the varying global responses.
KSR weaves together climate change science and the stories of several really interesting characters to create a tome that shows just how much trouble we could be in if climate change is not addressed. While there are some aspects of the story that seem a little far fetched (primarily the whole role of Caroline and the purported intelligence deep state), this is an outstanding fictional look at what is likely to be the greatest crisis facing us over the next century.
Turns out that finally deciding to read it during the COVID19 pandemic proved to be very good timing. There are so many similarities in the politics and the varying global responses.
KSR weaves together climate change science and the stories of several really interesting characters to create a tome that shows just how much trouble we could be in if climate change is not addressed. While there are some aspects of the story that seem a little far fetched (primarily the whole role of Caroline and the purported intelligence deep state), this is an outstanding fictional look at what is likely to be the greatest crisis facing us over the next century.
June 9, 2016
I started to skip major parts of the book, especially Book 2. Too wordy, too much on the individuals backstories. I did like the description of the flooding of D.C.
May 19, 2023
When an author turns three books into one book... my mind turns to how I can possibly get the credit for reading all 1,000 pages as three 333-page books. But maybe that is just me.
June 22, 2019
I remember when the the Science in the Capital books came out; I was unconvinced about whether I could face a near-future story about climate change. So I did nothing about reading them. Then I recently discovered that the books had been released as an omnibus edition, and I figured - why not. And the introduction to this edition reveals that it's a director's cut - and not in the way that Raymond E Feist did his version of Magician: in this case Robinson has actually cut extraneous material, for a variety of reasons, and I'm quite impressed by that whole process.
So anyway, now I have read the trilogy-that's-really-one-long-book. And it must be said that it's rare for me to finish a book where I kinda loathe the main character.
The book opens in a style that suggests the story will be told through a variety of voices. Each chapter opens with some extended comment on science or politics or global events, and then the chapter proceeds with different characters going about their everyday lives - which frequently interact with each other, and with making science- and climate-related decisions. There's Anna, a scientist at the National Science Foundation; Frank, a visiting scientist at the NSF; Charlie, Anna's husband and advisor to a senator, who works from home and is mostly caring for his youngest son; Leo, a scientist in a small biotech startup lab; and a couple of others. As it went on, though, there was somewhat less of this multi-focused approach.
It was intriguing to read a book that paired the domestic, sometimes banal, frequently humdrum lives of its characters - in the office, or the home, or the lab - with important scientific discoveries or crucial policy decisions. Like in real life. The conversations often looked really odd on paper... until I listened to them properly in my head, and then they sounded like just normal conversations. Zagging in odd directions, incomplete sentences, and so on. Robinson has often captured actual life with true verisimilitude, and I mostly enjoyed it.
However, the character that I initially liked the least is the one who ends up having most of the narrative. This is Frank. He has what I regard as a poor attitude to science, and an even worse one towards women. If I had realised that this was going to be largely Frank's narrative, I may not have kept going. In fact it's possible that if I had been reading this as three separate books, I would not have picked up the second after the first.
Now, I have little objection to abandoning a book - I mean I hate doing it, but I will, because life is too short to read crap books. So why didn't I abandon this book? Because I did want to know what would happen to the other characters. And because I was truly interested in where Robinson would go both in destroying the world through climate change, and suggesting possible ways of dealing with it.
Was it worth it? I still didn't like Frank. In fact I got really impatient with him, and his whole personal storyline seemed pretty weird and actually beside the point for the overall story... and this sense is growing the more I think about it. However, as a way of thinking about how science might help the world deal with the repercussions of climate change, it's certainly an intriguing novel. And like many of Robinson's books, ultimately hopeful. (Perhaps too hopeful?) So I don't regret reading it. For a reader who is interested in both politics and science, I expect this would hit a lot of buttons (unless you're very over the 'America saves the world' narrative, which this leans into pretty heavily, so be warned).
Sadly, Robinson made yet another odd statement about an Australian animal (he implied there's not that many black swans in Red Moon). This time, a character comes across an animal dead in the snow: it's a wombat, and then there's mention of warm-weather critters needing to be looked after. I've seen wombats in the snow a lot, so... nah. Not so much.
So anyway, now I have read the trilogy-that's-really-one-long-book. And it must be said that it's rare for me to finish a book where I kinda loathe the main character.
The book opens in a style that suggests the story will be told through a variety of voices. Each chapter opens with some extended comment on science or politics or global events, and then the chapter proceeds with different characters going about their everyday lives - which frequently interact with each other, and with making science- and climate-related decisions. There's Anna, a scientist at the National Science Foundation; Frank, a visiting scientist at the NSF; Charlie, Anna's husband and advisor to a senator, who works from home and is mostly caring for his youngest son; Leo, a scientist in a small biotech startup lab; and a couple of others. As it went on, though, there was somewhat less of this multi-focused approach.
It was intriguing to read a book that paired the domestic, sometimes banal, frequently humdrum lives of its characters - in the office, or the home, or the lab - with important scientific discoveries or crucial policy decisions. Like in real life. The conversations often looked really odd on paper... until I listened to them properly in my head, and then they sounded like just normal conversations. Zagging in odd directions, incomplete sentences, and so on. Robinson has often captured actual life with true verisimilitude, and I mostly enjoyed it.
However, the character that I initially liked the least is the one who ends up having most of the narrative. This is Frank. He has what I regard as a poor attitude to science, and an even worse one towards women. If I had realised that this was going to be largely Frank's narrative, I may not have kept going. In fact it's possible that if I had been reading this as three separate books, I would not have picked up the second after the first.
Now, I have little objection to abandoning a book - I mean I hate doing it, but I will, because life is too short to read crap books. So why didn't I abandon this book? Because I did want to know what would happen to the other characters. And because I was truly interested in where Robinson would go both in destroying the world through climate change, and suggesting possible ways of dealing with it.
Was it worth it? I still didn't like Frank. In fact I got really impatient with him, and his whole personal storyline seemed pretty weird and actually beside the point for the overall story... and this sense is growing the more I think about it. However, as a way of thinking about how science might help the world deal with the repercussions of climate change, it's certainly an intriguing novel. And like many of Robinson's books, ultimately hopeful. (Perhaps too hopeful?) So I don't regret reading it. For a reader who is interested in both politics and science, I expect this would hit a lot of buttons (unless you're very over the 'America saves the world' narrative, which this leans into pretty heavily, so be warned).
Sadly, Robinson made yet another odd statement about an Australian animal (he implied there's not that many black swans in Red Moon). This time, a character comes across an animal dead in the snow: it's a wombat, and then there's mention of warm-weather critters needing to be looked after. I've seen wombats in the snow a lot, so... nah. Not so much.
October 18, 2024
Green Earth by Kim Stanley Robinson is often categorized as climate fiction, but in truth, it feels more like a modern novel deeply rooted in the world we already live in. The environmental crises described in the book—floods, storms, and the slow creep of ecological collapse—are hardly futuristic; they’re all phenomena we’ve seen, perhaps too often, in our daily lives. This is what makes Green Earth both unsettling and grounded, though it also blurs the lines between speculative fiction and the real-world issues we face today.
At over 1,000 pages, Green Earth is undeniably long, and while I generally love sprawling narratives that cover extended time periods and multiple plot threads, I found some sections of this novel unnecessary. There are entire chapters that don’t contribute much to the plot or character development, which can slow the pace in a way that detracts from the overall momentum of the story. At times, trimming these sections might have made for a sharper and more engaging read.
One of the standout aspects of Green Earth is its optimistic tone, which is a refreshing change from the apocalyptic nature of most climate fiction. Robinson offers a vision of hope—of tangible solutions to the climate crisis. He shows us that while we already possess many of the tools and knowledge needed to address global warming, it's the political will and international cooperation that are lacking. The book imagines a future where governments, spurred on by public pressure, work together to implement these solutions before it's too late. It’s an inspiring vision that, despite its naiveté, offers solace to those who feel overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis.
This hopefulness is where Green Earth most reminds me of The Deluge by Stephen Markley. Like Green Earth, The Deluge also revolves around catastrophic climate events in the U.S., stretched across many years, and focuses on the political transformation needed to address them. However, The Deluge is a more polished work, with tighter writing and a more urgent sense of storytelling. Still, Green Earth, being an earlier work, carries a certain charm in its idealism, and I found that to be one of its endearing qualities. While the optimism may feel naive now—such as the idea that the UN could unite nations on climate action or that Russia might take a vested interest in preventing environmental collapse—this hope is a much-needed counterbalance to the cynicism we often feel today.
In fact, Robinson seems to revisit and refine many of the themes from Green Earth in his later work, The Ministry for the Future, which is arguably a more mature, realistic take on climate solutions. Looking back, I wish I had read Green Earth when it was first published because its sense of hope and idealism might have resonated more strongly. That said, reading it today still offers a valuable perspective, especially in its reminder that things could have gone differently.
Overall, Green Earth is a novel grounded in real-world solutions, and it underscores the painful truth that the only thing missing is the political and societal power to make them happen. For readers seeking an optimistic take on climate change, or for those who appreciate Robinson’s earlier explorations of these themes, Green Earth is a thought-provoking read. While it may not be as gripping or finely crafted as his later works, it still provides a sense of hope—a reminder that solutions exist, even if we’re still struggling to implement them.
At over 1,000 pages, Green Earth is undeniably long, and while I generally love sprawling narratives that cover extended time periods and multiple plot threads, I found some sections of this novel unnecessary. There are entire chapters that don’t contribute much to the plot or character development, which can slow the pace in a way that detracts from the overall momentum of the story. At times, trimming these sections might have made for a sharper and more engaging read.
One of the standout aspects of Green Earth is its optimistic tone, which is a refreshing change from the apocalyptic nature of most climate fiction. Robinson offers a vision of hope—of tangible solutions to the climate crisis. He shows us that while we already possess many of the tools and knowledge needed to address global warming, it's the political will and international cooperation that are lacking. The book imagines a future where governments, spurred on by public pressure, work together to implement these solutions before it's too late. It’s an inspiring vision that, despite its naiveté, offers solace to those who feel overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis.
This hopefulness is where Green Earth most reminds me of The Deluge by Stephen Markley. Like Green Earth, The Deluge also revolves around catastrophic climate events in the U.S., stretched across many years, and focuses on the political transformation needed to address them. However, The Deluge is a more polished work, with tighter writing and a more urgent sense of storytelling. Still, Green Earth, being an earlier work, carries a certain charm in its idealism, and I found that to be one of its endearing qualities. While the optimism may feel naive now—such as the idea that the UN could unite nations on climate action or that Russia might take a vested interest in preventing environmental collapse—this hope is a much-needed counterbalance to the cynicism we often feel today.
In fact, Robinson seems to revisit and refine many of the themes from Green Earth in his later work, The Ministry for the Future, which is arguably a more mature, realistic take on climate solutions. Looking back, I wish I had read Green Earth when it was first published because its sense of hope and idealism might have resonated more strongly. That said, reading it today still offers a valuable perspective, especially in its reminder that things could have gone differently.
Overall, Green Earth is a novel grounded in real-world solutions, and it underscores the painful truth that the only thing missing is the political and societal power to make them happen. For readers seeking an optimistic take on climate change, or for those who appreciate Robinson’s earlier explorations of these themes, Green Earth is a thought-provoking read. While it may not be as gripping or finely crafted as his later works, it still provides a sense of hope—a reminder that solutions exist, even if we’re still struggling to implement them.
July 29, 2023
I liked this massive tome a lot, and even though Kim Stanley Robinson is a hopeful writer and the book ended on a hopeful note, this still left me sad. I knew going into this book, that it would probably have this effect on me, because this book is about climate change in contemporary times. Its actually a little bit earlier, probably takes place in the late 2000s - early 2010s. What is depressing to me about it is that in this version of the US, we actually have politicians who have the will and means to do something about climate change, unlike in our country at the moment. The characters in this book are not afraid to challenge the status quo, they are not afraid to try big things to combat the effects of man-made climate change from putting too much carbon into the atmosphere. Just earlier this week, there were headlines about how the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation current could collapse as early as 2025, but more likely over the next 75 years. This happens because too much less dense freshwater is melting from Greenland, causing the more dense saltwater to sink. This will have broader impacts on the climate, making northern Europe's climate much closer to that of Canada's, drying out and heating up Northern Africa even more, and doing the same with the American midwest. This will make growing adequate amounts of food even harder. Well, in this novel, to combat this, they come up with a plan to salinate the freshwater, pumping millions of tons of salt into the ocean to match the density of the saltwater already there. Many countries work together on this problem, and are willing to share in the costs because they understand that not taking action is going to be more expensive than taking action, even if it was risky. So it was particularly depressing to see this headline this week, after reading about how it could have been handled in this novel. There's also a few subplots in this book about Buddhism and acceptance of things changing, but also about multiple black ops government agencies who are basically operating without much oversight and how they are spying on citizens and operating a futures market based on who they think has the most social capital to change society. It was very strange and didn't mesh as well with the overall story about climate change, but was an important look at what our government and society have grown into. In that aspect, this book was more about current times (or slightly before now), and provided a sort of blue-print of how we can overcome the current problems by having a strong vision and not being afraid to experiment and using the government as a force for good. I found it depressing because I know we will never have that in this country. There were a lot of good ideas here, some that I would like to revisit later, but I don't know if I would ever read the whole thing again. It was originally a trilogy of novels, but they were edited together to create one novel about a decade after they were first published. It wasn't heavily plot driven and ambled about a lot, and that was okay, because its more like true life, but I could see how this would be a struggle for many people to get through.
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