Completed: 2/22/2021
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Recommended By: A Science Fiction List
Review:
Robinson does not like capitalism. This is blatant in this book and I'm not saying that he is wrong, but I wonder if fiction is the way to make an argument. This is clearly an effort to help normal people understand the stakes of not acting on climate change. There is an effort to identify how capitalism makes climate change worse (an argument that has a strong basis in fact) and this is coupled with an oddly capitalistic approach to solving that problem. I guess it boils down to money = power.
He also pretty much hates the banking system. This book repeatedly addresses banking the same way Seinfeld addresses Newman.
The perspective of how things might go under serious climate change and the horrors that may be required in order for people to act are fairly well envisaged. The characters are forgettable in my opinion and deaths of some of the major characters came as a relief in several cases, rather than the disaster experienced by the other characters in the book.
There is a very long section on how each country (it seemed as though it was every UN country) could take steps to mitigate climate change provided as a list of attendees (country and cause) that was remarkably boring and wholly unnecessary. I happened to be listening to this section when my wife was in the same room and she asked how I could possibly listen to this...I had to skip forward repeatedly to get out of the list. Perhaps, as a reader, I would have scanned the pages or something. I find it hard to believe that anyone would read the list with interest.
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