Gar Petterson
A weird, fragmented but well written and engaging book. Not totally sure how I feel about it yet.
Really good in part, but the conflating of ecology and community ecology and ignoring the long integration of people in ecosystems and systems ecology (esp. by such influential ecologists HT & Eugene Odum) weakens the book and its arguement. Well written.
The is novel about the the rest of our lives.
It is a history of the next few decades, that focuses around a “the Ministry of the Future” an organization set up to implement the Paris climate agreement. The novel is based in Zurich, but shifts around the world from catastrophic heat wave, to revolutions, terrorism, strikes, to ‘carbon quantiative easing' and a transformation of central banking.
In reality, the global economy is eroding nature and destablizing the climate, pushing the world towards catastrophe. Humanity needs to change our civilization, substantially, to help us start building a liveable planet, for all.
KSR's novel sketches a possible transition towards such a society is therefore, pretty unique, well written, and essential. I didn't like some of the banking sections, which I didn't find convincing or engaging, but the overall goal of the book compensates for these flaws for me.
While I found the book too negative in parts, and widely optimistic in others, this type of near future novel is incredibly engaging, and provoking explores a possible pathways out of our current crisis.
A fantastic gripping novel of a greening Antartica that combines noir intensity with the ecological attention to landscape of Kim Stanley Robinson.
I've read a lot of KSR novels and this might be the one I've enjoyed the most.
a great imaging of the life in the Pleistocene
& better, and way more social-ecologically grounded than title suggests
Ballard in the Anthropocene.
Scientists, journals, guns, abandoned swimming pools, dispassionate alienated narrator.
And a complex entanglement of humanity & nature.
A really strong book. A strongly humane portrait of some of the lives crushed by India's rough economic growth. A good complement to Mehta's Maximum City.
Engagingly written but book is not well-integrated and covers fairly familiar ground (if you have read previously on these topics).
Was reading this book as the same time as “The House of Government Book” by Yuri Slezkine, which is about the Bolsheviks and the Russian revolution (and interprets them as a apocalyptic religious millennial movement). I was surprised at the number of parallels between the story of Bridgewater and the Bolshevik leadership of the USSR, even before the part of the book where Ray Dalio established a Politburo within Bridgewater.
Dated, but weirdly evocative book to read as the euro crisis drags on. Bankers continue to be bailed out, while millions are flung into poverty by financial crimes and poor governance in southern Europe.
A rare sustainable development novel.
A more young-adult adventure companion to The Deluge, Termination Shock, or Ministry of the Future.
Add a star if you want a story about adapting to climate change.
CBC interview with “Fire Weather” author John Vaillant
Massive '21st-century' fires are here to stay — and we need to update how we fight them
https://cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/q-a-john-vaillant-wildfires-bc-nwt-1.6942576
the book is about one fire, and it zooms out on that to discuss
“what we're seeing are these massive, explosively energetic fires that are the result of centuries at this point of relentless CO2 generation from industrial fossil fuels ... The boreal is really going through a massive, slow-motion transformation right now and turning into a much more flammable place.” - John Vaillant, in above interview
my score - rounded up from 4 1/2
found a bit long