Termination Shock
Ratings117
Average rating3.7
(Maar misschien toch 3,5*)
Een “technothriller” over het klimaat, met een hoofdrol voor het Nederlandse Koninklijk Huis. What's not to like?
“[...] a state of being that the Dutch referred to as normal with the accent on the second syllable. A different thing altogether from the English “NORMal.” To explain “norMAL” fully would fill a book, but the most important thing about it, if you happened to be a member of the Dutch royal family, was that “norMAL” was exactly what royals were forever under suspicion of not being, and so anything you could do that made you norMAL was desirable; and since that could easily be faked, it worked best if it were some activity that would get you killed if you did it wrong.”
Misschien dat het soms wat langdradig is, en Stephenson er iets teveel uitleg in probeert te proppen (niet geholpen doordat een deel ervan over Nederland gaat, en ik dat allemaal wel weet)?
“At first the protesters gave him mean looks for driving a huge gas-guzzling dually until they saw through the glass that he was a person of color and then they didn't know where to direct their moral indignation.”
Maar goed, het was toch wel fascinerende near-future science fiction, waar de zeespiegel zodanig hoog aan het worden is dat er nu daadwerkelijk eens iets gedaan moet worden. Enter een Amerikaanse multimiljonair die besluit grote hoeveelheid zwavel de lucht in te schieten, een vorm van geo-engineering, iets dat niet overal ter wereld even goed valt.
Enter Saskia, een toekomstige koningin van Nederland, die zelf-vliegend een noodlanding in Texas moet maken (iets met reuze-alligators en -zwijnen).
““I am the Queen of the Netherlands,” Saskia told him. “I am here on a secret mission to save my country.” “Rufus. Most people address me as Red. My not-so-secret mission is now accomplished.” He glanced at the huge dead boar and repeated the strange gesture of sticking his tongue out.”
Voeg hier vervolgens vertegenwoordigers van Londen, Venetie, Singapore aan toe die ook wel eens willen zien of het werkt, plus een Chinese geheim agent die op de onverwachtste momenten opduikt om de geschiedenis naar hun hand te zetten, en je hebt dus een soort van thriller.
Op het oog zit door het hoofdverhaal nog een ongerelateerde subplot gewoven over een Canadese Sikh die tijdens een soort van zoektocht naar zichzelf uiteindelijk terecht komt bij de Chinees-Indiase “grens” (de Line of Actual Control), waar Stephenson zijn martial arts hobby even kan uitleven :-)
Stephenson heeft wel duidelijk zijn huiswerk gedaan, en weet de Nederlandse politiek behoorlijk goed te schetsen (overigens toch wel fascinerend dat geen van de proof readers dan opmerkt dat Den Haag echt niet de hoofdstad van Nederland is :-)
“It raked in votes from conservative citizens and money from like-minded donors, which they could take advantage of in other areas, such as clamping down on immigration and making everything perfect for the Netherlands' twenty-five remaining farmers.”
De spanningsboog is dus niet optimaal, maar aan het eind komen alle draadjes in een spannende finale wel allemaal weer mooi bij elkaar (inclusief de Sikh :-)
Interesting speculative fiction with good characters, but I found myself glossing over the (for me) mind numbing detail.
Much more realistic than The Ministry for the FutureI think this was my 8th Stephenson book. It's not the first one I'd recommend but I really liked the characters and story.
I did not know anything about it in advance and was pleased to discover that it's about climate and solar geoengineering. I have been consuming a lot of non-fiction and fiction climate media lately and this was one of the best. It felt the most grounded in reality: self-interest driving action more than anything else.
Just could not get into this one, which is crazy since Neal Stephenson's stuff is almost always my favorite literature to read. Characters - blah. Situation - blah. Concepts - blah.
Can't win them all, I guess.
I was worried this was going to be boring but I quite enjoyed it for the most part. Reminds me of REAMDE but with the slightest hint of sci fi. Maybe not the best Stephenson but I still liked it. Though he does tend to think the only people capable of saving the world is billionaires which is a bit concerning.
Not what I was expecting based on the synopsis. Probably because what the author presents is not as traumatic and flamboyant as seen in the movies for near future scenarios.
Also, not much really happened in the 40% that I read before returning the loaner. Some mystery person roaming around India and some folks getting together in Texas to explore global warming solutions. Also a bit of how the author presents the impact of global warming on human interactions and lifestyle as well as the impact to the local and European environments.
The speculative climate science of it all was an interesting thought experiment, but I had a really hard time with the characters. Took me forever to read because it was propelling me forward. Found one of the storylines (Laks) far more interesting than the others, but this was relegated to short chapters interspersed throughout. Also did not care for what I would call the "dirty old man" humor and tone that kept popping up.
3.5 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews
Summary
With the global climate getting worse and worse, and the US in a shambles, one Texas billionaire has taken it on himself to do something, and to demonstrate to others (including the Queen of the Netherlands) just how it can be done.
Review
Neal Stephenson and William Gibson are often confused in my mind, likely because I've read little of either. I've read at least one William Gibson novel (didn't care much for it), but I believe this is my first from Stephenson. Perhaps from now on I'll be able to tell them apart.
I found Termination Shock to have a pretty rock start, a concern in a book of almost 700 pages. To my dismay, for at least the first 50 pages – possibly 100 – Stephenson seems to make no effort at all to make the characters engaging. We're thrown into what appears to be an adventure story, with little knowledge about the world, and little reason to care about the half dozen characters we meet. The result was unsurprising; I didn't care much about them, and didn't feel very grounded in the world. In fact, it's not until most of the way through the book that we get a good sense of the political realities (e.g., that the US is a decadent fiasco).
Those political realities, however, are really just a framework for a story about climate change and geoengineering, and – eventually – about a few particular characters. The character side of the story, unfortunately, is fairly weak. We start out with a host of people going to visit a demonstration project and, despite being wealthy, powerful people, they all travel halfway around the world, do as they're told, and look at what they're meant to look at – without ever a word of explanation. Not of what they're seeing, that's clear enough, but of why they're there, and why they put so much trust in an eccentric Texas billionaire. The story starts with a secret flight into the US by the Queen of the Netherlands, but just why it should be secret is opaque, at best. It doesn't help that a lot of those initial pages focus on how one man kills pigs.
Stephenson is clearly having fun describing the nuts and bolts of how stratospheric sulfur could mitigate the heat-trapping effects of atmospheric carbon, and of just how to get the sulfur there. There's barely a glance, though, at the potential side effects (beyond differential effects on different parts of the planet). The overall thrust of the book is that it's better to do something than nothing, even if that something hasn't been thought out. That's all well and good, but in the timeframe of the book, there would be time to at least discuss side effects, beyond just suggesting opponents are wacky nay-sayers. I found it disappointing to see so much effort expended on the hardware, and so little on whether that hardware is really a good solution.
There's a stab at some geopolitical warfare, but it's at a surprisingly limited level, and a lot of loose threads are left dangling. The Chinese are ubiquitous, nefarious, and powerful, and they do both good and bad things, but ... oh well, that's life.
Despite its weaknesses, the book is well written, and an interesting (if limited) exploration of at least one geoengineering approach to climate change. As a suggestion that we should finally do something about the climate it's effective, and I take that to be at least one of its goals. And the characters do, eventually become more engaging, though the book remains fairly distant overall.
Reads like Neal Stephenson read his older books and decided to write a parody of that type of fiction. Or a rip-off. Or an homage? It wanders between all three but what it definitely is not is original in any way. The premise is somewhat interesting but the moment to moment text may have been written by an neural network based on his previous works.
Meh, not a strong recommendation from me. Kind of boring and it doesn't feel like a coherent story to me. The main characters' story lines just feel thrown together.
This book is like 90% walls of text and no dialog. Great topic. Bad execution
Best book I've read by Stephenson in awhile. Like since Diamond Age. His early books were actual techno thrillers. As he's gotten older he seems to have settled into writing books that include a LOT more description than is absolutely necessary. This is one of those. However, for me, this one isn't as deadly as Seveneves which I gave up on. (That book's premise made it sound as if I'd love it but the pace was deadly.)
This book is set just far enough in the future that we are not there yet, but it's pretty clear that we will be. If not in the specific details, the general idea is spot on.
The characters are solid and interesting. I wanted to read about them which is what made the excess of description ok. That said, if I hadn't been stuck at home with Covid right as I started this, I might have lost the thread due to lack of time. There's a good 150 pages that could be cut right out of this book and we'd never miss it.
Normally I can't put down a Neal Stephenson book when I start to read it. With this one, I just couldn't get into it. Probably my first book of his that I haven't enjoyed reading.
Normally I can't put down a Neal Stephenson book when I start to read it. With this one, I just couldn't get into it. Probably my first book of his that I haven't enjoyed reading.
I've read many of Neal Stephenson's books; some of them were hard work. He has a penchant for dense, sometimes impenetrable details, (Seveneves: orbital dynamics) that can bore the arse off you.
I was hesitant to read this book, but I really enjoyed it!
Yes, there is detail, but it fitted the plot. I enjoyed the wide mix of characters and their various interactions. OK, some of it was a bit convoluted, but it was good fun. Could there be a part 2?
“One man has a Big Idea for reversing global warming” indeed. One man. One big idea. And it's not really about reversing global warming so much as it is an admitted band-aid. But then it's just left there. Alone. While somehow hand-waving at actual solutions and never actually approaching them.
It's almost like climate change was the pretext for a story about international politics and Texas. Which, okay. But the whole thing just felt weak. Weak jabs at the state of the U.S. as an international mockery. Weak hand waving at real climate change solutions. Weak connection of the concept in the title of the book with the plot.
After we get past 200 pages of wild boars, there are some likable characters and some low-level intrigue. There's some cool barely-future technology, but other than the Big Idea, there's not much else for us there. It's just very near future living, with a folksy Texan and a self-assured European queen. And Sikhs. I learned a bunch about Sikh culture and the Punjab which was great. And yet, almost completely unrelated.
And then the actual build-up happens to an exciting showdown and it ends 2 pages from the end of the book. The end turns out to not be an end at all, but a beginning. Blah.
Someone get Neal a great editor. No disrespect intended, but this had the bones of something great, and just stumbled down the hallway bashing into the walls the whole way. Much like his last book, Fall.
I yearn for the halcyon days of The Baroque Cycle, Anathem and Seveneves. Hell, even REAMDE.
A tough one to judge. Even bad Stephenson's tend to be “good” At the outset I was hoping for the pace of Reamde but with the science of Seveneves but I got neither. Both are good but neither excel so the plot is very interesting but I think I hoped to learn more on the consequences (Short medium and long like Seveneves) of the Sulphur gun but apart from introducing the concept the main bulk of the story tends to be character driven, but without the Reamde success. I know NS does not do sequels but this ones really does seem incomplete without one.