Book Review: "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson

*Spoiler warning!*

3.5/5 stars

This was my first book of 2022 (and by Neal Stephenson) and for me, it was a mixed bag. I think I would have given it four stars if it weren't for the rambling middle section of the book that was a bit of a slog to get through. Sandwiched between the action-packed exposition and climax portions, no less. In my opinion, the book could have been a bit shorter. 

I'll give it to Termination Shock though that it set up an interesting premise. 

In the near future, in a world very much like ours, but farther along in experiencing the ravages of climate change, an eccentric Texas billionaire wants to save the world, by, how else: the building of a big gun. (I had to enjoy the satire here of taking the American cowboy stereotype to the max.) The idea was that the gun would consistently fire sulfur dioxide (SO2) up into the atmosphere over the course of multiple years, mimicking a volcanic eruption and cooling down the global temperature. 

A stopgap method at best while the world then really hauled it to pull CO2 out of the air. (This kind of method was used in Kim Stanley Robinson's book, The Ministry For the Future. India, having suffered a devastating heat wave that took many lives, undertook a campaign of aerial spraying of SO2 in their airspace to cool things down.)

I believe it was described at one point in the book as someone getting a hand on the steering wheel of a car with a brick on the gas pedal. The car is still going super dangerously fast, but at least it's under control, somewhat. 

Powerful computers pressed into service by the world powers shows that this project (cheekily nicknamed "Pina2bo" after the real-life volcano erupted in 1991 and really cooled things down for a bit) benefited certain nations and not so much others. It would halt sea level rise for several vulnerable locations around the world, including Singapore, Venice (in Italy), and the Netherlands, but may lead to famine in other parts of the world. 

This unlucky roll of the dice fell onto India, who depended on the yearly coming of the monsoons to produce food. Pina2bo would cause the monsoons to come later or even not at all.

Naturally, this rubbed some the wrong way. General chaos ensues.

So, "geoengineering" had a positive connotation for those who came out a bit better than others from this. For those who got the short end of the climactic stick, terminology started kicking around like "climate terrorism" or "climate destruction" and the eerie "climate peacekeeping." 

In reading this, I came out of it not sure if I would support such intentional messing with the climate, but instead was bogged down in the sheer scale of such a change, whether for good or ill. Maybe that was the point of the story. Good books make you think and all.

What about the characters in the story? I liked the assembled cast of unlikely allies and enemies and how people interact when everything is on the line. Yeah, I haven't talked about them much, but you'll have to forgive me that I came away still immersed in all the complications brought up in the world of Termination Shock that we in this reality will have to reckon with. I still have not been able to get the book out of my head, its view of the world from 20,000 feet up.

My head is in the clouds still. I'll come down eventually.

While Stephenson may have gone a bit overboard on the 20,000-feet-up impersonal narration of things, I still think Termination Shock is a decent read for anyone who likes their sci-fi to make them really think.

--BookOwl