Read: 50 Degrees Below, 60 Days And Counting

Last Saturday I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s 60 Days And Counting; the previous week I read his 50 Degrees Below. With 40 Signs of Rain, they form a near-future sci-fi trilogy about dealing with global warming catastrophe. Robinson is most famous for his brilliant Mars trilogy, probably the best naturalistic sci-fi about the challenges of colonizing a new world. The Mars books are about terraforming Mars — making into a planet that’s permanently hospitable to human life. So it’s altogether fitting that Robinson has come to write a saga about terraforming Earth, creating what his characters call a “permaculture.” As the term suggests, permaculture is about everything — environment, economics, way of life — and Robinson has allowed himself a huge scope (~1500 pages) to write about all of these things. He succeeds in large measure. The novel’s thematic soup includes environmentalism, wildlife stewardship, living in nature, scientific rationalism, sociobiology, and socialism — and it winds up blending rather well. Of course, when you’re writing about everything, it’s hard to get everything right, and I often found myself chafing at the economics espoused by the book — I think it goes beyond political disagreement to serious errors of economic science (of course, some people would think the foregoing sentence is logically unreadable; oh well). It’s not perfect, but it’s an impressively big imaginative task handled impressively well.

(If you’re reading this and thinking about reading the book, let me instead recommend Red Mars, the first book in the Mars trilogy. It deals with many of the same themes and is quite a bit better. I re-read the Mars trilogy in college and rank it among the best sci-fi I’ve read.)