Hardcover, 708 pages
English language
Published Jan. 21, 2021 by William Morrow.
Termination Shock is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 2021. The book is set in a near-future Earth where climate change has significantly altered human society, and follows the attempts of a solar geoengineering scheme. The novel focuses on the geopolitical and social consequences of the rogue fix for climate change, themes common in the growing climate fiction genre.
This really feels like a book of our times whilst looking slightly ahead. An eco thriller that I will review in more detail on Hive soon.
Content warning Mild spoilers about some topics covered by the book
While his heroes might be horse riding vagabonds or rocket riding scientists, I have a feeling that everything that Neal Stephenson writes is essentially a techno-thriller. With Termination Shock this is true in both the theme as well as the style, and Stephenson again demonstrates his mastery over this hybrid genre.
This time around the topic is the climate crisis, a solution to which is presented in groovy technical details. Story takes place in a near future. It carries over the increasingly plausible and dystopian depiction of US that we've previously seen in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. Though this time the story is more global, so we get to see other places in more detail. I especially appreciated European locales.
Characters are typically clever, witty or stoic, if a bit stylized (no-one really info-dumps in their everyday conversations like that). Not the most believable bunch, but I liked them.
There are the standard weak points as well. The story drags on a bit, and I lost interest in it after a while. It took me almost a year to finish the book because I dropped it around 2/3 of the way through and it took a vacation for me to pick it up again.
In the end, if you like Stephenson you'll like this book. If you don't there's probably nothing revolutionary here that will change your mind. And if you haven't read much of him so far there are better books to pick up first.
I wanted to like this more, because I was an early Stephenson fan from Zodiac days, and I still consider Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon to be masterful storytelling. But this? Almost insultingly silly character development, implausible relationships, and a strangely attenuated focus, given the backdrop of the most complex and unrelentingly global problem of our age. If Kim Stanley Robinson's approach to anthropocentric climate change tries to take too sweeping a view (at the expense of character development and human cultural complexity), here Stephenson suffers the opposite failing: too narrow a focus on the relationships around a particular technology, which reveals his increasingly stark limitations as a character-based storyteller. The one character he does manage to make compelling? Well, no spoilers, but I was shocked at the lazy (and infuriatingly bad) conclusion of that particular arc.
