copyright & licensing

all content © VM (Vicky) Brasseur and licensed under CC BY-SA

Originally posted on 29 Mar 2025

1 minute read

This book is about climate change, and in that way it’s as grim as it gets, pulling no punches on how this will affect the planet and all its inhabitants. But it’s also about people working very, very hard to do something about that change, so in many ways the book is hopeful as well. After all, it certainly feels like any sort of global initiative to curb and reduce our impact on the climate can only be science fiction at this point.

As is usually the case with Robinson’s work, this one stands firmly on scientific foundations. He must’ve done a spectacular amount of research for it. A shame he didn’t include a bibliography, but as the hardback was already well over 500pp I can understand why he might not’ve wanted to increase the size of the tome.

It doesn’t move directly forward as your usual narrative would. Instead, it’s frequently interrupted by chapters that are standalone vignettes. This, plus the density of the prose overall, meant it took me longer than expected to get through the book.

Despite that, I mostly liked it but for blockchain regularly raising its ugly head throughout the work. That the technology is presented in a positive light in a book about climate change is some deep, rich bullshit. That element alone rather ruined the book for me. Reading along and coming across another mention of the wonders of blockchain was rather like eating a nice slice of chocolate cake and suddenly finding the latest forkful is mud.