EUROGRAPHICS '90 Book

Climate change is a common speculative-fiction trope these days, but when Norman Spinrad wrote this in the late 90s, hardly anyone was doing it. He wasn't the first SF writer to tackle the topic, of course, but reading it now, it's clear he was well ahead of the curve. Then again, leave it to Spinrad to write a climate apocalypse novel that's light on epic disaster and heavy on sex, drugs, corporate conspiracies and 60s counterculture philosophy.

That's not to say Spinrad's future is optimistic. The polar caps are gone, parts of Earth are uninhabitable, and what nation-states are left have little power, which is split between The Big Blue Machine (a cabal of rich corporations), "Green" syndicalists and Bad Boys, a syndic run mainly by the mafia and the triads. Meanwhile, several top climatologists have predicted that a sudden acceleration of global warming dubbed "Condition Venus" may be imminent. This is the backdrop for the main story, in which PR flack Monique Calhoun is assigned to manage an emergency UN climate conference in Paris to determine how long they have before Condition Venus kicks in, and what can be done to reverse it. The twist: The Big Blue Machine is funding both the conference and the PR for the first time, and everyone from Mossad to Russia wants to know why. Monique is recruited by Mossad to find out by liaising with Eric Esterhazy, who runs a luxury riverboat for Bad Boys that is outfitted with wall-to-wall surveillance.

It's somewhat messy in terms of the sociopolitical backdrop, though it's typical of Spinrad in that he tends to design his futures as allegories, not plausible outcomes. But his exposition is somewhat muddled, which make the allegiances and motivations of Monique, Eric and other key players hard to grasp at times - you really just have to shrug and go with it. Also, even by Spinrad standards, the sexual chemistry between Monique and Eric is ludicrous. That said, Spinrad uses his characters to raise ethical dilemmas - how far would you go to save the planet? Do the ends justify the means? And do we really need to wait until we know an outcome for certain before we take action? So as flawed as the novel is, Spinrad at least offers a different and thought-provoking take on the climate-apocalypse genre.