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42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
better than the first installment, December 17, 2005
This is the second book in a trilogy, or perhaps the second part of a three book novel. (More on that later.) It works better for me than the first installment (Forty Signs Of Rain) because it is a lot more focused.
Where the first book followed a bunch of mostly-separated stories about a bunch of mostly-separated characters, this one concentrates on a single character, Frank Vanderwal. Some of the other characters from the first book are also covered in a secondary way, but Frank is the center of the story. (Leo is completely absent. Charlie and Anna are sometimes used as viewpoint characters, but quite sparingly.)
Some of the author's longtime fascination with Tibet shows up in a secondary storyline, but the major plot thread details Frank's attempt to live homeless in the middle of Washington DC as a "modern forest primate". This is complicated by a severe winter that is brought on by global climate change. It is contrasted by an examination of what happens when the zoo animals that were released during the flood of the previous book end up "going feral" and trying to survive in the now-wrecked Washington city parks.
Frank is also the focus of domestic surveillance operations, and Robinson presents an image (which is quite possibly true) of a society where domestic high tech spying is rampant and extends even to people who live "off grid" as much as possible. (The headlines in US papers this week are about the NSA performing illegal domestic spying, so perhaps this was a timely subject for fiction!)
He also discusses the idea of letting science replace politics as a method for keeping society running. Those familiar with Robinson's other works will recognize this idea. He likes to come up with new systems of economics and government, which he then uses as the background for a story about his characters. Many of these focus on "market failures" in the current capitalism/democracy system that is in place in the West. Climate change is a well-known market failure scenario, and fits in well with Robinson's political interests.
In the book, Charlie's boss Phil Chase decides to run for president against the unnamed but very Bush-like Republican incumbent. This is a small story in the book, but it is thematically important to the idea that "business as usual" just isn't working.
Frank also finds himself somewhat torn between a possible romantic involvement with his boss, Diane, and an on-going relationship with the mysterious woman he met while stuck in an elevator at the end of the first book.
The bottom line is that this book reads better than the first one. It has a focus, a more definite storyline, and a better feeling of completeness -- even though it is obviously not a complete novel.
Which brings me back to a complaint about this series and several other recent fiction series that I have read. When did it go out of fashion to publish complete novels? More and more it seems that novels have grown to the point that partial novels are being released as "parts of a series". That has its place in some stories, but in most of them (as in this one) it breaks up the story too much and weakens it overall. I think this "series" would have better if it had been a more tightly composed single book, about two thirds the length of the total trilogy.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
KSR, the king of Bureaucratic Realism!, July 31, 2007
This review is from: Fifty Degrees Below (Mass Market Paperback)
Just as Federico Garcia Lorca might be said to be a novelist of magic realism, so too, I would argue that Kim Stanley Robinson has established a new novelistic genre: bureaucratic realism.
The problem with this is that bureaucratic realism is as deadly dull in fiction as it is in real life.
If you cherish reading about the lives of people who spend most of their time in committees, worrying about committee politics, and alternate that with episodes of imagining themselves in the jungle as "paleolithic man," (Frank, the protagonist)... you're a more bored person than I.
Combine that with an incorrigible urge to promulgate the kind of '80's REI-camping-gear yuppie old-school health-nut chest-thumping that veers awfully close, awfully too often, to turning into Advertising for New Age Healthy Life Goodies, along with Frank's consummate urge to combine his self-important delusions about leading the paleolithic life with slumming among a cleaned-up, yuppified version of homeless street people (they're smart! they play chess! they play Frisbie! they're formerly Vietnam Vets so they're also heroes! the 21st-century Noble Savage Writ Large, indeed), and you have a novel that is barely tolerable to read without the strong urge to throw it into the gas-log fireplace. In the middle of summer.
There are a few moments of interesting speculation on actual global warming science, and a few moments of intended disaster-movie scenario painting. There is even a spy-vs.-spy chase scene, as if, along with all his hopelessly naive aspirations, the author is thinking this novel might make a good movie.
However, I had to force myself to complete this thing, and I'm sympathetic to KSR's causes, point of view, yuppie scientist Starbucks klatch clique, fascination with the actual processes of science, and so on. How sad.
I would rate this novel 5 stars on the scale of Most Likely to Infuriate Irrational Hillary-Clinton-Hating Rednecks, ahead of Hillary herself, actually. That is its main value as a work of literature, unfortunately.
I'm girding my loins to read the last of the trilogy, since I'm a completist; I hope it takes awhile to get into paperback.
Sigh.....
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24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Suspense, It Burns!, October 27, 2005
I'm giving this only three stars, not for the writing, but for the serial nature of the two books so far in this trilogy.
Like the first book, this one has a lot to offer. Rapid climate change continues apace, and Robinson's scientists and politicians grapple with the effects as they work as involved professionals on the problem. Imagining Minnesotan winter temperatures in Washington DC is a powerful way to bring home how climate change could day-to-day life. The characters are touching and human, and their relationships with each other are as important as their relationship with the weather.
But for Pete's sake... the two books published so far aren't novels, they're the first two-thirds of a novel. They're not long enough nor dense enough to be satisfying as individual stories. The Mars trilogy, another trilogy by Robinson which followed a set of characters for three books, covered centuries of events in over two thousand pages; the first two books of this trilogy, by contrast, have the same page count as the last book of the Mars trilogy and span events over roughly a year, and even at that they seem a little padded with a lot of lunches and phone calls and searches for parking spaces. Worst of all, this book ends with another big 'To Be Continued...' placard.
It's praising with faint condemnation when a reader's principal frustration with book is that there isn't more of it, but still, be aware that whatever appetites were aroused by _Forty Signs of Rain_ won't be satisfied here. I remain optimistic about the end of the story, but I sure wish I didn't have to wait another year to read it.
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