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50 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing Finish to the Series, March 11, 2007
For Kim Stanley Robinson fans, like me, who have read ten of his novels, Sixty Days and Counting is a big disappointment. For Robinson himself, the book may be worse than that -- perhaps heralding a career crisis.
Robinson has two main problems. First, he has no new things to say. Second, for what he DOES want to say, the novel is not the best vehicle -- and so Sixty Days is awkward and ineffective.
But first, the good. Robinson is a great writer who combines powerful expressive skills with a passionate and insightful understanding of politics and philosophy. Moreover, he is a meticulous researcher who presents science by lifting the reader up, instead of dumbing the science down.
In addition, Sixty Days presents a detailed and compelling portrait of how a real President should behave, at a time when people are craving such a model. In fact, much of Sixty Days is simply political advice to a future Democratic Presidential administration. It is good advice, and that is perhaps the best that the book has to offer. You normally expect a Robinson book to offer loads of "Gee Whiz!" science, but because climate change has become so much more prominent in the public discussion than it was when this series began, most of what would have been fascinating science is now old hat.
Except for the politics, and without the science, Sixty Days is quite empty. The book might best be seen as a victory lap, or perhaps a "greatest hits" compendium from all his prior work. The first clue that Robinson was more interested in re-hashing prior work than introducing something new came when he started gratuitously recycling major character names like "Frank" and "Spencer" from the Mars series. But it turns out that nearly everything is recycled. We see again an uncontrolled experiment involving genetically modified lichen (as from Red Mars), a sexually loaded look at women's softball (as from Pacific Edge), home-made designer drugs (as from Gold Coast), primitivist living in an urban environment (as from Blue Mars), accounts of the Bardo (as from Rice and Salt), and of course all the themes from Forty Signs and Fifty Degrees, pounded endlessly.
Deemed by Robinson his "Science in the Capital" series, this book might originally have been intended to explore the possibility that the world would be better if scientists took over politics. Sixty Days is the culmination of this fantasy, in which scientists fill the White House, are amply funded, and drive all the key policies. However, a serious look at the potential pros and cons of a scientocracy this book is not.
Missing from Sixty Days is plot. The narratives carefully built in the prior books, such as election fraud and violence emanating from secret government programs, simply murmur in the background of Sixty Days, until suddenly resolved in a few pages (pp. 353-356, don't blink), without much detail about what was actually happening or how it was ended. The book's other conflicts are resolved as easily -- without giving away too much, the boy gets the girl, nobody dies, and everyone lives happily ever after. Robinson appears impatient to get to the movie-like ending, which features scene after scene of teary reconciliation.
Sometimes the passion comes through. What Robinson really wants to talk about is why primitivism is the best way of life, why outdoorsy people are the only completely realized humans, why rock climbing is so interesting, and why Californians should be infinitely more snobby about their state than New Yorkers could ever be about New York. These themes interrupt Sixty Days so frequently, and at such length, that they essentially hijack whatever the book was trying to be.
I would like Robinson to go back to his word processor and give Sixty Days a fair shot, dispensing with the kayaking, backpacking, rock climbing, and feral life. That book would be more like a novel -- but unsatisfying, I suspect, to Robinson. And thus we are left with this question: if Kim Stanley Robinson's main priority is to preach primitivism and impress upon us the virtues of the California landscape and outdoor sports, does he really want to be in the business of writing novels, or is there a better way to communicate this?
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Sixty Days to Nowhere, August 7, 2007
Robinson's books have always had strong ecological themes, and this, the final volume of his look at the global warming crisis, is no exception. Unlike so many other books that try and delve in this area, Robinson provides not only a look at what we might expect to happen to our world if our current production and consumption habits don't change, but what we can reasonably do about it.
This is, in fact, the strong point of this work, as Robinson envisions both a group of dedicated scientists who actively try to handle a myriad of different types of technological fixes and a newly elected President who gives far more than lip service to their plans. Many of the things Robinson describes here are both good science and show a good grasp of what is possible in the world of politics when the voting population can actually see and feel the detrimental effects (most of this was detailed in the prior two books). The economic costs of massive programs of this nature (such as pumping huge quantities of seawater into basins and back to the top of the eastern Antarctic) are not ignored, either, though I did feel that expecting a massive shift of dollars from military defense to ecological programs was expecting a little too much.
Unfortunately, the novel that above is wrapped in isn't much of a novel. We are presented with the continuing story of Frank in search of his briefly met mysterious love while still trying to live a feral life inside the city confines, and Charlie and his concerns about his youngest son. The whole incident of the potential election-rigging that formed a prime part of the last book is still here, but muted and almost buried under a somewhat far-fetched attempt to find and root out the super-black intelligence agency responsible for the plan. Now there may be little doubt that there may be intelligence-gathering agencies that have too much unsupervised power, and that current laws do not do enough to safeguard individual's liberties and rights, but Robinson's depiction crosses the line into James Bondian fantasy. Robinson also lets his own political biases show far too much, at one point making an unqualified statement that the people in the current administration are criminals.
The trouble with all of this is there is very little action, and almost no suspense. Frank and Charlie's stories just don't have much emotional grabbing power, so that in the end I felt I was reading more of a treatise (even if a good, well reasoned, and scientifically sound one) than a novel. The other plot threads that were started in the first two books are given conclusions, but almost in a back-handed manner, and with far too much of `everything ends well'. What would have helped this book considerably would have been a look at the world and the political maneuvering from the eyes of Phil Chase, the new President, but we are only given short glimpses of this. By the end of the book, everything just kind of sputters out, leaving me quite disappointed. I expect much better from this author.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Very disappointing, December 28, 2007
I agree with other reviewers that this is among Robinson's weakest and was quite a disappointment. Plot is weak. I am a big fan, thinking the three California's is his best work and the Mars trilogy is outstanding. But Robinson seems to be paying less attention to the things that placed him on my pedestal -- thoughtful review of possible futures, interesting characters, good hard science, understanding of alternative styles of leadership. I liked the first volume in this trilogy quite a lot -- Frank was not exactly a likable character, but he is an interesting loon, not unlike other academics I have known (I am an academic Economist myself). The second volume was not as good, and this volume was pretty terrible. All of Frank's eccentricities from the first volume (but one -- his like for the outdoors and primitive lifestyle) have disappeared or been trivialized. For example, an injury affects his brain function. He does nothing interesting as a consequence of his injury, then an operation fixes it. This is not the stuff that makes Robinson great.
Instead of crafting this like a literary exercise, objectively pondering the possibilities and lyrically leading the reader onward, this feels like an angry blue-stater releasing his frustrations through abstract wish-fulfillment. I am a very angry blue-stater, but the idea that everything would be better if only the right man were president does nothing to assuage my anger.
Finally, as an economist, I have to say it bothered me that Robinson wrote so extensively and ignorantly about the subject of economics. OK, you may think I am an apologist for capitalism, offended by his epiphany for socialism. No, that would be confusing MBAs with economists. I am offended that a hard-science advocate gets the science of economics wrong in most every detail, taking an ideological stance against a straw-man version of capitalism and an equally ideological stance in favor of socialism. Economics properly taught covers market failure extensively -- reasons why markets systematically can be predicted to be *in*efficient with respect to externalities, and ways that public policy can restore (social) efficiency such as carbon taxes or cap and trade systems. The problem that causes pollution, global warming, and other externalities is not the private ownership of capital -- it is (in some sense) the lack of ownership of commonly consumed biosphere. Not that I am advocating private ownership of the biosphere -- just pointing out that if a good environment could be bought and sold, capitalism would provide us with a great environment. Social ownership of capital, the defining characteristic of socialism, could be used to fix market failures, but when everyone owns something nobody owns it and it is also quite possible (as we have seen in the Soviet Union and China when they were closer to the socialistic pole)that the environment will get worse.
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