... apparently in Texas you could just crash jet airplanes, shoot it out with giant predators on the tarmac, set fire to the wreckage, and flee, and no one would get particularly excited about it. [loc. 5526]
Just over a decade ago, I wrote a review beginning thus: "Neal Stephenson's latest novel is a vast, sprawling contemporary techno-thriller. It's very readable: I devoured it, on my Kindle (not sure my wrists are up to coping with the physical dead-tree book) in a couple of days. But it wasn't as satisfying as Stephenson's previous novels. All his flaws (including implausible female characters, lack of editing, frustratingly inconclusive endings) are here..." So: ten years after Reamde, more or less, comes Termination Shock, a vast sprawling techno-thriller, very readable, et cetera. I did enjoy it a lot while I was reading it, and I am happy to report that I was much more satisfied with the female characters and with the ending. But gosh, there is a lot here. Feral hogs, a pair of football hooligans from Leeds, a Venetian movement in favour of seceding from Italy, eagles versus drones, the Comanche mindset, Herman Melville's Moby Dick ... They do all connect, eventually, in this thriller about climate change, one man's radical approach to reversing it, and the competing factions who would like things to be done differently.
One of the protagonists is Saskia, Queen of the Netherlands; another is Rufus, a nomadic veteran with a complex racial heritage and a great many practical skills; and the third is Laks, known as Big Fish, a Canadian Sikh who goes to the Himalayas to fight the Chinese on the Line of Actual Control, disputed territory where any weapon developed later than the Paleolithic is forbidden. It's not immediately obvious how Laks' story intersects with the others, but I trusted Stephenson enough to go with the flow.
Things I especially liked included Rufus' close reading of Moby Dick and the parallels he draws to his own life; Cornelia, a Venetian aristocrat who can trace her ancestry back to the Roman Empire; Stephenson's clear, layman-accessible descriptions of the scientific principles, inventions and techniques involved; Saskia's relationship with her daughter. Things I wasn't so keen on: repeated references to news items of the present day, since this is set, I'd say, a decade or two in the future. Are we really still going to be talking about January 6th, about Khashoggi, about the Talking Heads? ... Also worth mentioning that this is a world in which 'living with Covid' is a thing: better track'n'trace, children growing up learning how to have facial expressions that are effective fro behind a mask, social bubbles ...
Termination Shock was a good read, and a surprisingly optimistic one: as usual, it could have been a lot shorter without any impact on the plot, but I did enjoy the frequent, lengthy digressions.
A long, spoilery, intelligent piece about the science and the themes of the novel..
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