By B. Wells
With his uncanny prescience, Neal Stephenson is the big ideas man of contemporary speculative fiction. In his breakout 1992 novel Snow Crash, he coined the term “metaverse” and described a type of virtual reality similar to what Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is developing today. Back in 1999, his novel Cryptonomicon gave readers glimpses of the basis of crypto currency. His many works since then have earned him fans including Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
In his 2021 novel Termination Shock, Stephenson takes on climate change. Set in the near future, the planet is fully beset with the climate disasters we are already seeing. Amidst this, a Texas billionaire named T. R. Schmidt takes matters into his own hands by seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide, which reflects sunlight and thus has a cooling effect on the earth. For those not familiar with this climate mitigation strategy, I recommend this Open to Debate (formally Intelligence Squared) debate on solar geoengineering. As argued in the debate, solar geoengineering only masks the causes of climate change. The novel’s title, Termination Shock, refers to the effects of sudden, rising temperatures should such a strategy be abruptly halted.
Fans of Neal Stephenson delight in the technological details fleshed out in his books, and Termination Shock doesn’t disappoint. T. R. spends long sections of this 720-page novel explaining his stratospheric aerosol injection technology to a delegation of colorful characters including the book’s primary protagonist, Frederika Saskia, Queen of the Netherlands. In the Texas desert, T.R. has built a large, underground gun that continuously fires projectiles into the stratosphere. Once aloft, the projectiles’ engage engines that are fueled by molten sulfur to produce thrust by expelling sulfur dioxide. Once the sulfur has been exhausted, the projectiles glide back for reuse. Saskia, representing a country particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, has a personal stake in reversing climate change. This comes into focus when the Netherland’s Maeslantkering storm surge barrier, the largest moveable object in the world, is attacked with devastating results during a storm. Nevertheless, she has grave concerns about the unintended consequences of T. R.’s unilateral solution to climate change.
One of the controversies regarding solar geoengineering is that not all parts of the globe would be evenly affected. Even if it saves low-lying areas such as the Netherlands and Venice, it could disrupt the monsoon season in Punjab, potentially causing drought. This brings us to another central character named Laks, a Canadian-Indian, who uses martial arts to fight the Chinese on the Line of Actual Control on the Sino-Indian border. Laks’ exploits, streamed in real time, make him a hero, but he is then used by India in a violent attempt to stop T. R.
Much of the book is spent developing Saskia, Laks, and many other characters across the globe, setting the stage for an eventual showdown, while at the same time diving deep into the geo-political and ethical questions around intervening in such a fundamental way to reverse climate change. In this sprawling and riveting tale, Stephenson takes up the dire effects of climate change, suggests a potential solution, and explores the unintended consequences of large-scale climate alterations.