Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Book review: Sixty Days and Counting

Back in March I mentioned that I went to a book signing by Kim Stanley Robinson. While the book reading was pretty lame the book turned out to be the best of the trilogy. See, during the reading he didn't want to give away any spoilers so he read lots of quotes by Thoreau that appear in the book and some OK banter from one of the families in the book.

"Sixty Days and Counting" is the third and final book in the Science in the Capitol trilogy. In the first two books, "Forty Signs of Rain" and "Fifty Degrees Below", most of the interesting stuff happened in the last 100 pages or so. In this book we have a new president who is aware of global warming and dedicated to doing something about it. Our leading characters finally get jobs where they can throw some weight around. They get to argue with and smack down the head of the World Bank. People who try to stand in the way of dumping the oil based economy get fired. Some technologies are discussed that are really being considered that were works of science fiction only ten years ago.

My post a few weeks back about how to make sure nuclear power is only a transitional power source was inspired by discussions in this book.

This whole series is a bit of work, but if you read the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy of books then you can make it through this.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Kim Stanley Robinson trilogy is great. "Sixty Days and Counting" final book in the Science in the Capitol trilogy is the best of the three in my opinion. "Forty Signs of Rain" and "Fifty Degrees Below" are great reads too, but Sixty Days takes the cake. If you like Robinson, you should also check out author Paul Mark Tag. His book "Category 5 and the sequal "Prophecy" are great eco-thrillers with doses of science and technlogy. Enjoy!