The Anti-Crichton  

Kim Stanley Robinson's "Forty Signs of Rain" is one of the few fictional books (along with Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather") that has looked at our globally warmed future. He now has a follow up called "50 Degrees Below" out - the Guardian has an interview with him about the book. I quote a pretty large section below, but the whole thing is worth reading.

I met Kim (very briefly) at a book signing over a decade ago in possibly the geekiest spot on the planet - the basement of the Forbidden Planet bookshop, under the grim concrete of London's New Oxford Street. If you ever plan to visit Nepal (assuming you aren't frightened of Maoist revolutionaries), I highly recommend reading his book "Escape From Kathmandu", which isn't anywhere near as heavy going as most of his stuff.

The concept of terraforming - transforming the landscape of a planet to acquire the characteristics of Earth - is central to Robinson's Mars trilogy, in which the characters attempt to effect climate change on a massive scale to warm the planet to habitable levels. In his latest books, Robinson turns this concept on its head: rather than shaping an alien landscape until it resembles Earth, he explores the possibility of manipulating our own environment to redress the damage we've done to it. But what seemed relatively straightforward on Mars's vast, uncomplicated canvas is infinitely trickier on a planet that already supports a complex, populous biosphere. Every proposed action (adding salt to the ocean to restart the Gulf Stream, shooting dust into the atmosphere to reflect light and heat back into space) is likely to produce not one but many reactions, most of them entirely unexpected, in what one ecologist in Fifty Degrees Below calls "the law of unintended consequences". The challenge in this trilogy - to which Robinson gleefully rises - is to work out how to operate within the constraints of a land already lived in.

"It seems so easy on Mars, and looks so hard on earth, which is kind of ironic," Robinson agrees. "It's infinitely more difficult when there's already an established ecology. There's no room for error. And also, alas, there are some mistakes that we simply don't have the power to correct."

Such as?

"Reducing the acidity of the ocean. That's a problem I've become more aware of since I finished book two - it will definitely feature in the third volume. Much of the carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere actually ends up in the ocean, increasing its acidity and making it harder for the little creatures to live. They represent the bottom of the food chain and we're at the top of it. Scientists have looked at whether we could de-acidify the oceans after the fact, and the answer is flatly no ...

"But there are things we can do. The kind of terraforming projects we may well have to contemplate in the future are huge, but they're not outside civilisation's industrial ability."

This fundamental belief in the power of science to tip the scales in our favour underpins Robinson's writing, to the extent that, although he is predicting a future in which we will either plunge into an ice age or drown beneath a 7m-tall wave, his tone frequently verges on the upbeat, and his characters refuse to succumb to despair and instead view the world's potentially fatal problems as challenges to be met. But how much faith can we honestly put in humanity's ability to solve the problems it has created? How does Robinson respond to Martin Rees's chilling claim in his recent book, Our Final Century, that we have a 50/50 chance of making it to the end of the century?

"My sense of it," Robinson replies after a meditative pause, "is that the odds are better than that. It's likely that we'll cause a small mass extinction, but I believe that ultimately reason will prevail. If the amount of money going into the war economy were invested in landscape restoration, we would be in a far more positive position. It may get a little dire before we pull together, but I think when the prosperous nations, and in particular the US, realise they're wrecking their own kids' lives, there will be a mass change in value. It will be a difficult century, and ugly, but I don't think that in the end people are so stupid as to kill themselves off."

Ah, the US. Robinson is of course an American himself, and apart from the odd nod to the wider world, his books are set in and deal exclusively with America. As evidence for human-triggered climate change has mounted over the past decade, the US's continued policy of wilful ignorance has earned it considerable disapprobation from the international community. To what extent, I ask him, does he hold his country to blame for current levels of global warming?

"I think the US is in a terrible state of denial," he says firmly. "Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Gotterdammerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong. Even here in California, 50% of cars on the freeway are SUVs, and they're political statements: they say, we're going to take the rest of the world down with us because we don't give a damn. Essentially they're Republican vehicles: when you see an SUV go by, you know the driver voted for Bush. I do think the world has larger global warming problems, but if the US were actually engaged in dealing with them, there'd be a sense that the worst abuser had seen the light and the whole world was on the same page. There's a really sizeable minority here who back measures to reduce emissions, but the political process is controlled by the Republican administration, which is basically in thrall to the oil industry. So it'll come down to another election - and with the last two elections both in their different ways perhaps having been stolen, we can't even really count on democracy anymore. It's pretty scary here."