Termination Shock

This book is perfect evidence that Neal Stephenson has about 4/5 of a really good analysis of the world, but that the final 1/4 is very important and absolutely super missing.

The good: the book is decently written, the characters seem believable and there is considerable and obvious research behind them. I learnt things reading the book and I like that. The cast is diverse, and that’s not just a throwaway thing but rather a crucial part of the story, which is really about migration, colonialism and ecological disaster in that order.

The bad: the book is, to say the least unclear about what it’s trying to say. I feel like a story about colonialism, migration and ecological disaster should perhaps not come out mostly on the side of a Texas oil baron and the queen of a colonial empire. It’s also remarkably flat in its handling of China. Essentially every other nation is deeply humanised and shown to have multiple interests working against each other. China is a creepy superpower that routinely does covert terrorism mostly for the fun of it, and it moves as one unit.

Also, as a thriller this is decidedly mid. It’s not very exciting and it’s very very slow.

While his heroes might be horse riding vagabonds or rocket riding scientists, I have a feeling that everything that Neal Stephenson writes is essentially a techno-thriller. With Termination Shock this is true in both the theme as well as the style, and Stephenson again demonstrates his mastery over this hybrid genre.

This time around the topic is the climate crisis, a solution to which is presented in groovy technical details. Story takes place in a near future. It carries over the increasingly plausible and dystopian depiction of US that we've previously seen in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. Though this time the story is more global, so we get to see other places in more detail. I especially appreciated European locales.

Characters are typically clever, witty or stoic, if a bit stylized (no-one really info-dumps in their everyday conversations like that). Not the most believable bunch, but I liked them.

There are the standard weak points as well. The story drags on a bit, and I lost interest in it after a while. It took me almost a year to finish the book because I dropped it around 2/3 of the way through and it took a vacation for me to pick it up again.

In the end, if you like Stephenson you'll like this book. If you don't there's probably nothing revolutionary here that will change your mind. And if you haven't read much of him so far there are better books to pick up first.