Fifty Degrees Below

[phantom power]

The second installment in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Younger Dryas" novels, is out in mass-market paperback. I believe the final installment comes out in hardcover very soon: Sixty Days and Counting.

In case you want to interrupt your regular diet of E/E climate disaster with some tasty fictionalized climate disaster.

[YankeyMCC]

1. Problem is just How Fictionalized is it?

Or rather how soon before the books are overcome by events?

Actually I haven't read them but his Mars series was outstanding and I've heard very good things about these novels as well.

[phantom power]

2. If we do experience a Younger-Dryas type of event...

it might be very much like what he's describing in his novels. Hard to say, but I'm pretty sure these days that if we have a Y-D event, it will probably happen in my lifetime. Lately, I think of it as a best-case scenario. Un-checked warming will lead to a climate equilibrium that is even more hostile to contemporary life than an ice-age.

He spends so much time on his characters' lives at the NSF and Washington, that the actual climate events have (so far) been mostly in the background. I'm waiting to get to the juicy climate-disaster porn.

In real life, I'm very happy to wait.

[kestrel91316]

3. oooohhhh, how did I miss this? My favorite literary genre is

postapocalyptic/disaster fiction!

Note to self: Put this on my PBS.com wish list!

[Porcupine]

5. Consider reading S. M. Stirling's "Dies the Fire"

also "Peshawar Lancers" and "Conquistador." These are three novels about man's place in the environment.

[kestrel91316]

7. I read Dies the Fire. Great book.

[kestrel91316]

4. I think Forty Signs of Rain is first in the series?

I put them both on my PBS wish list!

[phantom power]

6. Yes, that's the first one. Good stuff.