Green Earth
GREEN EARTH takes the stories first told in FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN, FIFTY DEGREES BELOW and SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING and combines them in a fully updated, compressed and compelling single volume.
Catastrophe is in the air. Increasingly strange weather events are pummelling the Earth. When the Gulf Stream shuts down and the Antarctic ice sheet starts melting, climate extremes multiply, and some winters hit like an ice age.
New U.S. President Phil Chase is on a mission: he’s determined to solve climate change. His science advisor, Frank Vanderwal, is a bit more messed up. When massive floods hit Washington, Frank finds himself living in a treehouse and in love with a woman who’s definitely not what she seems, one who will draw him into the shadowy world of Homeland Security, and other, blacker agencies.
Only science can save the day. Frank knows he has to find a way to save the world so that science can proceed.
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GREEN EARTH
THE SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL TRILOGY
FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN
FIFTY DEGREES BELOW SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
HarperVoyager an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Forty Signs of Rain copyright © 2004, 2015 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Fifty Degrees Below copyright © 2005, 2015 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Sixty Days and Counting copyright © 2007, 2015 by Kim Stanley Robinson
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover design and illustration: Wes Youssi/M80 Design, based on images © Shutterstock.com
Kim Stanley Robinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting were originally published separately in hardcover and in different form in the UK by HarperVoyager in 2004, 2005, and 2007.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008139544
Ebook Edition © November 2015 ISBN: 9780008139551
Version: 2015-10-13
Contents
Chapter 4: Science in the Capital
Chapter 5: Athena on the Pacific
Chapter 6: The Capital in Science
Chapter 12: Abrupt Climate Change
Chapter 13: Back to Khembalung
Chapter 14: Is There a Technical Solution?
Chapter 15: Autumn in New York
Chapter 19: Leap Before You Look
PART THREE: SIXTY DAYS AND COUNTING
Chapter 24: The Technological Sublime
Chapter 27: Emerson for the Day
Chapter 28: Terraforming Earth
Peter Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was a great writer. His non-fiction is superb, and his novels are even better: At Play In the Fields of the Lord is an epic thing, and Far Tortuga is brilliant and moving, one of my favorite novels. You read those books, you’ve lived more lives.
His third great novel has an unusual publishing history. It first appeared as a trilogy, in volumes called Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone By Bone. Then about ten years later it reappeared in a single volume, considerably compressed by Matthiessen, titled Shadow Country. When I picked up that book in a bookstore and read Matthiessen’s foreword explaining what he had done, I immediately said to myself, “I want to do that with my climate trilogy.”
This reaction surprised me. I had not been aware that I harbored any longing to revise those books. When I finish a novel I generally move on without a lot of looking back. On completion I feel a glow, as when finishing any job, but it’s also a little sad, because the characters stop talking to me. It’s like being Calvin and watching Hobbes turn back into a stuffed doll. Could be tragic, but in my case there is a solution, which is simply to start another novel. That’s what I do, and on it goes.
But in the case of my climate trilogy, which was published between 2004 and 2007 under the titles Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting, it appeared that I still had the urge to tinker. After some reflection it began to make sense. Almost fifteen years have passed since I started that project, and in that time our culture’s awareness of climate change has grown by magnitudes, the issue becoming one of the great problems of the age. In this changed context, I had the feeling that quite a few of my trilogy’s pages now spent time telling readers things they already knew. Some of that could surely be cut, leaving the rest of the story easier to see.
Also, my original idea had been to write a realist novel as if it were science fiction. This approach struck me as funny, and also appropriate, because these days we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together. If you want to write a novel about our world now, you’d better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.
