Fifty Degrees Below
Kim Stanley Robinson is at his visionary best in this gripping cautionary tale of progress and its price as our world faces catastrophic climate change – the sequel to Forty Signs of Rain.Frank Vanderwal of the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC has been living a paleolithic lifestyle in a tree house in Rock Creek Park ever since a big flood of the Potomac destroyed his apartment block. The flood was just the beginning. It heralded a lot of bad-weather news. Now the Gulf Stream has shut down and the Antarctic ice sheet is melting.The good news is that Frank is part of an international effort by the National Science Foundation to restabilize Earth's climate. He understands the necessity for out-of-the-box thinking and he refuses to feel helpless before the indifference of the politicians and capitalists who run America.The bad news is that Frank has fallen in love – with a woman who is not who she seems. He discovers that their first meeting was no accident: he was on a list all along! Her ulterior motive is political and she expects Frank to spy for her. And thus Frank is drawn into the world of Homeland Security, and other, blacker Washington security agencies as the presidential election year heats up.Then suddenly it's winter …It's winter like the ice age, fifty degrees below. As hellish conditions disrupt the lives of even the most important people, there is a convergence of meteorological and human events with Frank at the centre – catastrophe is in the air. This unforgettable story from the master of alternate and future history brings tomorrow into new focus with startling effect.
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Fifty Degrees Below
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Nobody likes Washington D.C. Even the people who love it don’t like it. Climate atrocious, traffic worse: an ordinary midsized gridlocked American city, in which the plump white federal buildings make no real difference. Or rather they bring all the politicians and tourists, the lobbyists and diplomats and refugees and all the others who come from somewhere else, often for suspect reasons, and thereafter spend their time clogging the streets and hogging the show, talking endlessly about their non-existent city on a hill while ignoring the actual city they are in. The bad taste of all that hypocrisy can’t be washed away even by the food and drink of a million very fine restaurants. No – bastion of the world government, locked vault of the world bank, fortress headquarters of the world police; Rome, in the age of bread and circuses; no one can like that.
So naturally when the great flood washed over the city, wreaking havoc and leaving the capital spluttering in the livid heat of a wet and bedraggled May, the stated reactions were various, but the underlying subtext often went something like this: HA HA HA. For there were many people around the world who felt that justice had somehow been served. Capital of the world, thoroughly trashed: who wouldn’t love it?
Of course the usual things were said by the usual parties. Disaster area, emergency relief, danger of epidemic, immediate restoration, pride of the nation, etc. Indeed, as capital of the world, the President was firm in his insistence that it was everyone’s patriotic duty to support rebuilding, demonstrating a brave and stalwart response to what he called ‘this act of climatic terrorism.’ ‘From now on,’ the President continued, ‘we are at a state of war with nature. We will work until we have made this city even more like it was than before.’
But truth to tell, ever since the Reagan era the conservative (or dominant) wing of the Republican party had been coming to Washington explicitly to destroy the federal government. They had talked about ‘starving the beast,’ but flooding would be fine if it came to that; they were flexible, it was results that counted. And how could the federal government continue to burden ordinary Americans when its center of operations was devastated? Why, it would have to struggle just to get back to normal! Obviously the flood was a punishment for daring to tax income and pretending to be a secular nation. One couldn’t help thinking of Sodom and Gomorrah, the prophecies specified in the Book of Revelation, and so on.
Meanwhile, those on the opposite end of the political spectrum likewise did not shed very many tears over the disaster. As a blow to the heart of the galactic imperium it was a hard thing to regret. It might impede the ruling caste for a while, might make them acknowledge, perhaps, that their economic system had changed the climate, and that this was only the first of many catastrophic consequences. If Washington was denied now that it was begging for help, that was only what it had always done to its environmental victims in the past. Nature bats last – poetic justice – level playing field – reap what you sow – rich arrogant bastards – and so on.
Thus the flood brought pleasure to both sides of the aisle. And in the days that followed Congress made it clear in their votes, if not in their words, that they were not going to appropriate anything like the amount of money it would take to clean up the mess. They said it had to be done; they ordered it done; but they did not fund it.
The city therefore had to pin its hopes on either the beggared District of Columbia, which already knew all there was to know about unfunded mandates from Congress, to the extent that for years their license plates had proclaimed ‘Taxation Without Representation;’ or on the federal agencies specifically charged with disaster relief, like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers and others that could be expected to help in the ordinary course of their missions (and budgets).
Experts from these agencies tried to explain that the flood did not have a moral meaning, that it was merely a practical problem in city management, which had to be solved as a simple matter of public health, safety and convenience. The Potomac had ballooned into a temporary lake of about a thousand square miles; it had lasted no more than a week, but in that time inflicted great damage to the infrastructure. Much of the public part of the city was trashed. Rock Creek had torn out its banks, and the Mall was covered by mud; the Tidal Basin was now part of the river again, with the Jefferson Memorial standing in the shallows of the current. Many streets were blocked with debris; worse, in transport terms, many Metro tunnels had flooded, and would take months to repair. Alexandria was wrecked. Most of the region’s bridges were knocked out or suspect. The power grid was uncertain, the sewage system likewise; epidemic disease was a distinct possibility.
