Neal Stephenson, "Termination Shock" (2021)

This review is a pendant to my previous piece on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future (2020), by way of thinking through the way we narrativize climate change. My argument in the Robinson review is that, by refusing the easy narrative satisfactions of eucatastrophe, Ministry of the Future does something interesting in terms of how we conceptualise and storify and therefore apprehend the enormities of climate catastrophe. Neal Stephenson’s new book is also about climate change, but it embodies a different story-shape, and that’s what interests me.

I blow hot and cold on Stephenson, some of whose books are interesting, but who often writes books are a remarkable, puddingy badness: bloated meander-fests in which the prolix lucubrations of a high-IQ moderate-EQ individual are rehearsed at excessive length. Lots of research is kneaded into the dough of the text, characters and the narrator trading great gouts of infodumping with one another and the reader. In this respect Termination Shock (2021) is representative Stephenson. I’ll describe it briefly in the next couple of paragraphs, with spoilers.

We’re a few decades into the future, and the global climate is deteriorating. Sea levels are rising, day-time temperatures in many parts of the world are too hot for humans to endure, and a ‘whirling dervish troposphere of superstorms’ wreaks havoc. People struggle through outbreaks of ‘COVID-24 and COVID-27’ and other terrors and horrors. The book’s opening sentence is: ‘Houston’s air was too hot to support airplanes.’ This is a problem for Saskia, one of the book’s three main characters and Queen of the Netherlands. A hands-on progressive monarch, Saskia is flying her own jet to Texas to meet with an elderly billionaire named T.R. Schmidt, who has a plan to address the climate catastrophe She diverts her plane to Waco, but on landing she smashes into a troup of feral hogs dashing across the runway.

She is helped from the wreckage by Rufus, a swine-hunter who is chasing one pig in particular, a gigantic wild sow called ‘Snout’ who had previously eaten Rufus’s daughter. We get a brief chunk of Rufus’ backstory: a no-nonsense, ex-military man who tried to make a go of a farm until his daughter was killed, and who afterwards went all Captain Ahab on the feral swine, hunting them at night. Saskia happens to have crashed into Snout herself, and Rufus is finally able to dispatch the monster. Rufus joins Saskia’s team, and they trek across Texas to meet with Schmidt. It’s an exciting opening, but the novel soon bogs down into an awful lot of directionless infodump-lumpy wandering about. Interspersed are sections concerning the novel’s third main character: a young Canadian Sikh called Deep Singh but known as ‘Laks’: an outdoorsy, well-built type who travels to India to reconnect with is roots, and afterwards uses his martial arts skills manning the ‘Line of Actual Control’ between India and China.

Those are your three main characters. For the middle 400-or-so pages of this 700-page novel nothing very much happens. Stephenson puts in more infodumps; Saskia and Rufus become lovers (in a fearsomely unerotic scene: ‘Rufus now wished that he had taken an extra minute to put on clean underwear since his penis was getting bigger and rubbing against the mil-spec stitching [of his cargo shorts]’ [273]). Laki gets a reputation as a kung-fu hero, ‘Big Fish’, fist-of-fury-ing at the Chinese. They retaliate by baking his brain with a targeted microwave weapon, after which Laks has to spend a long time in hospital, the Indian government paying for him to be rebuilt as a kind-of Robocop. He’s not properly Laks any more after this eventuality, although he does make his way to the States to join Saskia and Rufus for the big denouement.

That denouement? So: the reason billionaire T.R. Schmidt called Saskia (and representatives from other low-lying sealevelrise-threatened countries) together was to pitch his Big Gun solution to climate change: to shoot very large levels of sulphur (‘sulfur’, as US-citizen Stephenson insists on spelling this word) into the atmosphere, to cool things down. This happens, and has a broadly positive though uneven effect on the climate: temperatures do come down, although the atmospheric sulfur messes with the monsoon in Northern India, causing droughts (‘India’s pissed off’ one of Saskia’s people tells T.R., late in the novel. ‘“What’s India got to be pissed off about?” T. R. asked. “Perhaps,” Wilhelm said, “they regret you did not consult with them before building a giant machine that fucks with the weather.”’ [596] But the drift of the novel is that this intervention, this firing of what the novel calls ‘The Biggest Gun in the World’, arrests the worst of climate collapse.

There’s a shoot-out when T.R.’s compound on the Rio Grand comes under attack, and is defended, mostly by Chinese troops flown in for the purpose. Rufus, who had previously made his living hunting feral hogs for money, tracking them with drones before dispatching them with his rifle, uses his skills as ‘The Drone Ranger’, to help fight off the assailants. Laks is sent in by the Indians to sabotage the sulphur-gun, but gets killed a second, and final, time before he can.

This is, to return to the terms of the Stan Robinson review I link to above, a eucatastrophic sort of story. Stephenson doesn’t tie-up everything with a neat little bow: climate collapse isn’t ‘solved’ with this one neat trick, and the purpose of the Biggest Gun in the World is to slow global temperature rises long enough to allow new carbon-capture technologies to come online. As a solution it is, T.R. admits, ‘messy’. But the whole story is built around this massive intervention. I think this is bad. I don’t mean, or don’t just mean, in terms of the likelihood of the science of this (though obviously this is a jejune ‘solution’: the Earth’s climate is a super-complex system, and altering one single variable is not going to reset it in one fell swoop). I mean it’s bad in terms of the story-shape of it, for the reasons I outline in the link above. Not for nothing did Tolkien talk about the eucatastrophe in terms of Fairy Stories—something he did to dignify the fairy story, rather than to denigrate the eucatastrophe, since for him the greatest ‘fairy story’ of all was the sacred narrative of Christ’s passion. I might almost think Stephenson is self-consciously playing with this: for all the tech-thriller specifics of guns and planes and big machines, and all the adventure-story running around and fighting, Termination Shock is fundamentally a fairy story: it’s about how the pig boy shows himself brave and resourceful enough to marry the princess (or, in this case, Queen), It’s about how a happy ending is just waiting there, to be pulled from the story’s hat. It’s mendacious.