Book Review: TERMINATION SHOCK, Neal Stephenson

An eco-thriller with all the Stephenson hallmarks

As mentioned last week when I wrote about that Harlan Coben book, this is the book that started me out of my recent readers’ block. It’s Stephenson in thriller mode, writing about a not-all-that-distant future in which climate change is really starting to bite, so an odd group of rich people— a Texan billionaire, the Queen of the Netherlands, one of her chief assistants, some faintly sinister Venetians— and very dangerous men— a Canadian Sikh martial artist, a part-Cherokee feral hog hunter— decide to do something about it. This has all the things you would expect from Stephenson; but of course, that’s a statement that cuts both ways.

To start with the good, nobody does infodumps better than Stephenson, and this book displays a lot of that. There’s a ton of material here on a wide range of subjects— elaborate launch systems, geoengineering by creating clouds, the history and government of the Netherlands, Sikh traditions and martial arts, etc— all delivered in entertaining fashion. It’s never not obvious that he’s written a scene largely as an excuse to deliver a huge wad of background information, but it’s also never a slog to read.

This also has a good dose of what I think of as his real strength as a writer, which is decribing the everyday lives of quirky (often rich) people. I’ve joked in the past that he should switch to writing plotless literary fiction, because I would happily read 600 pages of him describing odd characters doing quotidian things, and the sections here where Saskia is being Queen, Willem being a political aide, or Laks is getting set up in the Pujab are fantastic. It’s only when he has to construct a plot that comes to some sort of resolution that he bites himself in the ass.

That’s very much the case here, too. The build-up is terrific, with the slow reveal of T.R.’s scheme and the description of the process behind it, and Laks’s slow progess toward the Line of Actual Control. The final confrontation is rushed and confusing and not especially satisfying. Which is to say, very much typical Stephenson.

The other very characteristic thing here, which kind of overlaps some of the other stuff, is that it’s full of odd obsessions that very much have the feel of a major nerd excitedly telling you about the thing they stayed up untill 3am reading about on Wikipedia last night. Some of these are very of-the-moment— the plot is set into motion by a pack of feral hogs— others come completely out of nowhere, like the random falconry. As I’ve said to a couple of people about this book, I’d really like to know what his research process is. It feels like he just sort of faffed about on the Internet for a while, falling down wormholes on Reddit and Wikipedia, until he accumulated some threshold number of quirky facts and then slapped together a story that could include all of them.

Again, aside from the ending, which is kind of a resigned sigh, this was fun to read. There are a few mis-steps— the sex scenes are just awful— but if you like the thing that he usually does, well, he’s doing it again, and you’ll probably like this too.

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Speaking of people doing things that they usually do, here are the usual buttons:

And if you’d like to take issue with any of my comments, or just discuss the book more, the comments will be open.