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Fifty Degrees Below
Kim Stanley Robinson

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Nick Chapman, November 7, 2007

Robinson's Mars trilogy was one of the greatest things I've read. One aspect of that greatest was the tremendous, persuasive detail of his imagined exploration and colonization and transformation of Mars. But the more important aspect was the human and the social. The people were real and interesting and I enjoyed spending time with them - and the vision of human society, and the hope for the possibilities of more just and interesting human societies, was exciting.

His new trilogy, beginning with Forty Signs of Rain, continuing in this book, and then going on to Sixty Days and Counting, is every bit as wonderful and engaging. It lacks the epic scope the settlement of Mars provided, but instead we have a story that is much closer to our story, set in the very near future, a future rushing towards us - a future of catastrophic climate change. Again, the science is utterly persuasive, as with the Mars trilogy, but what makes these books great - and this one in particular of the three - is the utterly persuasive, and engaging, characters. This is not, in the end, science fiction, but simply fiction, as the science, crucial though it is, is always carefully subordinated to the human story - human both at the level of the individual characters who are wonderful, but also at the level of what is stake - humanity, human history. And again, there is the hope... Something that I am least desperately needed when it came to climate change.

Like Sax Russell in the Mars trilogy, Frank from these books has become one of my mentors - not to follow slavishly or worshipfully, but as a deep, intelligent and compassionate thinker, whose thoughts and example I feel I can learn about myself from considering.

These six books... I doubt I will be more moved or excited or encouraged by anything I read this decade more than I have been by these. Other books have made me laugh more, but none have made me think more, study more, or hope as much...

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