Kim Stanley Robinson Fifty Degrees Below

Fifty Degrees Below

Kim Stanley Robinson

Bantam, Nov 2005, $25.00, 405 pp.

ISBN 0553803123

In the not too distant future, global warming has changed the earth's climatic patterns in a dramatic way. Washington D.C. was fatally flooded and now the clean-up operation has started but the danger is just beginning. The ice caps at both poles are melting and the Gulf Stream waters are stalled which could mean another Ice Age, similar to the Younger Dryas, is imminent.

Frank Vanderwal of the National Science Foundation is working with other scientists to find a way to fix the climate. Unfortunately, politics comes in to play with the current president believing that the scientific community is unnecessary alarmed. However when winter comes to the capital city, temperatures plummet to fifty degrees below zero and other states and countries are hit hard by storms and freezing temperatures also. Scientists prepare untested experiments to stop the earth from entering another Ice Age.

There are too many scientific explanations about global warming, climatic changes and methods to reverse the effects of global warming for the ordinary lay man to understand. There is very little action and the characters discuss theory as if working a treatise but only in the last one hundred pages does any real action occur. The premise of the story is interesting and there are many intriguing elements but for the most part only die hard reader with a science background will appreciate the cautionary work of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Harriet Klausner