Recent reads

Greenhouse Summer, by Norman Spinrad. It's sometime in the twenty-first century. Global climate change has resulted in the melting of planetary icecaps, and low-lying areas like Louisiana have been inundated by rising sealevels. Much of Africa has been swallowed by the rapaciously expanding Sahara.

But not everyone is suffering. In every age, it seems, it's better to be lucky... or rich. Siberia has become a golden agricultural paradise; Paris exists in a year-round perpetual summer. New York has constructed massive seawalls to keep Manhattan habitable in the midst of the warm, shallow ocean that surrounds it, swamping the ruins of the outlying boroughs. (The local seafood is famous.) The Gulf Stream is kept going through artificial assistance from orbital mirrors funded by industrialized Europe. And for the Big Blue Machine, the unofficial global consortium of multinational corporations that hawk climate-altering technology to the desperate governments of the so-called Lands of the Lost, business has never been better.

Our Heroine, Monique Calhoun, works for a major international public-relations company called Bread & Circuses. She's made a splash by facilitating some very difficult projects for Big Blue clients. Now she has a chance to work for the United Nations, organizing its next Annual Conference On Climates Stabilization in glorious Paris. It's a grand opportunity to impress her superiors and boost her career into the stratosphere.

Or is it?

Strange things are afoot. The conference is spending far more money than the penurious UN could ever afford; some of the people invited to speak at the conference are well beyond "eccentric"; and both the crime-oriented Big Boys syndicate and the recently-privatized Mossad are sniffing around as if they smell something irresistible in the air.

Skulduggery, spying, and murky moral decisions abound as the plot thickens. Al Gore meets John Le Carre in a convoluted plot of assassinations, hypocritical stage-managed political theater, and dubious science. Spinrad casts cynical doubt on the motivations of practically every human being and organization in the book, while never slighting the moral seriousness of the consequences of their actions, which after all is visible in the global climatological trainwreck occuring all around. Certain passages of the book sound almost like a premonition of Joel Bakan's The Corporation, with the repeated theme that most organizations, either corporate or governmental, are inherently incapable of making and executing long-term plans in a responsible fashion. Can individual responsibility, at any level, alter that sinister mechanism? And at what cost?