Neal Stephenson's Latest: Termination Shock

Lots of interesting ideas here, chief of which is solar geoengineering to combat ever-increasing temperatures, being pushed by a part visionary, part bullshit artist billionaire Texan.  The title refers to the downside of abruptly ending such a project, which, of course, someone has to try doing before the end of this novel.

The Good: Big Ideas – they've got to be big if they're going to cool the planet.  Interesting characters, all well-developed by the author; we know what motivates just about every one of them.  A decent sense of history.  A handful of new technologies extrapolated to interesting extremes.  Yet the core geoengineering technology could have been deployed (had we chosen) decades ago, so that's solid tech.

The Bad: This novel really needs an edit to boil down its bloated 700 pages to a more compact 300 or so.  Still, it was a compulsive page-turner, so even in its current form it wasn't that much of a chore to read.  One of the key technologies, earthsuits (a sort of personal air conditioner overgarment), were so sporadically deployed that they seemed more like window dressing than a key fact of then-current life.  Finally "performative war" is just a ridiculous concept and its chief practitioner, a drone-enhanced semi-cyborg with a fighting staff, is even more so.  There's plenty more to bag on here, but you get the point.

So... I don't know.  I'm glad that I finally made it through a Stephenson novel.  I swear, I tried and tried on both The Diamond Age and Snow Crash, just couldn't chew my way through either of those, not even with the aid of a crack team of Formosan termites.  And to be fair, Termination Shock was an OK read, if not taken too seriously.  But with a big idea like blocking climate change via technology and triggering a series of disasters and small wars, it's not exactly a comedic setup, so "if not taken too seriously" doesn't really work here.  Meh, time to move on.  2.5/5 Stars.