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Sixty Days and Counting
Kim Stanley Robinson
Harper Collins hardback, 512 pages, £18.99
ISBN 978 0 00 714892 9
Review by Steven Blake (2007)

Sixty Days and Counting is KSR’s final book in his Science in the Capital trilogy (Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below being the previous two volumes). ‛Science in the Capital’ because, of course, it’s about science (basically, the USA’s toothless National Science Foundation) meeting politics in the context of environmental disaster. 

The trilogy is one long disaster novel, Robinson’s answer to all those predictions of ecological disaster. The difference is that Robinson, as copious with his research as ever, has worked out – it appears – the best possible outcome. Or one of them, assuming of course that nothing much is done in advance. KSR’s future is convincing, but it does look a bit over-optimistic to me. 

Climate change isn’t coming, climate change is here. The disasters have happened: Washington is under water in Forty Signs of Rain, after the Potomac river flooded after tidal problems caused by massive storms. That first volume was published just in advance of New Orleans going under water, and look how the world hung its head and promised to clean up its act after that. More bad weather and political storms followed in Fifty Degrees Below, as well as the inevitably ongoing resistance of capitalism even after the world got the message at the climax of Forty Signs.

In this final volume President Chase has decided to do something about this. But then he would, being elected at such a time. This book covers Chase’s first two months in the job, the period when he can best force through the controversial policies (hence Sixty Days). The President, and his scientists, are dogged by a hangover from the Dubya Bush administration, a secret team of spooks, and by the USA’s painful acceptance of the now-inevitable power cuts, unpredictable weather, shortages and various environmental changes for the worse.

Good characterisation, though some of the character situations seem a bit off, and I don’t get the Buddhist thing. Good writing too, as ever with KSR. He knows how to tell a story, and he really paints a global picture. The science is arguable, but I’ve read about the technical solutions he describes. KSR believes in science, and has said that he feels he may as well attempt to describe the best possible outcome. I agree with him there, and I’d like to be convinced by his optimism. Kim Stanley Robinson is very believable, but I can’t help thinking that things will be worse than this. I want to believe. •

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