neal stephenson (popularni autor vedecke sci-fi) vydava roman, řeší tam síru
Climate change is real. It’s going to be devastating. It already is devastating, but it’s only getting warmed up,” says author Neal Stephenson, speaking from his home in Seattle on an especially hot day.
Global warming is at the heart of the 61-year-old science fiction author’s new novel, Termination Shock (Morrow, Nov.). The techno thriller is set in the not-too-distant future, when the effects of climate change—roaming droves of feral pigs, superstorms, global pandemics—have become so devastating that something drastic has to be done, immediately. Eccentric billionaire T.R. Schmidt, owner of a monstrously successful chain of truck stop restaurants, believes he’s just the man for the job. So, in an attempt to mitigate the problem, he builds a giant gun to shoot the cache of sulfur he’s been hoarding into space. That’s when things get weird.
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For Termination Shock, though, Stephenson wanted to do more than predict a possible future: he wanted to shed light on an almost certain one—a future in which climate change has devastated the planet. Speaking just days after the UN released a report validating the novel’s premise—that humans are indisputably to blame for climate change and are also the only ones who can stop it—the author explained why writing about this topic felt so pressing.
“Climate change is going to lead to war,” he says. “It’s going to lead to refugee movements on a huge scale, and to mass extinctions, and all kinds of other disasters. These are all real possibilities that I think need to be kind of dragged out into the open and made part of our conversation.”
To ensure Termination Shock would have its intended impact, Stephenson chose the novel’s setting carefully. If it feels like the dystopia depicted could just as easily be tomorrow as a century into the future, that’s by design. Stephenson aims to set his stories in a sweet spot that feels futuristic yet contemporary.
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With Termination Shock, Stephenson was faced with another balancing act. He had to juggle the overwhelming notion that we’ve essentially destroyed the planet beyond repair, while presenting a possible solution. To do so, he had to find a way to address, for the layperson, the potential benefits of using the solar geo-engineering technology discussed in the book. He wanted to distill the theoretical benefits of actually engaging that technology, and the potentially dire consequences of halting it.
As with all of the complex subjects Stephenson tackles, he was up for the challenge. “We’re in this predicament with climate change: it’s such a vast topic that it’s hard even for experts to wrap their heads around,” he says. “So to the extent that I can raise some questions and tell some stories around it, in a hopefully approachable way, maybe that has some value.”
Termination Shock: A Novel - Kindle edition by Stephenson, Neal. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0941WBTYL/