Fifty Degrees Below

[sawyl]

In an attempt to avoid committing myself to my academic studies, I've managed to find time to finish Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below, the second book in his Science in the City series.

After the great flood, Washington DC is still in a state of chaos. The parks are closed, escaped zoo animals a roaming free, housing is at a premium and funding for reconstruction does not seem to be forthcoming. Worse still, there are signs that the climate is getting worse: thermohaline circulation appears to be weakening, leading to concerns about Younger Dryas-type weather in Europe and North America. It is against all this that Frank Vanderwaal and his colleagues at the NSF have set themselves.

Following his encounter with a mysterious woman in an elevator and his subsequent decision to defer his return to San Diego, Frank finds himself without anywhere to live. Ever the scientist, he undertakes an experiment to resolve his problem: he decides to investigate whether it is possible to adopt a paleolithic lifestyle in modern America by opting to live in a tree house in Rock Creek Park. Splitting his life, he spends his days battling with the details of climate change, coming up with plans to restart the gulf stream or to improve the efficiency of photovoltaics, whilst his free time is spent helping the homeless — both humans and feral zoo animals — survive a winter in which temperatures have dropped to 50 below.

As if this wasn't enough, Frank's personal life is also causing him problems. Having comprehensively burnt his bridges with his ex-girlfriend Marta and run off to DC, he suddenly finds himself in the difficult position of having to try and tempt her to join one of his key bio-engineering projects. His relationship with Caroline, the woman from the elevator, is no less difficult. She has finally been in touch and is definitely interested, but she's also a spook trapped in an unhappy marriage to fellow spook with a serious streak of jealousy. Adding a final complication is his increasingly close relationship with his boss, NSF director Diane Chang, which has a sort of maybe-possibly about to happen except for everything that's screwed up quality to it.

I've enthused about Fifty Degrees Below before and I've found nothing in the last part of the book to cause me to change my mind.

One of the great strengths of Fifty is the character of Frank Vanderwaal. He often appears to be an archetypal scientist: rational, wry, clear-sighed and confident. But actually, he's anything but. Yes, he's ultra-rational, but most of his reasoning is post hoc and his actions are more usually impulsive than thought through, and he frequently chides himself about leaping before he looks — something that reminds me of learning chess as a child and endlessly being told to look before leaping. As to being confident, he's actually extremely introverted and plagued by doubts. He manages to give the impression of confidence by dividing his life up into roles, acting out a different character for different people, parcellating his life. Aware that he's doing this, he worries about the sanity of it, which in turn feeds into his doubts about whether he's doing the right thing.

The science whilst generally interesting and accurate — I have a couple of quibbles, but only because I've sat through a couple of lectures on modelling Younger Dryas — mainly serves to show what it means to do science, what it means to be a scientists and to have a scientific mindset. There is also a nice strand that plays with the intersection between science and politics. At one point an NSF group set up a project called SSEEP — the Social Science Experiment in Elective Politics — which seeks to generate a set of rational, scientifically defensible political goals for a theoretical presidential candidate. These, it transpires, are a sort of green utilitarianism, which puts heavy emphasis on the non-human parts of the biosphere as de facto extensions of humanity and takes future generations into account.

In summary, Fifty Degrees Below is an elegant combination of a disaster story, a spy thriller and, most of all, a novel of ideas. The pace of the plot and focus on a strong lead character make it very readable. The exploration of ideas is done subtly, without the tell-don't-show problems of most philosophical novels. A positively delightful read.