Books: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy

The Science in the Capital trilogy is comprised of:

• 40 Signs of Rain (2004)
• 50 Degrees Below (2005)
• 60 Days and Counting (2006)

Kim Stanley Robinson has focused most of his novels on the impact of humanity on the environment, winning many awards for his Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) and 2002’s alt-alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt. Overall I think Science in the Capital is good writing and important reading despite suffering from unrealistic optimism as well as trilogyitis–this should have been one solid book as was Rice and Salt and the denoument more wishful than scientific thinking. Specifically, Robinson’s concern is global climate change and the political will we require to successfully deal with it.

Charlie Quibbler and Frank Vanderwal are the two point of view characters. Charlie is a high level political advisor to Phil Chase, a senator at the opening who’s elected President early in the last volume; Frank is a biologist and UC San Diego professor taking a turn at National Science Foundation headquarters, where Charlie’s wife Anna is a brilliant colleague and because of this Charlie and Frank are friends. Frank, a native Californian, is an avid outdoorsman and naturalist and through this shared avocation becomes close to Nick, the older of the Quibblers’ two young sons.

Right at the open of 40 Signs Anna meets the staff of the Khembali embassy, which has just taken space in the NSF building for offices, and thus Frank and the Quibblers befriend them. Khembali is a fictional Asian nation, sort of a proxy for Tibet, which has existed for many centuries but in different locations as events dictate. They originated in the also fictional Shangri-La but presently occupy an island in the Bay of Bengal threatened by the rising ocean level. These Buddhists have profound effects on the story’s other characters despite rarely taking direct action.

Robinson uses many things from his own life in this story: He grew up in southern Californa an avid naturalist, attended UCSD (BA and PhD), taught in the UC system, was a working stay at home dad while his wife worked in Washington, D.C., for several years and loves to play frisbee golf. (Charlie is a working stay at home dad for most of these books and Frank plays a great deal of frisbee golf.)

The author presents a sequence of increasingly severe climatological events for which Frank attempts to find scientific solutions and Charlie works the political side. Meanwhile both men have personal issues, though Charlie mainly struggles with being pulled back into an office role. Frank has serious health traumas, multiple romantic entanglements and, in the second half of the series, a spy subplot thanks to one of the women.

Frankly, I think this is where Robinson wastes pages. In 60 Days (the title refers to the first two months of the Chase Administration), for example, Frank and Charlie go off on a weeklong hike in the Sierras with a few of Charlie’s old school buddies. While the writing is beatific, this is 18 pages that are totally unnecessary, contributing nothing to the plot except to give an explicit liturgy of what we stand to lose. Each of the books have several similar segments, pleasures to read but wasteful of momentum and energy.

Finally, the ending reads like Robinson sort of threw his hands up in literary defeat. Possibly this is due to the lack of a personified antagonist but I felt that there was no climax, even allowing for the fact that climate change is a process without a definitive, er, finish line.

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