The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 September 2001
by Norman Spinrad
Give it another century, and the effects of global warming may become painfully evident. Given another century, though, perhaps we'll have developed technology for controlling local climate conditions. Perhaps, as the ice caps melt, people will grow to love the tropical climates of northern Europe. Perhaps New York City will put in the investment needed to build a massive sea wall. Perhaps (See a chapter in Jennifer Egan's recent Pulitzer-winning novel). This is the environment of this comic novel. Along with climatological collapse, nation-states have dissolved into loose global entities of connected individuals. Some of these syndics are shady, but most are like today's giant corporations, acting in the interests of citizen-shareholders. The occasion of an annual United Nations climate conference in Paris will be the scene for a collision between several of these syndics, at the desperate hour when the climate may be collapsing into Condition Venus. It would be in the interest of a giant climate-control syndic to prove Condition Venus is iminent. Others, looking at losing the precious warm new climates of Siberia and Paris if the climate is fixed, stand to lose everything, but also might see the need for saving the planet as a whole. Prince Eric Esterhazy and Monique Calhoun, representatives of shady syndics at odds with one another, must discover the hidden motives swirling about them in tropical Paris. Spinrad manages to weave a fast-moving and entertaining story about these characters without preaching about the coming environmental collapse. In fact, his appeal to a corporate self-interest may indeed be the only way we will stave off the disaster to come. The book is comic and entertaining, if somewhat thin. The characters are a bit two-dimensional, and the sexual situations are explicit and gratuitous. Still, the story twists enjoyably to a surprising end. Will the world survive?