Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is the second book in a trilogy, or perhaps the second part of a three book novel. (More on that later.) It works better for me than the first installment (Forty Signs Of Rain) because it is a lot more focused.
Where the first book followed a bunch of mostly-separated stories about a bunch of mostly-separated characters, this one concentrates on a single character, Frank Vanderwal. Some of the other characters from the first book are also covered in a secondary way, but Frank is the center of the story. (Leo is completely absent. Charlie and Anna are sometimes used as viewpoint characters, but quite sparingly.)
Some of the author's longtime fascination with Tibet shows up in a secondary storyline, but the major plot thread details Frank's attempt to live homeless in the middle of Washington DC as a "modern forest primate". This is complicated by a severe winter that is brought on by global climate change. It is contrasted by an examination of what happens when the zoo animals that were released during the flood of the previous book end up "going feral" and trying to survive in the now-wrecked Washington city parks.
Frank is also the focus of domestic surveillance operations, and Robinson presents an image (which is quite possibly true) of a society where domestic high tech spying is rampant and extends even to people who live "off grid" as much as possible. (The headlines in US papers this week are about the NSA performing illegal domestic spying, so perhaps this was a timely subject for fiction!)
He also discusses the idea of letting science replace politics as a method for keeping society running. Those familiar with Robinson's other works will recognize this idea. He likes to come up with new systems of economics and government, which he then uses as the background for a story about his characters. Many of these focus on "market failures" in the current capitalism/democracy system that is in place in the West. Climate change is a well-known market failure scenario, and fits in well with Robinson's political interests.
In the book, Charlie's boss Phil Chase decides to run for president against the unnamed but very Bush-like Republican incumbent. This is a small story in the book, but it is thematically important to the idea that "business as usual" just isn't working.
Frank also finds himself somewhat torn between a possible romantic involvement with his boss, Diane, and an on-going relationship with the mysterious woman he met while stuck in an elevator at the end of the first book.
The bottom line is that this book reads better than the first one. It has a focus, a more definite storyline, and a better feeling of completeness -- even though it is obviously not a complete novel.
Which brings me back to a complaint about this series and several other recent fiction series that I have read. When did it go out of fashion to publish complete novels? More and more it seems that novels have grown to the point that partial novels are being released as "parts of a series". That has its place in some stories, but in most of them (as in this one) it breaks up the story too much and weakens it overall. I think this "series" would have better if it had been a more tightly composed single book, about two thirds the length of the total trilogy.
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