Sixty Days and Counting: 3 (Science in the Capital) - Softcover

Robinson, Kim Stanley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553585827 ISBN 13: 9780553585827

Publisher: Spectra Books, 2007

Synopsis

By the time Phil Chase is elected president, the world's climate is far on its way to irreversible change. Food scarcity, housing shortages, diminishing medical care, and vanishing species are just some of the consequences. The erratic winter the Washington, D.C., area is experiencing is another grim reminder of a global weather pattern gone haywire: bone-chilling cold one day, balmy weather the next.

But the president-elect remains optimistic and doesn't intend to give up without a fight. A maverick in every sense of the word, Chase starts organizing the most ambitious plan to save the world from disaster since FDR-and assembling a team of top scientists and advisers to implement it.

For Charlie Quibler, this means reentering the political fray full-time and giving up full-time care of his young son, Joe. For Frank Vanderwal, hampered by a brain injury, it means trying to protect the woman he loves from a vengeful ex and a rogue "black ops" agency not even the president can control-a task for which neither Frank's work at the National Science Foundation nor his study of Tibetan Buddhism can prepare him.

In a world where time is running out as quickly as its natural resources, where surveillance is almost total and freedom nearly nonexistent, the forecast for the Chase administration looks darker each passing day. For as the last-and most terrible-of natural disasters looms on the horizon, it will take a miracle to stop the clock . . . the kind of miracle that only dedicated men and women can bring about.

About this title

Review

‘Sixty Days is finely written and persuasively paints what may be – if climate change happens the way so many scientists fear – the best of all possible futures. Read it and worry.’ SFX

‘An elegance that manages to contain a what-happens-next vigour... It makes astonishing connections’
The Times on ‘Fifty Degrees Below’

Praise for ‘Forty Signs of Rain’:

‘The Brave New World of global warming ... A narrative that is rich in closely observed characters and a wonderfully vivid sense of place ... depicts a society sleep-walking towards the abyss ... His great achievement here is to bring the practice of science alive and to place this in an all-too familiar world of greedy capitalists and unprincipled politicians. Robinson's critique of science is heartfelt ... humans have gone from being the smartest animal on the savannah to being "experts at denial".’ P.D. Smith Guardian

‘A funny, convincing, intelligent book’ Kim Newman, Indpendent

'Kim Stanley Robinson is freed by his medium – fiction – to deliver [a] message with passion and restraint ... A great book' New Scientist

About the Author

Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. He is the author of eleven previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Fifty Degrees Below, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica-for which he was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program. He lives in Davis, California

Edition details

• Publisher: Spectra Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0553585827
• ISBN 13: 9780553585827
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 560