Review: Greenhouse Summer, by Norman Spinrad

The climate crisis has become the subject of rather a large body of science fiction over the years. Where that body of work is concerned it seems to me that Norman Spinrad's contributions to it, rarely mentioned, are unjustly overlooked; that he was ahead of the curve in addressing the matter when he did, and even decades later, far more successful in doing so than many of the attempts seen since then. Entering some of his prior works in a minor though not uninsightful way (like 1991's Russian Spring), before the turn of the century he devoted a full novel to the theme, Greenhouse Summer (1999).

Reading the book I was less satisfied with it than Russian Spring overall, its patches of brilliance marred by creakier portions (like its treatment of computer technology, and the thematically appropriate but dramatically flat conclusion to the central intrigue). However, by and large it gets the nuances right. Spinrad gets, for example, that the phenomenon will be experienced differently in different regions, generally as a disaster though not always so (we have the equatorial "Lands of the Lost," but also "Siberia the Golden"); that climate change has no clear end point, so that an already damaged world might have to face worse still in the absence of radical, remedial action, with much the same uncertainty and political wrangling we do now (his characters confronting the complete, life-eradicating catastrophe of "Condition Venus"); and that this will surely have consequences for society, the structure of which will, in turn, determine the possibilities for facing the problem (the syndicalists have inherited the Earth in his scenario, and it seems to him that therein lies such hope as exists in it). From a more literary standpoint, Greenhouse Summer impressed me in that, while Spinrad did not shrink from the horror suffered by the worst-hit places, he managed to be colorful, even satirically humorous (not least, in the airship tour of the Lands of the Lost conducted by Colonel Qaddafi very, very displeased about having been cheated by tricky foreigners during the construction of the Great Man-Made River, or its Paris reinvented as New Orleans). Indeed, when I reviewed Gordon Van Der Gelder's original anthology Welcome to the Greenhouse some years ago, and more recently, the "solarpunk" anthology Glass and Gardens, I found much to like, but was confirmed time and again in the sense that such virtues, on such display in Spinrad's book, were all too rare in their stories, and in climate fiction generally.